How to Make a Video: Why do Ads Sell? Video advertising is one of the most effective ways to market your product or service, but it is also becoming a giant that costs businesses a huge amount of money. You don’t need to spend a fortune to produce high-quality videos that sell your products or services well, but you do need to understand what goes into making quality videos to pick a designer to help you. Target your Potential Customers Not everybody is likely to purchase your product or service. Knowing who will purchase what you have to sell and who won’t makes the difference between wasted advertising dollars and money well spent. There are a number of different factors that may go into determining your ideal customer. Here are a few relevant demographics that you may choose to target your video marketing to: Age It should come as no surprise that young people have different interests and relevant purchase consideration than adults. However, other age demographics besides child versus adult are also highly relevant when you are trying to create the most effective video marketing possible. Millennials may respond to different marketing techniques than older members of the population. Understanding what age group you are trying to target can be extremely helpful as you move closer to your ideal demographic. Parental Status You may not be targeting your services to children, but knowing whether a member of your potential market has children is important in your marketing decisions. Makers of some sorts of luxury goods may choose to avoid targeting parents who are unlikely to want them. Makers of family product or products for children will likely want to include parents in their marketing strategies Household Income This can be one of the most relevant features that you will take into consideration when you are targeting videos. Depending on whether your product or service is generally considered a luxury or an essential and who your most frequent purchasers are, you may choose to adjust your marketing and the way your video is constructed for different household income levels. For instance, if you are marketing a product or service to middle-class families, you may emphasize affordability. In contrast, if you are marketing to a more affluent target audience, you may emphasize desirability. Interests, Hobbies, and Affinities Your customers’ activities, the places they go, and much more are all relevant data as you determine where your marketing dollars are best spent. If you are selling a product that is relevant to a particular hobby, you will naturally be very interested in learning who is interested in that particular hobby and directing your marketing dollars in that area. You may choose to advertise on a website targeting your main demographic, or you may have a presence at a trade show relevant to your industry. Be creative if you examine the interests, affinities, and hobbies that your customers may be involved in and how it may be relevant to you. The connection between a relevant hobby and your business isn’t always immediately clear. Previous Customers or Interactions One of the first places that many companies spend their video advertising dollars is in reaching out to previous customers or customers who have interacted with them in some way in the past. This may be customers who have gone to the website or social media pages or have provided their email address at some point in the past. Targeting previous customers or customers who have interacted with your site or provided information to you makes sense, but many businesses overreach their communications with previous customers and interactions. Customers may develop negative feelings towards a company that they perceive as badgering them or tracing them. Customers that may be happy with the purchase might decide that they aren’t as pleased with your business practices, after all, if they feel that you are too persistent in your attempts to reach them or get them to make a purchase. Sometimes it is better to focus your advertising dollars on new customer possibilities rather than putting too much energy into marketing to previous customers. Keep it Brief but Not Too Brief Different platforms have different requirements and different likelihoods of successful videos at different lengths. In general, what is important to keep in mind is that people generally have short attention spans and are likely to get frustrated with a video that doesn’t get its point across promptly. If you need to fill out a video to five seconds or longer, be sure that the video is extremely high-quality. It can be tempting to take the car salesman approach and try to communicate as much information as quickly as possible, but this will usually only result in you losing your potential customers’ interest and good faith. Instead, fill the time you have with quality information that delivers something of value to the viewer while also providing very visually appealing media that will keep your potential customers’ attention rather than making them look to their phone Don’t Forget the Call to Action One of the most common mistakes made by beginner video makers is to forget to call to action until the end of the video. Whether you reference the call-to-action throughout the video or not, you should have present in your mind what you want the customer to do after they have seen the video throughout the creation of the video. Professional video makers know how to influence a potential customer to act in the way they want them to, whether that means making a purchase, visiting a webpage, or something else, not just at the end of the video, but throughout the content. Build Videos for The Platform on Which You’ll Be Screening Them It can be very tempting to make one or two videos and adjust it to the needs of all the platforms on which you want a presence. However, this is not a good way to produce video marketing. In fact, it will likely be less effective than if you only focused on a single platform. To produce quality content on all of the platforms you want a presence on, you’ll need to make videos for each platform. Making videos for different platforms has two separate advantages: you can be confident that the media will be correct for the platform it is displayed on, and you will be producing media that can be enjoyed separately by the same customer on different platforms, rather than creating repetitive media. Producing enough video content for all of the platforms that are relevant to your business can get exhausting. Most businesses choose to rely on a professional media producer to be confident that they are producing quality content. It is also important to keep screens in mind when you are thinking about how to build videos that will sell your product or service. Too often, beginning video makers create a video for the big screen on which they’re working, but it does not look appropriate on the small smartphone screen that most customers will view it on. Consumer behavior has changed quickly. More customers now view media on smartphone screens. It takes some practice to get a feeling for creating videos that look appealing on multiple screen sizes. This is one of the areas in which experience in video production is so incredibly valuable in the production of successful videos. Here are a few of the most common platforms that you’ll likely need to create videos for and some things to keep in mind: Amazon. Amazon advertising is a true giant that can get your brand out next to the big brands at reasonable prices Instagram. Instagram is rapidly becoming the favorite choice of businesses everywhere since it tends to create strong brand alliances. Choose a Designer for your Videos The vast majority of businesses choose to outsource video production to a company that knows how to do it well for a reasonable price. This isn’t an area where you want to take the risk of not producing the best possible video advertising. Sources https://www.iab.com/insights/guide-to-digital-video-advertising/ https://hbr.org/2015/10/when-people-pay-attention-to-video-ads-and-why