How to Create Social Media Videos for Your Business

We’ve all heard it: it’s no longer “content is king” as much as it is “video is king”. That is all well and good, but how do you actually get started with video marketing? What kinds of videos should you create to promote your business? How can you consistently create quality videos for your social channels without spending a fortune, especially if you don’t have any filming or video editing skills of which to speak?

Spotlight

Doner

Our purpose is to move people. Ideas are our fuel. Ideas versatile enough to thrive across platforms and fertile enough to start a riot of tweeting, posting, shopping, pinning, sharing, buying etc. It’s not enough to enlighten or inspire, we’re here to incite action. How we do it is a collaborative thing. We surround each client with a connected ecosystem of talent and resources. No functional silos. No separate profit centers. Because, you can't deliver integrated solutions "downstream", unless you live in a truly integrated model "upstream". Based in Detroit, we're proudly a part of the MDC Partners network. As we've grown, we've never lost touch with the entrepreneurial spirit; the virtues of being "turn-on-a-dime" nimble; the value of true partnership with our clients.

OTHER ARTICLES
Social Media Advertising

4 Ways to Create Engaging Video Content For Advertising

Article | July 14, 2022

Video content is more important than ever from a marketing perspective, but the high profile status it has attained also brings challenges with it. The main hurdle to overcome is that of creating compelling clips that outshine the competition in a marketplace that is already overflowing with attention-grabbing content. With all that in mind, here are just a handful of strategies that will empower you when making promotional video content for your business or brand. Use the right software tools The video editing tools you choose will form the foundation of your content creation strategy, so it pays to give this plenty of thought and not to just stick with the same old package you have been using for years. For example, leveraging collaborative video editing software could take your projects to the next level, not only in terms of creativity but also when it comes to compressing cycles of work. If you can have multiple team members collaborating on the same project in unison, you can hit deadlines and capture the zeitgeist with your content, rather than seeing viral trends pass you by. Choose types of content that serve your advertising aims The extent to which your video content is able to engage and connect with your target audience will partly be determined by the format it takes. As such you have to choose wisely and avoid producing clips that don’t gel with your marketing goals. For example, if your business makes a product that has practical applications, you could gain views and shares by making tutorial content that explains how best to use it. On the other hand, if your business offers services within a particular industry, then you may earn more traction with videos that explain a particular aspect of the niche you occupy. Both of these types of content provide value to viewers as well as being promotional, and can also remain relevant for long periods. The more evergreen your video content, the bigger the potential ROI. Extrapolate ideas from your existing content Working out what video content will hit home with your ideal demographic can feel like it involves a lot of guesswork, and a lot of risk-taking as a result. However, you don’t have to go all-in on a concept for a video without knowing if it will hold water, because it is more than likely that you already have tried-and-tested ideas that have proven themselves and are ripe for video adaptation.

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Display Advertising

How to Use Customer Match for Google Ads with Zapier

Article | July 8, 2022

Zapier announced its Customer Match feature is now more widely available for Google Ads to all eligible users. As an expert Google Ads agency that uses Zapier’s automation features in our own campaigns, our team knows how useful Customer Match is to reach advertising goals and increase return on investment (ROI), making its expanded capabilities for Google Ads big news. This article will introduce the Zapier and its Customer Match tool, tell you how to get started using Customer Match for Google Ads with Zapier, and outline its benefits for first-party audience data in ad campaigns.

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Ad Networks

4 Ad Performance Metrics You Should Track

Article | October 20, 2022

Measuring the ad performance on your website is critical for understanding how well your revenue stream is optimized. Ad sizes, placements, and color are common measures, but they may not necessarily work for you. As a publisher, you must focus on four prime metrics that give you a clear idea of an ad campaign’s performance. Let us take a look at them: 4 Ad Performance Metrics You Should Track CPM (Cost per mille) CPM stands for advertising cost per thousand views. It is the benchmark used to calculate the approximate cost of an advertisement or ad campaign across various media. CPM can be calculated by dividing how much it costs to place an advertisement by the number of impressions (in thousands) that it achieves. This metric helps compare the difference in ad opportunities based on efficiency and to evaluate the overall campaign cost. CTR (Click-through rate) CTR is the ad click-through rate that measures how well an online ad campaign is progressing on a website. It is denoted as a percentage and is calculated by how many times an ad is clicked divided by how many times an ad is shown. RPM (Revenue per mille) RPM is the revenue generated per 1000 ad impressions. It is similar to CPM but instead of cost, it measures revenue. It is an especially important metric for publishers. If the RPM of a campaign is low, you should replace the campaign with one that earns a higher revenue and RPM rate. RPC (Revenue per click) RPC is the revenue generated per click. It tells you how much the average revenue is for every click on your ads and PPC (pay-per-click) keywords. You can easily understand how much you earn every time someone clicks on one of your ads. Comparing RPC and RPM values can give you insights on your ad spend and the money you earned through the ads. Streamlining Ad Campaigns with Ad Performance Measurement Here are some tips to streamline your ad campaigns with the insights your ad metrics provide: Use the right data: First-party data can help you optimize your programmatic ad campaigns along with your content. Capitalize on returning visitors: Play with ad location on pages with returning visitors. Mix and match to maintain the interest of the visitors. Optimize your content: Find out the type of content that attracts your visitors and optimize your content strategy based on your findings. Maintain optimal ad placement and size: Place your ads in the middle of the page, use in-image ads at the bottom of mobile web pages, experiment with different ad sizes and positions to check how users react. Final Thoughts Data-driven optimization is the secret to getting the ad revenue you expect. Testing and improving with the help of data insights can help you identify the areas that need attention.

