Find out the ideal video length for your advertising efforts
This year YouTube looks to make more than $2 billion in video advertising revenue. Agencies are shifting their video marketing approach, focusing $10 billion of total expenditures on digital advertisements.
Video length ranges between 15 to 30 seconds but oddly, 80% of internet viewers are skipping them when given the opportunity after five seconds.
How can a marketer succeed when people are not even watching the video? For all this money spent annually, what is the best approach to connect with viewers via YouTube and Facebook?
In this blog, you will learn how personalized video marketing is the solution for video advertising on YouTube and Facebook. You will learn:
- The ideal video length (in seconds)
- The best tactics to personalize videos
- The expected outcome when using personalized video
According to Jeff Bullas, 500 years (4,368,000 hours!) of YouTube footage is watched daily on Facebook. With 40% of the world connected to the internet, the majority of users are engaging in video content, the first action sought when connecting to the net. We all contribute to this massive tally of minutes, hours, days, and years of videos. Each day we sit with our smart device or a computer screen and anticipate watching the latest movie trailer, baby outtakes or goats screaming, but we groan at the inevitable commercial–the pop-up video advertisement.
Yet, after five seconds we all have the choice to move forward with a SKIP Ad button.
Like me, you and 80% of the rest of the viewership skip this video ad. Why? Maybe we lack patience? But most importantly, we skip this short video, no more than 30 seconds in length because it lacks relevance to us and our lives.
Studies have shown that folks like you and I can tolerate sitting through 15 seconds of video marketing content before skipping, making the ideal YouTube video advertisement 15 to 30 seconds in length. But most video ads we encounter are longer and have nothing to do with the video we are even watching.
Without any personal connection, the video ad from the get go is meaningless and risks getting skipped when the opportunity arises.
The Super Bowl remains the exception to this skip rule, where according to USA Today, in 2014 78% of Americans polled in California preferred the commercials over the game itself. This explains why advertisers are willingly paying more than $5 million for a 30-second spot.
statista.com
But not all companies are like Doritos or Volkswagen, so they turn to the internet and YouTube, and spend plenty of money on shorter videos that somehow still benefit less due to the skip button.
Research suggests 65% of viewers skip online video ads as soon as they’re able to. The same research also found that 76% do so out of habit.
The ideal video length for an ad on YouTube should be 15 seconds but such a video still risks missing the mark with the viewer.
However, when personalizing a video ad, completion rates not only increase dramatically, but they increase on videos that are on average between 70-90 seconds in length. Such video marketing content generates completion rates on average of 85%!
O2 Refresh, a major UK-based Telecommunication company created a 30-second personalized video that had a complete rate of 62%–almost 40% higher than its competitor’s video advertisement complete rates! Watch it for yourself. This video was personalized for individuals based on their location:
An airline in Mexico using the same CRM Personalized Video platform generated a personalized video ad for customers that was 80 seconds in length and generated a completion rate of 83%.
How is it possible that a personalized video of equal length performs 500% better than any average YouTube video advertisements, or a video that is almost three times in length succeed by 800%?!
Personalized Videos speak directly to the viewer, by name, in the subject line and email body, as well as, in the video with subtitles and a possible voice over recording. This level of engagement peaks the interest of the viewer and motivates them to watch the video in its entirety.
If the video is about me from the beginning, then I am determined to see where my video ends up.
This new and innovate level of customer engagement cannot be experienced with a traditional digital ad that instructs which car to buy or beverage to drink.
Personalized videos on average are watched 1.3 times by the viewer.
There is so much to be gained personalizing video ads, even videos that are longer than a minute in view time. Such videos will raise completion rates and open the advertiser to include:
- Multiple advertising messages start to finish
- Call-to-action buttons at the end of the video
- Important information placed throughout
- Directives throughout the video
Furthermore, it is easy to personalize a video to produce results above and beyond industry benchmarks. Using API calls and other profile data, any marketer can acquire the necessary information about the viewer in order to personalize the experience. A video can specifically be made for the viewer’s gender, their location, and even the language they speak. The possibilities are endless when personalization is the method for video generation.
With customer data readily available at any agency’s fingertips, such as profiles, preferences, interests, and other pertinent information, personalized videos can be tailor made specifically for an individual on a massive scale in real-time and sent by email, text message, or other social media methods.
In general, if a subject line greets the customer by name, that email is opened 20% of the time, but when the words “personalized video” are added in that same subject line, the email open rate jumps by almost 10%.
How Coca-Cola Used User Data On Twitter
Personalized videos and their respective emails can be generated in the millions in real-time and sent across multiple industries, about thousands of products and services. Millions of people can read their personalized email and watch their personalized video. It will be a commercial, but one they want to watch because the message speaks directly to them, about the product and services that concern them.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, 12-15% of video ads are watched until the end, but when using personalized similar video ads, the completion rates increase to 78%, quintupling the level of engagement.
Using a CRM platform to generate personalized videos has proven to be successful. Of emails sent to customers with a personalized video, 50% of those emails were opened by the customer, whereas industries on average, sending emails without any personalized video were opened only 23% of the time.
Call-To-Action buttons on Landing Pages of Personalized Videos are clicked through 32% of the time. Click-through rates on banner marketing on average are over 3%, but with Personalized Video, they increase to 20%.
At the end of the day, a personalized video will serve the same purpose as any traditional video, that is, it sends a message about a product or service to the viewer.
But when using personalization, relevancy is established, bringing out the best of the marketing campaign, making the video unique to the individual and valuable, leading to desired outcomes.
Video marketing content is here to stay, and with evolutionary technology such as 360-degree viewing and virtual reality it will only leap ahead of traditional marketing channels.
On YouTube, the ideal video length for advertising remains at 15 seconds but when videos are personalized they can increase by 75 seconds in length and still generate better results and higher completion rates overall!
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In conclusion, Personalized Video marketing creates an experience as if the vendor and the customer are face-to-face. As a result, customers feel an affinity to their video and appreciate it more. Of customers who watch personalized videos that are more than 75 seconds in length, over 15% of them watch the same video again, and on a different device! This demonstrates that personalized videos take the next step in customer engagement. The second viewing is more meaningful and hopefully watched with other people.
Using personalized video is winning over the viewer’s heart, and also winning over their family and friends too. See the numbers Personalized Videos by Idomoo generate on three separate continents.
Idomoo discovered 70-90 seconds was the ideal video length for generating high video completion rates.
This is what you learned from this blog post:
- Personalized video ads with 70-90 seconds in length can and will produce high completion rates.
- Classic video ads cost a lot of money, average 15-30 seconds in length, and are skipped 80% of the time.
- Video ads with personalized messages provide endless video space for Call-To-Action and Customer Engagement.
- When personalized Video Ads are tailor made using customer data providing the most unique and exciting viewing experience.
- The ideal video length for your Ads depends heavily on your audience and how personal you get with them
Have you found certain video ads more interesting and engaging over others? Are you also someone who skips a video ad often, why? What other video ad solutions have you read about or seen that provides high completion rates when the video is longer than 30 seconds? Please feel free to contact us below or share your thoughts on the blog information itself.
