Video Marketing with YouTube and Facebook

People love video. And in marketing, video is becoming more and more important.

YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world. One Facebook insider said they believed within a few years Facebook may be 100% video.

To keep up, your business needs to market with video effectively.

So how do you get the best video marketing results?

You need to think about how to:

1. Create great videos,
2. Show them on people’s favorite platforms, and
3. Use advertising to ensure they reach the right people.

What are the Best Video Marketing Platforms?

Our agency has done experiments, with and without ads, to see what works best with:

1. Edited videos of various types: Most of our experience with video (TV and movies) is edited, not live. Edited videos are planned. They don’t waste people’s time. This is the best for ensuring people see your whole message and you get the best results.
2. 15-second edited videos on Facebook: Generally speaking, Facebook videos need to be shorter. Facebook itself is recommending 15 second videos now when you create video ads. We’ve created tightly scripted 15-second videos that get up to 8% clickthrough rates.
3. YouTube videos: People watch videos longer on YouTube. You can make them extremely long (30 minutes, for example) if you want. But I would make videos for ads shorter- 3-5 minutes max. A smart new strategy is a choose your own adventure video where your first video gives people a choice and they can click to other more specific videos more relevant to them.
4. Instagram Video: 60 seconds and under, square dimensions- and you can use Facebook ads to target people. This is my third choice after Facebook and YouTube video.
5. Facebook Live: People often go live for 15 minutes to 45 minutes, but the average viewer still may only watch for 20-30 seconds. This is a challenging format for many.
6. Twitter video, both edited and live: Everything is limited on Twitter because of the smaller audience size, and we recommend advertising to ensure your video is seen.
7. Snapchat video: Very hard to get a sizable audience, and no ad platform for most companies. The filters might be entertaining, but limited marketing application here.

Killer Content: How Do You Create Videos People Love That Drive Them to Take Action?

To find out what’s most effective, we are constantly working on new things for ourselves and our clients:

• Video creation tools: Camtasia, Ripl, Slidely
• Video type: Live talking head, live in front of audience, edited, greenscreen, talking head, animated- You need lots of different kinds of video because you never know which kind your audience is going to respond best to until you create it and test it
• Video content outline:
  • Starting with a list of persuasive copywriting points you need to hit will get you better business results. Who is your audience? What are their pain points? What are their biggest fears? Problems? How do you benefit them? Solve their problems? What are their dreams? What is your unique selling proposition? Why should they take action now?
  • Read about the charismatic leadership tactics of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other great speakers, and write a new script based on that.
  • Experiment with serious vs. funny videos
• Video length: 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds… on Facebook if you want people to see your whole video, create 15 second videos.
• Ad targeting: Cold prospects, retargeting…
• Video editing techniques: Greenscreen, video background loops, huge caption text…

We track the results to see what drives views, traffic, leads and sales.

It’s usually different for each client, so you have to experiment to discover what works best for you based on your customer and your offerings.

Targeting: Who Do You Show Videos To?

I always advertise my videos to multiple audiences, and see which videos each audience likes the best:

• Cold (new potential customer) audience targets
• Retargeting people who’ve been to my websites
• Retargeting people who’ve watched my other videos
• People who’ve signed up to my email lists
• Cold lookalike audiences based on retargeting or email lists

Retargeting and small custom (email) audiences can have a high CPM but it’s worth it.

Budgeting: How Much Does it Cost?

• We find that typically, Facebook ads for video are more affordable than YouTube ads for video. 
• YouTube cost per view ranges from $0.05 – $0.15; these are 30 second views
• Facebook’s definition of a view is only 3 seconds, which is useless. They may not have even looked at your video, they may have been looking at a post above or below it. Dig into the 30-second view metrics when you analyze your results. Look at cost per 30 second view. To get that you have to export to Excel and calculate it yourself! If you don’t want to, go off cost per 10 second view.
• The right goal: Is your goal just views? Don’t you want clicks to your website? And possibly real action like leads or sales? If so, I would recommend looking at CTR and CPC instead of cost per view or CPM.
• The right metrics:
  • Facebook video ad clickthrough rate is higher, and CPC comes down with higher CTR, so…
  • Facebook cost per click is much, much lower- my own avg CTR is 3.0% (across 133 videos for our agency, infoproducts and my keynote speaking)- avg CPC is $0.69. YouTube CPC can easily range from $4 – $13… basically 10x the cost.
  • YouTube CPM’s can be 2-3x Facebook CPM.

You need a lot of content online period. And you need a lot of video. You need new video content at least once a month, if not weekly.

There are endless amount things to try with video and we all need to work on getting better at it.

Why You Have to Market With Facebook Video

I mean it’s obvious why Facebook video rocks, right? I mean you see a ton of it in your news feed. Right? It’s always there.

Facebook live, Facebook edited videos, it’s constantly there and you’re getting pulled in from one video to another through that carousel experience. You may be watching a sequence of videos before you even realize it.

It’s very popular and Facebook is pushing it like crazy, they definitely want to beat YouTube. YouTube just put out there YouTube Live thing, so Facebook and YouTube are fighting for video. There’s a huge war in general about the screen.

Facebook’s going to bring in all these people like Gordon Ramsay and try to capture your video viewing time. They don’t want you to necessarily to be on Netflix doing video viewing, they’d rather you were on Facebook doing it. Right? Anyone that’s using Facebook video has a huge advantage right now.

