Got a cool brand video and looking to use it to find more clients on Facebook?

You might want to rethink that strategy.

In my experience, video is not an effective form of creative for a lead generation campaign on its own. Especially when the video is pretty long, or your budget is small.

It’s just too much to ask for people to not only watch your content, but to then click off to do something elsewhere. If your ad objective is video views that is ALL you should expect to get. I can’t buy groceries with video views and neither can you, we need something more tangible.

I still love video as a way to connect with your audience, just not as the cornerstone creative piece for a Facebook ad campaign.

What are your options? You have a video. First question: what is your budget for this ad you want to run? Start there, write it down, and we’ll come back to your budget later…

If you have a video you want to use for a Facebook ad, two strategies come to mind.

Use the video as part of a 2 part campaign

I’ve used this before successfully and developed it with the FB ad expert i worked with during my corporate years. It is one of the few ways to truly get a video ad to convert.

It requires running 2 separate ads, and enough budget to get a healthy number of views in the first part of the campaign.

In the first part of the campaign, you show the video to a wide range of humans in your targeted areas (zip code, DMA etc), and optimize the ad for video views to cast a wide net.

This first part of the strategy is a cheap way to reach more people, and filter them based on their interest. It would be the “awareness” part of the campaign in traditional marketing speak.

The follow up is a 2nd ad that uses a Custom Audience to retarget the people who watched more than 15 or 30 seconds+ of the video. You can choose 15 seconds for lukewarm people, or 30+ seconds to filter for people that are likely even warmer leads.  

Retargeting people who watched a certain amount of your video the first time narrows the sales funnel by selecting for people whose behaviour suggested they were interested in your content.

Use the video as supporting content on a landing page.

Option two. You use a captivating image as the ad creative for your Facebook ad (not video) that sends people to a landing page on your website that works as a one page sales funnel.

The initial ad would be optimized to send people to the landing page (link clicks) using a hook that ties into the topics discussed in your video.

The video is embedded on the landing page, in addition to content that discusses the content of the video. This could just be worked into a souped up blog post, it doesn’t have to be crazy fancy.

The video is the supporting argument, a.k.a. of course you are a believable professional, you made it on the news! (or something like that, depending on the type of video)

Which should you choose?

There are limitations to both strategies, and benefits of course, but the benefits are in the long term asset development realm (aka email subscribers).

That’s part of why I ask what you’re looking to spend on this ad. If you are a business maven on a tight budget (my favorite breed of lady boss) you want to ensure any cash you spend is well worth the investment. 

The positive of the first strategy is you get your content in front of a lot of people using the video views objective. Facebook loves video so you get a a lot of reach for less cash.

The problem is, if too few people watch the video long enough (often due to low budget), you can’t retarget them with a follow up ad. You do not pass go, do not collect $200.

If you have a larger budget this isn’t as much of an issue, but it’s always a gamble.  Look at your metrics to see if you can get an idea of your historical cost per views, or average video views, to gauge if your budget is adequate. 

You can’t do the 2nd phase of the strategy if you don’t get enough views to create a custom audience. Facebook does not allow you to create Custom Audiences when the sample size is too small, it violates their privacy rules. Not enough views, not an audience.

For Facebook, at least 100 people need to hit that view time threshold for the possibility of a custom audience, although in practice you’d really need at least 1,000 for an effective, accurate audience. (basic statistics sample size stuff, meh)

Door number 2 for the win.

While the 2nd strategy is a bit more work, it gives you two chances to reconnect with people who click through your ad if you set the landing page up right.

One would be an email list opt-in, and the second would be the Facebook pixel installed on your website. (If you are running Facebook ads you should have a Facebook pixel installed on your website, no excuses, it’s free!!!)

Make sure these two touch points are included on the landing page. Email and Facebook pixel, you want them both.

If you’re going to spend money on Facebook ads, make it worth it.

If you are going to invest in a FB ad you want it to at least help you keep marketing to people who show interest. You need them to either visit your website (to trigger the FB pixel) or sign up for your mailing list.

Both of those behaviors allow you to continue the conversation with them if they don’t purchase right away.

If it works, you can reuse the same landing page/blog post in the future. If it flops, at least you logged the ip address of all the people who visited the landing page & got some of them signed up for your email list. This means you can market to them again with future content.