5 Ways to Triple Your Social Video Ad Performance

If you have a brand with an online presence and a desire to increase your sales or ROI, below are the five most current best practices for achieving maximum scale using the incomparable power of social video advertising.

Social video advertising means running video content as an ad on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Native, Reddit, Email, etc... for the purpose of acquiring customers. 

As a Forbes 30 Under 30 guy behind what Google awarded the "Most Viral Ad of the Decade," I'm going to show you under the hood, including some information I've never before shared publicly. I've directed social campaigns at renowned creative agency CP+B and 20th Century Fox for Fortune 500 brands like Old Navy, Kraft, Turkish Airlines and Coca-Cola but I've also written, produced and directed commercials and managed ad spends for dozens of top multi-million dollar e-commerce companies you may have never heard of like Shark Tank's Piperwai, Nerd Skincare, and PMD. From my experience at agency Chamber.Media seeing every aspect of acquiring customers with social video, here are the 5 ways to triple your social video ad performance in a world were billions of dollars are to be made this year. 

We've driven $100M+ in sales with our small 12 person agency so far.

1. Adopt a Mindset That Mixes Brand Awareness With Direct Response 

Most advertisers I see advertising on social media have polarized strategies when it comes to social video; they’re either traditionally minded and focused completely on brand awareness to get results or they're e-commenced minded and focused completely on the immediate sale at the expense of the brand.

For decades, marketers have been disciplined to place ads and track anything they can, but at the end of the day make decisions based on overall sales lift and brand studies. Nowadays in the e-commerce world, marketers expect to perfectly track and attribute every single A to B purchase using advanced tracking technology.

Together both of these mindsets are correct, but independently they are wrong. Both are needed to succeed and see the whole picture.

I see some social advertisers making massive top funnel videos with no plan to engage the customer beyond that, and a majority of them fully dependent on mid to low funnel static images with lifestyle photos, or offers, or dynamic product ads. You need both. You need to think like Nike and also think like some underworld affiliate marketer. 

2: Focus on the whole Funnel: High, Mid, and Low

When you plan out your content, make video that engages, entertains, and educates as your first touch point. The longer you can go with it still being interesting and exciting, the better. If you pass a cookware salesman in Costco who's boring, you're going to keep walking (aka scrolling or skipping them). If they’re impossible to look away from, you may stand there for 2, 3, 5 minutes and before you know it you're buying cookware you didn't even know you needed. Treat your first interaction with a customer like that in what's called a high funnel video, and don't be afraid to sell hard.

We've made dozens of such videos ranging from $2,000 productions all the way to $300,000 specifically for Facebook and YouTube, such as this one for Nerd Skincare with social influencer Laura Clery or with influencer Manon Mathews and JP Sears for PiperWai, for Transparent Labs, or this lower budget one for Gurunanda Essential Oils.

After you've served your high funnel videos then later on serve those viewers mid to low funnel content that reminds, creates urgency, and provides credibility. This may include testimonials, offers, press features, origin story, message from the founder, product demonstration, or anything focused on overcoming potential concerns.

Just by engaging the customer through high, mid, and low funnel content, most brands could triple performance on this one tip alone within a few weeks. 

3: Invest in Elite Ad Buying Talent

One of the most common pitfalls I see in the industry are brands unsuccessfully trying to scale with inexperienced, low paid, junior ad buyers. Facebook and YouTube have made efforts to make ad buying platforms intuitive for in-house marketers to use, but a majority of companies still have serious challenges in using industry best practices.

The role of social ad buyer is one of the most intellectually demanding in the whole marketing industry.

A high performing ad buyer must possess a rare ability in both left and right brain disciplines. In the right brain they must have deep experience and talent for identifying effective creative, copywriting, design, and sales psychology. In the left brain they must be able to have the natural mind of a programmer or mathematician, understanding how algorithms react, being able to solve complex problems using data that isn't just limited to ad accounts. They have to also have fundamental understanding of reporting, placing pixels in code and making sure attribution is functioning properly, A/B testing and how to improve conversion rate optimization on website. Even the best ad buyers can fail if they are sending traffic perfectly to a website that does not convert sales well.