I’ll talk at some other time about photos versus videos, because photos still have a big advantage on Facebook just because they’re so quickly consumed. It’s not easy to do Facebook video, or video anywhere well, in a way that people are going to love. It’s a huge opportunity because Facebook really wants everyone to see it, so they are favoring it in the news feed… so you should definitely figure out how to do video.

There are a lot of internal obstacles to it:

• Like our videos aren’t good enough
• We don’t have enough money
• We’re not good on camera

You can do something like this. I’m filming this on an iPhone. I bought like an eight dollar thing to attach it to my tripod. My tripod probably cost thirty bucks, I don’t even remember. You can go on Amazon get a tripod and a little thing to attach your iPhone to your tripod.

The iPhone creates great, I don’t even have special lighting in here. When I bought an HD camera that required special lighting to look good. My iPhone does not, it’s very low maintenance.

There are ways to get involved and do video, and you’ve got to figure it out and start doing it because it’s a huge opportunity.

Facebook video is huge- Facebook reported seeing 100 million hours of daily video watch time near the end of 2015. And with the newer “related videos feature,” where people are automatically served another video after their current one, you can bet video views have grown dramatically from there.

There are a lot of Facebook video options:

• Facebook Live
• Facebook video in your personal or page posts
• Facebook video ads

Why You Have to Advertise to Promote Your Videos

As you might know, I am a big believer in advertising everything you can on Facebook, even if you have a small budget…

Before you run away- let me explain!

What happens if you don’t use ads with your videos?

• No certainty you get views. They don’t get viewed much. You may get lucky if your video is super awesome and goes viral… but unless you’re already a celebrity, you probably won’t get more than a couple thousand views.  Even if you’re super interesting and talented, most videos don’t go viral- they get a few hundred views and fizzle out.
• No certainty of target audience. Organic videos don’t necessarily reach who you want them to. Who sees them is not under your control. It’s whoever happens to be on Facebook right then, however the algorithm works, whoever likes or shares, whoever their friends are, et cetera.
• No certainty of reaching your target buyer. If you’re doing this video for business, you might not reach your target customer. Or out of your several hundred views, maybe only a few dozen are your ideal buyers.
• No certainty of traffic, leads or sales. Even if you have a link somewhere in that video or post, the percentage of those who watch that click is not 100%; it’s going to be between 1-10%. So if 200 or so watch, maybe 2-20 people click to your site. And what % of visitors do things on your site? Maybe 1% buy and 10% opt into an email list? So very little action comes from this.

But when you advertise your videos, you can:

• Reach exactly the right audience (your best buyers, not just anybody, not just friends family employees)
• Reach them right away (not like whenever… maybe… but NOW)
• Reach enough potential customers to discover how they respond to your content- or don’t
• Get more detailed stats and metrics from the ad manager than you do from Facebook Page Insights

The last thing is critical. If you don’t run ads for your videos, you won’t get a lot of analytics or insights about them. And you won’t learn much. The video analytics you get when you don’t run ads are pretty limited.

Trust me, you’ll be surprised by what you learn. You need to know

• How many seconds people are watching your videos on average
• Which audiences watch them the longest
• Which ones convert
• Which ones don’t

There are four ways to run video ads on Facebook, and all produce different results.

The first thing you absolutely MUST understand about how Facebook ads work, that many many people don’t know is that the ad goal determines who FB shows the ad to  based on their most common FB activities which ensures you mainly get that response and very little of the others…

In other words,

• Choosing an engagement ad shows the ad to people who engage a lot, but these people don’t necessarily click to websites…
• Choosing a video view ad shows the ad to people who view a lot of videos, but these people don’t necessarily like posts or click to websites…

So your actual Facebook targeting is:

• Not just the targeting you choose, but also
• The subset of those people who most do the thing that you’ve chosen as your ad goal.

The five ways to advertise video on Facebook are:

1. Video in post, promoting the post (whether boost or a post promotion ad from ad manager/power editor): gets you in front of the subset of your audience who likes, shares and comments on posts, so you get much more engagement on the post than video views, link clicks or conversions
2. Video view ad: gets you in front of the people who watch a lot of video, so you get a lot of video views, more than post engagement, link clicks or conversions
3. Website traffic ad with video instead of image: gets you in front of people who click off FB on links to other sites (but not necessarily the subset that converts), so you get a lot of link clicks, more than video views, engagement or conversions
4. Website conversion ads with video instead of image: gets you in front of the people who click AND convert BOTH, so you get conversions, but less clicks, video views and engagement.
   Start with your goal, then choose the right ad type.
5. Awareness boosting ad with video instead of image: this is interesting, because in our initial tests with this, it actually beats the video view ad at its own game!

Here’s how those shake out:

NOT PICTURED: The awareness boosting ad gets you larger reach and at times can get you more views and longer duration than the video view ad.

But just beware- both the video view ad and awareness boosting ads can get you a lot of exposure but won’t necessarily get you interaction or conversions.

What do I recommend?

I like the awareness boosting ad and the website conversion ad with a video in it. I run them in separate campaigns with separate budgets.

That way you can get exposure AND conversions. Best of both worlds.

But it’s going to be different for all of you- if you have someone looking over your shoulder who expects to see interaction on your Facebook post that has a video in it, you probably should run a post promotion ad (similar to a boosted post)… remember, it’s all about your goals!