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Marketers Need to Invest in Detailed Geo Targeting Now

Article | April 16, 2020

Geo targeting is the most under-utilised targeting element available to marketers today, giving a huge opportunity to brands that invest time and money in smarter geo targeting. Most advertising platforms now allow for detailed geo targeting – often down to a zip code/postcode or even to GPS coordinates. Yet it is amazing how few advertisers are consciously investing effort in this area. Audience targeting/ retargeting (via cookies) has dominated online display advertising and is now under threat from legislation and the end of third party cookies. Targeting in search and demographic targeting in logged in social networks attract huge spends. With the end of cookies it has been contextual targeting getting the most attention. This has relegated geo targeting down the list in terms of investment and understanding. This is a mistake as in fact it has many benefits, and to succeed advertisers need to understand how it impacts their business.

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Spotlight

Doner

Our purpose is to move people. Ideas are our fuel. Ideas versatile enough to thrive across platforms and fertile enough to start a riot of tweeting, posting, shopping, pinning, sharing, buying etc. It’s not enough to enlighten or inspire, we’re here to incite action. How we do it is a collaborative thing. We surround each client with a connected ecosystem of talent and resources. No functional silos. No separate profit centers. Because, you can't deliver integrated solutions "downstream", unless you live in a truly integrated model "upstream". Based in Detroit, we're proudly a part of the MDC Partners network. As we've grown, we've never lost touch with the entrepreneurial spirit; the virtues of being "turn-on-a-dime" nimble; the value of true partnership with our clients.

Related News

Ad Networks, Ad Tech and Martech

Businesses Increase Spend on Digital Advertising But Shift Platform Priorities

Business Wire | July 17, 2023

Emburse, the global leader in spend optimization, released new information today about corporate online advertising spend in May 2023. The data reveals that despite macroeconomic concerns, companies are on track to spend more on search and social advertising in 2023 than in 2022. As companies seek ways to be more efficient with their budgets, they are shifting which platforms they prioritize with their ad dollars, but have not slowed ad spending overall. According to the data released in an infographic today, the top three vendors by share of advertising spend, in order, are Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. Spending on Twitter declined 54% from May 2022 to May 2023, while companies are putting more money toward Gen Z-oriented social media platforms. ByteDance, which owns Tiktok, saw a 55% increase, and Snap, which owns Snapchat, a 41% increase from May 2022 to May 2023. Companies invested 6% more in digital advertising in the first five months of 2023 than in the same period in 2022. Emburse also reported increased investment in newer business applications like chat-based AI tools. For example, the amount spent on OpenAI increased 3,266% from May 2022 to May 2023. Although many people expected companies to reduce spend overall this year, instead the company has seen an effort to better align business values with their budgets. “Online advertising is an essential business function, even as companies look to establish lasting efficiency with their budgets and better manage spending practices,” said Emburse’s Chief Experience Officer Johann Wrede. “Many of our customers entered 2023 ready to make changes with a shifting economy, and found that concentrating their ad dollars on platforms that are giving them high value with little tumult is the way to make a longer-term impact on their bottom line.” More than 18,000 companies trust Emburse for its corporate card and spend management solution, Emburse Spend, representing over $80 billion in spending transactions a year. Emburse tracks corporate financial trends, such as the SpendSmart Travel Trends report, which in Q1 2023 revealed that the number of domestic and international flights, hotels, and car rentals increased year-over-year. Investments also increased across all measurements, with the amount spent on flights increasing by 85% domestically and 178% internationally. Emburse will continue to track the shift in corporate expenses as the year goes on. To view the full infographic and learn more about the data, visit emburse.com/learn/digital-ad-spending. About Emburse Emburse is the global leader in spend optimization. Our expense, travel management, purchasing and accounts payable, and payments solutions are trusted by more than 12 million business professionals, including CFOs, finance teams, and travelers. More than 18,000 organizations in 120 countries, including FORTUNE 100 corporations, high-growth startups, public sector agencies, and nonprofits, count on our intelligent automation, sophisticated analytics, and unmatched spend control to streamline processes, increase spend visibility, enhance compliance, and deliver positive financial outcomes. Our mission is to humanize work by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks, so our customers and their teams can focus on what matters most in their personal and professional lives. For more information on Emburse, visit emburse.com, or follow our social channels at @Emburse.

