Using Video with Your PPC Campaigns

LAURA: When you finish producing a video, one of the most common places it is get posted is: ONLINE.

But what happens next? Does it get the views and attention it deserves? Or are you disappointed with the results you’re getting from your social media properties?

In this episode, we’re going to dive into the complex world of PAID social media campaigns...

and explain why you may want to consider putting a BUDGET behind your video

...to get more views,

...target the right audience,

AND convert your message into customer action.

Steve Kroll/Granular: Companies come to us because they want to get found online, and there's two ways to get found online.

LAURA: This is CloseUp: Decoding Video Production for your Business... we’ll talk with a digital marketing company devoted making sure your video is FOUND online.

I’m sure you’ve wondered why some videos get thousands or millions of views and others barely get noticed. Often, the catalyst for the “clicks” is digital marketing. In my day job, I’m a digital marketing strategist, focused on making sure videos perform well online.

When our marketing strategy calls for putting MONEY into promoting a video online, I reach out to a company that lives and breathes the world of P-P-C, or Pay per click.  What that means is: we pay to make sure the video is viewed or played by the people who are MOST likely turn into customers for our business.

Jordon Meyer is the founder of Granular, and Steve Kroll is the vice president, overseeing business partnerships for the company. Both are joining me on CloseUp. Jordon, today it seems like video would be an obvious way to create a message online. Set some context. Why is video gaining in popularity in the P-P-C world?

Jordon Meyer: I think, you know, the messaging is so much different in video than in any other medium. People really engage with it in a different way than a blog post or a billboard or a radio ad or anything else. So, we try to take advantage of really every ad medium that's out there and video is definitely a big slice of that and a growing part of what we advertise on.

Because I think, you know, the world has really it was limited by bandwidth and internet connectivity, and you know, mobile devices getting smarter and better. That we see video growing so much um from a consumption standpoint. But it’s also just a really good medium in general, so we use it whenever we can. We find that not every client has the best assets when it comes to video, but we try to take advantage of those assets whenever we can and put them behind advertising.

LAURA: When companies produce a video and post it online, Steve, what are the ways they can improve the chances that their video will be found?

Steve Kroll: Companies come to us because they want to get found online, and there's two ways to get found online. You just earn your ability to get found online organically or you can pay to get in front of your targeted audience. They want to drive subscriptions; they want to drive awareness. Translating that from a targeting perspective and putting together that plan and then implementing that plan so that’s at our core what we do.

LAURA: Explain the pay-per-click strategy and how you come up with a plan to get results?

Steve Kroll: Yeah, we always bring it back to alright why do you, what's prompting this request?

Who is your audience? What are your goals? How are you defining success? With video if it's, "Hey, we aren't expecting direct transactions from this. We want to just get our name out there. Then we'll say, "Alright, is there a geographic component to this?" Do you want to make sure that you want to target people if they are in a certain radius? If they're in certain counties? If they're in certain states? Do you have specific demographics that you want to make sure that this is in front of? Is it broadly residence or is it homeowners? Are they people who are business owners? Are they people who are currently in school? And then we want to say, "Have you defined a budget around this?" And sometimes they'll say, "Hey, I've got these dollars. This is what we're comfortable spending." Other times they'll say, “This is what we've spent when we've done broadcast, advertising or this is what I'd feel comfortable spending. Can you give guidance on what we should do?" And so, what we'll do is we'll put together an actual plan and say, "Based on what you told us, your goals are, who your audience is. Here's how we'd go about doing this for you."

LAURA: Ah yes, going in with a plan is key. We talk about that in video production all the time.

You bring up some interesting thoughts around advertising online.

There’s location, maybe demographics like age or gender. Or it could be behaviors ¬– such as someone who enjoys gardening. Companies now have the ability to get their video in front of a very specific audience through paid advertising – and get results at the lowest cost

Steve Kroll: We're always going to be looking at this from again a bias of "We want to try and drive conversions at a target cost per acquisition. We want to be able to get the average cost per view as low as possible. We want a click-through rate to their website and maybe a lot of other marketers aren't thinking like that.

LAURA:  Let me ask this: There are a lot of people familiar with Facebook, and if you have a business page, you’re inundated with notifications to BOOST an existing post. Is that the right thing to do?

Steve Kroll: In general, what we say about boosting versus an ad, boosting it's better than doing nothing. Right? And there's some cases where it makes sense to boost while also running ads. But think of it in terms of like giving a little child a fake steering wheel and a horn and a shifter where there is very minimal controls versus a real car where you have the full instrument panel and the ability to change everything and manipulate different parts of the car and check on all the different attributes of its performance.

