Visual Media Marketing: Using Videos to Captivate Your Audience

Online marketing is a complex topic overall, but the most important facet of the entire subject is visual media marketing. It’s not enough to just create top-tier products and set up your online store for intuitiveness and easy navigation--you also have to visually market your brand to draw in new customers and retain your existing customers.Out of all the options available, including image ads and email marketing, videos are the best way to captivate your target audience and get them to check out your site where they wouldn’t otherwise.Let’s take a closer look at why visual media marketing is so important, plus why video ads should be the cornerstone of your digital marketing campaigns.

The Importance of Visual Media Marketing

There’s no denying that marketing for visual media is incredibly important in this day and age. With so much traffic coming from social media and other online platforms, it’s vital that you capture your target audience through the most effective advertisement you can make.These are increasingly video ads rather than still image ads. Video ads are more effective than image ads, provided you make them with engaging imagery and sound and capture the attention of your target audience quickly so they can’t scroll away.Video marketing is even more important for businesses or brands that compete in crowded niches, like apparel or technology. There are thousands of companies all competing for the same limited audience (albeit an audience with millions of potential customers), so your ads have to stand out if you want your marketing to be a broad success.

How Videos Can Boost Your Conversion Rates

So, why videos? How can video ads boost your conversion rates and help your brand in the long term compared to other types of ads, like image ads or text ads (which are usually easier to create)?It turns out that video ads are improvements upon their single-image counterparts for three primary reasons.

Improving Engagement

For one, video advertisements are excellent for boosting user engagement.It’s simply because watching a video ad takes more brainpower and more engagement than scrolling past a still image ad. While it takes more effort and money to create a top video advertisement, this is often well worth it in the long run because each ad you make will have more converting power overall.Simply put, video ads can boost engagement with your brand, which can then increase the likelihood of a new consumer converting to a paying customer. Video ads are also important for boosting engagement with existing customers, particularly in competitive niches.In competitive industries, brands must constantly reaffirm their connections to their existing customers (especially since it's usually cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new customer altogether). To do this, they have to keep putting out high-quality ads to retain consumer interest over the long term.Video ads are great for this. They remind your current consumers that you exist and can act as messaging vectors to tell customers about upcoming promotions, special offers, and how you are evolving your business to meet their needs.Bottom line: when it comes to driving user engagement, video ads are the cream of the crop.

Social Media Marketing

Video ads are also great choices in large part because of their suitability for social media marketing.Social media marketing is a big marketing focus in and of itself; many brands looking to capture as much of their target audience as possible will want to advertise regularly on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.Why? Billions of people use these platforms, of course! If you can create excellent ads on these platforms, you’ll reach a wider audience than you could ever imagine.Video ads are particularly good for social media marketing because they capture the attention of habitual scrollers more easily than image ads, which don't catch the eye and don't stop someone scrolling to the bottom of their social media page looking for fresh content.In comparison, video ads are very effective at capturing the attention of your target audience and getting them to stop and engage with your brand. Furthermore, video ads are more memorable than image ads because they tell a story (more on that below).In a nutshell, if you want to advertise on social media as effectively as possible, you’ll leverage video ads as often or even more often than still video ads.

Telling Stories

Perhaps most important of all, video ads are adept at telling stories in a way that image and text ads simply cannot. It all comes down to the medium.Think about it – image ads only have a single image in which to:

• Attract a potential convert
• Connect with that would be customer
• Explain how your brand can help solve a pain point
• Include a call to action button to get the customer to visit your site or store

That’s a lot to demand from a single image, especially when you take Instagram or other social media platform image requirements and restrictions into account.In contrast, video ads give you the flexibility and space to tell a complete story from start to finish. They’re fantastic for connecting with customers and explaining exactly how your brand can solve a projected pain point.Take this example of a video ad for an automotive company:

• Say you create car polish that serves as a replacement for traditional wax
• You can make a video ad with a protagonist (a well-trained actor, possibly hired by a knowledgeable digital marketing agency) and show exactly how wax fails to keep one’s car safe and clean over the long-term
• Then you can show your special car polish in action, demonstrating in life motion exactly how effective it is
• Your video ad can then include a call to action at the end

It’s easy to imagine how such a video ad would be much better at getting consumers’ attention compared to static image ads.In this way, video ads are potentially the best type of advertisement for getting new customers to check out your store.

The Elements of a Good Video Ad

Of course, video ads aren’t great just because. The best video ads will include a number of shared components or pieces that help to accomplish your marketing goals, whether you need to convert new customers, increase brand awareness, or retain your existing customers if they are in danger of losing their brand loyalty.A good video ad will include these elements:

• An initial pain point or problem that your brand can solve. This connects with your target consumer (since the pain point should ostensibly be something they experience in their everyday life) and gets them engaged with the advertisement since they will anticipate a solution.
• A clear solution provided by your brand’s flagship product or service. This shows your brand is the only solution for the pain point you previously demonstrated.
• A call to action at the end that inspires the customer to visit your site or online store. Don’t forget this step because even the best ads can fail to convert if you don’t make it easy for a customer to visit your store.
• Excellent production design, acting, and other physical elements that make your ad stand out from the rest

The last aspect can easily be achieved by partnering with a high-quality visual marketing agency, such as VisCap Media. We can also assist with storyboarding your ad, coming up with the creative core for your marketing push, and more.Great video ads might take a little bit to create to your satisfaction, but they’ll be well worth it in the end. Furthermore, you can run video ads for quite a long time, getting more bang for your buck for every week they remain up and active.

Summary

Ultimately, video ads can and should be the primary type of advertisement for your visual media marketing campaign. This is doubly true since you don’t have to have a degree in video advertising or communications to create a top-tier marketing campaign for your brand.That’s because you can partner with a digital marketing agency like VisCap Media. As experts in this field, we are well-equipped and ready to create and post high-quality video ads to represent your brand exactly to your specifications and convert your target users.Want to see our work in action? Check out our portfolio, and don’t hesitate to contact us today to see how we can help your company succeed!SourcesVideos vs. Images: Which Drives More Engagement in Facebook Ads? | DataboxMost used social media 2021 | Statistia36 Social Media Marketing Statistics to Know for 2021 | Sprout Social