Video Advertising on Facebook - New Mecca For American Entrepreneurs

  CROATIA - 04/18/2017 (PRESS RELEASE JET)

Many entrepreneurs and companies struggle to breach online markets and turn profitable. Why is that, and is there another way into the digital marketing most business owners may be overlooking?

This is an example of how to get things right using Facebook advertising to get high returns.

Several months ago, Breeo Industries started manufacturing smoke-reducing fire pits.

They just started advertising online – their Facebook Page counted less than 200 likes back then.

But the main thing is that the people weren't familiar with their product. Those who were, reported that its design is superb, quality is super-high and all Breeo Industries products are, in fact, 100% handcrafted in the USA.

Surely it was the time for the right advertising campaign. With just 10 days later, a trial campaign had 727.8% return on advertising investment.

Understanding the basics of Facebook advertising

Facebook is a content network and Facebook strives to serve ‘only the best’ content to people which find that content relevant. Facebook measures relevance by checking the ratio between content reach (impressions) and engagement rate (reactions, comments, and shares).

When your post or an ad is highly engaging, Facebook will mark it as relevant and give you a ‘push’ in distribution pipeline – in other words, you’ll get bigger reach for less money.

Every successful Facebook advertising campaign is contained from 2 factors – Content and Distribution.

1. Content or ad relevance

You need no more than 1000 impressions to see if your ad is working, or not. CPM (Cost-per-mille, mille=1000 impressions) is less relevant at this stage, doesn’t matter if it’s $5 or $75. Focus only on metrics that will show you how your content (ad) is performing;

• CTR (Click-through-rate)
• Engagement rate (Reactions, comments, shares)
• Video view rate (Until which point (%) is your video being watched)

Through these 3 metrics, you can see if you have an ad that can drive engagement, clicks and ultimately, sales.

2. Distribution

When you have an ad that’s relevant (and working), it’s time to start investing in outreach. In this stage, you should focus on metrics that bring you closer to the desired action, such as making a sale or acquisition and overall CPA.

• CPM (Cost-per-mille, mille=1000 impressions)
• CPC (Cost-per-click)
• CVR (Conversion rate)
• CPA (Cost-per-action)

Through these metrics you can have a direct influence on your sales record, a number of leads generated or apps installed.

Video killed the banner star

Original Buggles famous refrain from 1979 said ‘Video killed the radio star’, which carried a deep message about emerging trend of music videos. Radio was already dying and the video was about to explode. People could enjoy not only the audio aspect of music but a visual medium as well.

The same thing happened when Facebook introduced video advertising back in 2014. From an advertising perspective, it was just amazing, especially in the terms of distribution. Cost-per-impression in video advertising was drastically lower than banners. And it still is.

But not only that, the medium of communication changed. Two-minute video can explain (and sell) more than a greatly designed banner with a 2000 word copy. For an average reader (200 words per minute), it would take 10 minutes to read and they still wouldn’t get that special feeling of your product.

Now let’s break the math behind the Facebook advertising with video. Imagine that your total advertising budget is around $5000. Here’s the simple math behind it;

In this imaginary case, numbers say that video production would pay off (in the terms of distribution) in around 25 days. With a video, you could reach almost 20% more people just in the first month. If you continue running for the second month, the video would get around 1 million impressions vs. a banner which would get around 500K impressions.

Don’t let your ads look like – ads

No matter if you’re using banners or videos, your ad copy shouldn’t sound like an ad copy. Rather, make your ads feel natural. When people scroll through their newsfeed, they’re being bombarded with ads. Nobody likes that. People don’t like being manipulated or pushed to do something. 

You may also know how to create multiple ad sets and what are your best ad sizes

Call-to-action (CTA) is very important part of every ad. That doesn’t mean that you should include it in the headline. Tell your story first and then ask for the money. The converse will not work.

Also, try to avoid buzzwords like FREE, new, the best, etc. in your first interaction with the target audience. Don’t bring the big guns to the game too early. You don’t want to sell them something just once – aim to build a relationship which will result in high customer retention rate.

Start with split testing

Split testing isn’t about getting 100s of ads out and seeing which works the best. That’s not split testing, that’s not a scientific approach for long term results – that’s guesswork.

People guess the same way when comes to scaling. Scaling campaigns is not just ramping up a budget from $10/day to $1,000/day, or even worse, $10,000.

In 99.9% of cases, it’s just a recipe for a financial disaster.

Simplest, yet most effective strategy for video advertising on Facebook is contained in 3 simple steps and performs marvelously every single time.

Before you start split testing, do the research to get a feeling of your target audience. Male or female? Both? 18-35 or maybe 36-50? Go with something similar and don’t fear to go to broad. You’ll go more specific other types of audiences once you have an ad that’s working.

Step 1 – Test video

People often think that they have a perfect video but the reality is different. Your video isn’t finished when the editor says so – it’s finished when you achieve decent view rates.

Average video view rate can easily tell you to which point is your video being watched and when it actually becomes boring and people stop watching it.

For products with mass market potential you should aim for 20-25% average view rate, everything below 10% is unacceptable. For B2B and niche high-end products, everything between 10-15% is ok, below 5% is unacceptable. Why? Because both business and niche high-end products are understood by smaller groups of people – even though you’re targeting well-defined audiences, most of the people are going to find your ad boring.

Also, track how much people are actually clicking on the ad and going to your website. Before anybody decides that the video isn’t working and need a new one, they should make sure that they tried a strong call-to-action at the end of the video.

Step 2 – Test copy

It is time to create a compelling message to accompany the video. In most cases copy on top of the video doesn’t have to be written by professional copywriter – it just has to catch the attention or briefly describe the problem or the solution in the video to the potential watcher. Including a question often does the job. Get the engagement going.

The best thing about Facebook advertising is social proof. Not just on Facebook, but on every social network. People tend to trust other people (even if they don’t know them). Having an ad with high engagement, especially if the engagement is positive - sells.

Step 3 – Targeting

This is one trick that works marvelously on mass market products and it worked on Breeo.

Instead of having 10 different ad sets containing slightly different or same ads, try pointing 10 different ad sets to a single PPE (Page-post-engagement) ad.

That way you don’t have to build up the social proof on 10 different ads, but just on one, which is for the start more cost effective. More engagement brings, of course, more engagement – which leads to the ad going ‘viral’.

Ramp up the number of different demographics, see which lead to the desired action and which score higher engagement. Optimize. Scale.

Next steps

Sticking just to these to strategical points above, the campaign served almost a half a billion impressions (498 million) to more than 200 million people across the globe, just in 2016. This strategy is applicable to almost every business and many of them are known to boost sales dramatically with Facebook advertising. To read full article and get more insights into this strategy with graphical examples visit the full case study example described here.