It's kind of similar with a boosted post. You can see 'Alright, I've spent this money and here's kind of generally who I want to target and go." And it's a little bit of a black box. Where running an actual ad gives you full control over the audience, the devices it's seen on, being able to import your owned audience, lists of customers being able to exclude people, being able to target people based on their engagement with previous ads or having come to your website. Targeting if they're an Android user, an iPhone user. Do you want to show on Messenger? Do you want to show across all formats or not? I mean there's- part of the reason that you'd mention that people hire us is there's so much that goes into all the different options, all the different targeting in these platforms.

Jordon Meyer: Yeah, I think that was a really good answer Steve. I think my view on it is that boosted posts are valuable to a very short extent. They have their purpose. They get in front of your audience, your current audience and some of their friends and maybe a small geographic region. So, it amplifies your message a little bit. But it's not exactly targeted marketing in an advertising standpoint. So, to actually get in front of new users that are going to be valuable to your business, we definitely recommend a traditional ad unit in Facebook. Boosting has its place. It's important but the ad will net you the new customers and actually kind of drive a bigger difference in your business for you.

LAURA: Let’s talk about online video like YouTube. When I Google a how-to video for example, I often see pre-roll video ads. Talk about why it’s a good idea to purposely create shorter video clips as advertisements or commercials. These could be 6 seconds or 15 or 30.

Steve, what opportunities are out there for companies to use pre-roll video advertising before this other video content plays?

Steve Kroll: Today there's way more supply of video content on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram and all these different platforms than the supply of advertisers so the very popular social networks that are free to users to use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the way that those organizations make money is by selling targeted advertising to have the ability to bid on a user to show them targeted ads on their feed. We know that there's a higher engagement rate and there's better value for your money if you're investing in video. And because anyone can write a text ad, anyone can do an image ad in terms of those are lower barriers to entry. Doesn't mean you do it well, but you know the everyday marketer business owner can do that. But we see way fewer people who invest in the video asset and those platforms know that there's going to be higher engagement rate. They would prefer to show the ad to the user if it's a video asset. So, there’s that component. It's a supply and demand. You can get really good value for the investment. We see higher engagement rates, so we define that as people who click on an ad, comment on it, click through to go to a website, ad recall is much higher.

LAURA:  You Tube is just one of the social media platforms where you can place video ads.

There’s also Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram. Jordon, do you need to customize the way you create your video ad for each platform?

Jordon Meyer: Yeah, I would say don't get too worried about making a specific video for each of those platforms. Go into this with a solid plan of how to edit it to fit the platforms afterwards. You can do one good shoot, one good quality commercial or video, but if its planned out, if there's a clean storyline or storyboard beforehand, you already know how you're going to cut that six second or 15 or 30 second clip ahead of time so that you don't have to worry about shooting six different videos. You can create six videos out of one clip.

LAURA: Great advice.  Jordon, what do you say when someone wants their video to go viral?

Jordon Meyer: I'm sure you guys get that same wonderful question. I think the responsible answer right away is no. Because a lot of people just don't, I don't think anyone understands how something goes viral. I think people dial in style and tactic, you know, the TikTok stars of the world or Gary Vaynerchuk. He shouts at a camera and gets passionate and that is a brand that will get a million views every day. But it’s not going to get a 100 million views and that's what viral is, is just going and spreading to different audiences across the world or across the U.S. Viral is a unique lighting strike that is, I think, impossible to bottle. If someone just, if someone comes to us and says "Hey we sold this video to a client. We told them it was going to go viral. We need 500 thousand views." We can do that. We can get you views all day long. Sometimes for one cent per view. Then you get free views on top of that after it gains some momentum. But to make it go viral, that's just something that we can never promise, and I would suspect 99% of video producers would also never promise.

LAURA: That’s great advice. Jordon and Steve, you’ve provided a wealth of information about how to get better results for online videos. And I appreciate you coming on “Closeup.” I want to give you an opportunity to plug YOUR podcast as well.

Jordon Meyer: Sure. It's called Getting Granular. It's on every platform that you can listen to your podcasts on. We interviewed a lot of people on our team just to dive deep into specific topics or a lot of personal interviews to get backgrounds on the team members and how they kind of got into the industry And then we also get really deep on some topics like Facebook Ads or Geofencing. We kind of dispel some myths and get really deep and nerdy.

LAURA: That’s awesome. Thank you both for taking the time to talk with us.

As Jordon and Steve said: Video is a powerful tool.  And when posting online there ARE many strategies to make sure your project gets the attention it deserves. Pay Per Click or PPC is a great advertising approach. In addition to putting money behind your strategy, be sure to plan for editing shorter video clips that become pre-roll ads on YouTube, for example. And, remember. You can’t wave a magic wand to create a viral video. We’re going to cover that topic in depth in a future episode and talk more about why some videos DID go viral. So, watch for that.

If you have any questions, you’d like us to answer, send us an email to podcast@plummedia.com

Also, be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave us a review.

This is Close Up: Decoding Video Production for your business is produced by Plum Media. I’m Laura McElree, thanks for listening.