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When Should You Pay to Promote Video Content?

Paid media plays a large role in your social media strategy.

There are two key questions that we want to address: When should you pay to promote video content? And how should you measure your video marketing or ad campaign?

When should you pay to promote video content?

Between the number of videos on the internet and the ever-changing social media algorithms, you can’t assume everyone is going to organically see your video content. If your brand doesn’t already have a large following, it’s a good idea to boost your content with paid advertising once you publish it. Many brands used paid advertising as a way to accelerate audience building and spark sharing.

For example, when you publish a post to Facebook, you’re prompted to “boost” the post. You can also do a more targeted version of this through Ads Manager by selecting a post and creating an ad with it. Both of these methods turn your video content (owned media) into paid media (paid advertising). Aside from the obvious benefits of paid media, paid media also increases your earned media (organic reach). Many paid media campaigns generate at least one organic view as a result of two paid views. This means you’re getting additional organic (free!) engagement because of your paid engagement.

The key to success is to produce high-quality, engaging content and make sure you get it in front of at least half of your target audience. If you know your target audience well and cater your content to them, they’ll take care of pushing it out even further.

How should you measure a video marketing campaign?

Views are vanity metrics. It’s time to stop worrying about them! You want to keep your focus on measuring attention and engagement. How long did people watch for? How many people watched the whole video? How many people interacted with your content?

First, you’ll want to consider your campaign goal and establish which metrics apply to it. Then you’ll want to start comparing data to see if there’s been any growth relating to the campaign. One common goal is brand recognition. It’s also the one goal that get’s people the most hung up on their view count. But even when it comes to brand recognition, there are better ways to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

Focus on website traffic and social listening. Are you getting a lot of traffic from direct searches? That means people are remembering your brand. Are you getting a lot of referrals from Facebook while your campaign was live on Facebook? That means people are interacting with your campaign. Are people talking about your brand on social media? That means your brand is in the front of their mind.

Watch-time, click-through rate, and conversions are other good metrics to focus on when measuring your video marketing campaign. These all measure how engaged your viewers were when they came across your content and if it encouraged them to interact further with your brand.

If you’re looking for more tips, check out our other blog posts here!