Ad buying encompasses a job that should technically require a team of 5 experts to pull off, but unfortunately if they are lacking in any of these areas individually, they are unlikely to scale a given ad account at its full capacity. The industry demand for social ad buyers is liely 10X+ of supply, so most companies are hiring internal people who are not sufficiently qualified. The solution to this is only bringing a lead ad buyer in house if they are an $70,000/yr+ salary level person.

Companies who put an entry or mid-senior level ad buyer at the helm risk losing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend and facing failure at running an ROI-positive revenue channel and this is the reason we only employ well paid and heavily sought after social ad buyers at our firm. Any legitimately talented ad buyer right now can easily go out on their own and make six figures in a short amount of time so it's critical to provide incentives similar to what tech companies provide for top engineers. The upside of one extraordinarily gifted ad buyer in your organization is worth millions of dollars of revenue a year. 

4: Invest in Video and Refresh Often

So what is the right amount to invest into video production? The rule is whatever your ad spend is, whether it's $5k or $500k a month, you should be spending a third to a half of that initially on content that will allow you to scale your ad spends. As your ad spend continues to grow, you need to refresh content every $500k - $1M in spend, or every quarter for high performing brands. s your audiences sees your content multiple times they will begin to fatigue, making your content less effective over time. Two, social algorithms know this and will decrease your reach over time if new content is not being uploaded often enough (or recut).

However, sometimes you will have pieces of content that are evergreen, that you can continually serve to brand new audiences at high funnel and still be effective. There are a handful of our high funnels videos that have now been running for two years that continue to perform with new people in the funnel.

The most effective format for a high funnel video for converting is to have a thumb stopping hook in the first few seconds, introduce the problem and solution, introduce another problem and solution, present credibility using testimonials and/or press features, and have strong calls to actions to buy mixed throughout.

Sometimes humor works well because it often disarms the viewer and makes them more willing to listen to the message while being entertained.

5: Have a Holistic Approach to Looking at your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) 

These five points all lead to Return on investment, or ROAS, which stands for Return on Ad Spend. One of the most common mistakes in social ad buying is looking at numbers in a vacuum.

Most marketers will look at ad platforms separately rather than holistically, which can often lead to misinterpretation that a campaign that might actually be working, is failing.

Some marketers will look at a 2 to 1 ROAS on Facebook, meaning every $1 spent drove $2 in revenue, as a failure. But often in reality once sales lifts on Google Search, Amazon sales, affiliates, unattributable purchases, re-order rate, lifetime value, and revenue from email campaigns are factored, it could actually be a 7 to 1 ROAS, which any marketer is ecstatic about.

We had a campaign performing at break even that a client thought was a failure, and then when retail sales lifts were factored and attributed the ROI was actually 500%. Another commonly mis-read platform for ROAS is YouTube, which Chambers said is harder to attribute than Facebook because it more heavily influences Google Search and brand recall. What may look like a failure on YouTube is often wildly successful when factoring in search and people who remembered the brand and went directly to the website on a different device or weeks to months later.

Facebook is an experience where marketers are interrupting users without context, so a strategy should be planned for multiple quick touch points to get someone to buy. YouTube, however, usually introduces skip-able videos within context of what the user was looking for, so that strategy is more planned for getting someone to watch an ad as long as possible without skipping and to remember it. In conclusion, social ad buying typically lifts metrics across every revenue channel, even retail, so a holistic mindset is critically important when trying to decide how effective your campaigns are. 

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed these article, please follow me here on LinkedIn and leave a comment, I usually respond to every comment, let's get a conversation going! I post new value-add content every other day here on LinkedIn.

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