Tips for creating engaging video ads

I'm going to provide some tips for creating engaging ads that will be as successful as possible on YouTube.

First of all, don't forget about the first five seconds. For most ads on YouTube, users have the option to skip the ad after those first five seconds. So those first five seconds provide an opportunity for you to captivate the user. Let them know why they should watch the rest of your advertisement. Make your ads short, concise, and to the point, because if the user doesn't like what they see in those first five seconds, they're going to be very likely to click on that skip button and then you lose that user. So you really need to take advantage of those first five seconds. Secondly, a call to action. This is important for almost all marketing campaigns, but especially important on YouTube. Make it clear to your users what their next step should be if they're interested in your product or service. Whether it's signing up for a free trial, or just entering an email address to get more information, let them know exactly what they should do next. When the user has to decide what to do next, often times you don't get the results that you're looking for. So remember to provide that call to action in your advertisement so that they know exactly where they can go for more information. Next, authenticity. It's important to be authentic on YouTube. Avoid deception, avoid click bait, and any other practices that may upset the user. So what's click bait? Well if you're unfamiliar, it's when you provide an advertisement that looks great, definitely makes the user want to click. They almost think, why would I not click on this, and then when they click and they go to the website or wherever the landing page is, it's not what they saw on YouTube, it's a completely different product or service, it's not what they were offered. That's just going to confuse the user, it's going anger them. And even if you change your marketing campaign in the future to avoid click bait, they may remember that brand and just automatically skip your ad and not click through just because they remember clicking before in what you were trying to do and deceive them. So although it may improve your click-through rates, your engagement rates, your interaction rates on YouTube, it's not going to improve your conversion rates, which is the real reason why you're advertising to begin with. Even if it's brand recognition, being deceptive is definitely not going to help your brand recognition. So remember to be authentic on YouTube. Finally, we have professionalism. Make sure that you're showing high-definition advertisements with good sound quality. It may even be a good idea to outsource the creation of your videos that you're going to be showing on YouTube. There are a lot of really high-quality ads on YouTube, there are movie trailers, they're HD, they're shot in studios, and you're going to be competing with those advertisers. So it's really important to have as high quality of an advertisement as possible. I know that it might not be attractive at first glance, thinking about how much it's going to cost to produce an advertisement, but you're paying for these ads to be shown on YouTube. So if you're willing to pay for the ads to be shown on YouTube, then it's probably a good idea that you have a little bit of a budget for the actual creation of the advertisement, because that's really going to determine how successful your ads are. It's going to determine how engaging they are, if people watch the whole ad, and then if people click through to your product or service. So remember to create advertisements that are as professional as possible before you start advertising them on YouTube.

YouTube Advertising