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Ad Networks

Smartly.io Announces Smartly.io AI Lab at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity

Business Wire | June 19, 2023

Smartly.io, one of the world’s largest SaaS digital advertising platforms, today announced the launch of Smartly.io AI Lab. This innovation hub serves as a meeting point for artificial intelligence and marketing expertise, driving advancements in Generative AI and other AI technologies to simplify campaign management and enhance creative scalability without compromising marketers’ brand governance. For the past ten years, Smartly.io has been at the forefront of AI-powered creative and campaign innovation, transforming digital advertising through its unified, AI-enhanced campaign management platform and creative automation solutions. In 2021, Smartly.io acquired Stanford-graduate founded Viralspace.ai, an industry leader in AI-driven creative optimization. The combination of Viralspace.ai’s custom AI models and Smartly.io’s Workspaces platform has resulted in an unrivaled approach to social advertising, integrating creative, media buying and intelligence seamlessly. “We’ve only just begun to see AI technology, specifically generative AI, unlock value for marketers. From enhanced campaign efficiency, creativity, and effectiveness, AI technology has the potential to make creative the most powerful performance lever of our time,” said Arto Tolonen, Head of Smartly.io AI Lab. “Our mission is to empower marketers to take ideas to ads with intelligence while maximizing their return on investment.” From scene generation that enhances a brand's product photos with new backgrounds and text iteration that powers translation, personalization, and iteration in natural language, to image generation from scratch and video ad assembly and iteration, the Smartly.io AI Lab is equipping marketers with the tools to get to use cases faster and transform their creative quality and time to campaign. “In this way Generative AI serves as a co-pilot to marketers and platforms. What Smartly.io AI Lab is building is already feeding the infrastructure that marketers, creators and even designers use, and increasing simplicity without sacrificing ideas and quality,” said Laura Desmond, CEO, Smartly.io. “The companies that seamlessly adopt generative AI into their platforms will be the early winners in a decades-long race. Smartly.io is poised to be among them.” The Smartly.io AI Lab launch represents the company's commitment to empowering marketers to unlock greater value from their digital investments without sacrificing their brand governance. By advancing the state-of-the-art in Generative AI and other AI areas, the company is poised to provide marketers with a significant advantage, simplifying creative scale while enabling agile campaigns and unified workflows across the evolving social and digital advertising landscape. About Smartly.io Smartly.io is one of the world’s largest SaaS digital advertising platforms, managing nearly $5B in ad spend with 700+ brands worldwide. Our leading end-to-end technology and outstanding customer service help brands such as Walmart, FanDuel, L’Oreal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Nestle, and Disney/ESPN to better reach audiences, engage creatives and learn what performs best—consistently driving scale for brand and performance across the largest media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Pinterest, TikTok, and Google. Visit Smartly.io to learn more.

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Advertiser Platforms

Creator Guided Shopping Platform LTK Launches Social Media Advertising for Brands

Business Wire | April 03, 2023

LTK, the global creator marketing platform, today launched social media advertising for brands to further leverage LTK Creator content to drive business outcomes. The new LTK Boost™ advertising solution allows brands to amplify creator collaboration content directly from the creator’s social media handles – leading to higher engagement and conversion. Brand investment in LTK Creators continued to increase last year with brand campaigns growing nearly 50% in the second half of the year. In a recent study, LTK found that Gen Z and Millennials rank influencer content over brand and even user-generated content when making a purchase decision. With LTK Boost, LTK can now run social media ads directly from creator profiles on behalf of brands -which creates a more authentic message, reduces the cost of content production and drives higher engagement and conversion versus traditional social media advertising. In an initial offering, LTK worked with several brands across multiple categories to run LTK Boost ads from creator profiles, which led to an increase in traffic to the brands’ sites, as well as a significant lift in sales with some brands seeing nearly 4X sales growth. All brand results outpaced social media ad industry click through averages by 80%. In addition, creators that participated in the trial saw significant impact with increases in audience reach, outsized gains in new followers and incremental sales and commissions for each creator. Participating creators saw nearly 200K new audience views per post and reached a near 30% increase in retail sales. “Creators are undoubtedly having an impact on consumer shopping behaviors. 92% of Gen Z – a group that will make up the largest consumer segment in a few years - rely on creators to inform their purchases across virtually every category. And, creators are the number one most trusted source to help with purchase decisions for Gen Z and Millennials – beating social media ads and celebrities. That’s why we continue to introduce solutions like LTK Media Boosting to help brands to fully harness the power of creators and reach their customers efficiently and effectively,” said Kristi O’Brien, General Manager of the LTK Brand Platform. LTK Boost is available now in the LTK Brand Platform. For more information, please visit https://company.shopltk.com/en/brands. About LTK As the founder of creator guided shopping, LTK is the trusted and effective platform for creators and their businesses by powering the connection between content and commerce. Founded in 2011 by Amber and Baxter Box, the LTK mission is to empower creators to be as economically successful as possible. World premium lifestyle creators in 150+ countries drive more than $3.6 billion in annual retail sales through their LTK Creator Shop profiles. Today, more than 18 million consumers turn to LTK Creator Shops in the LTK shopping platform each month to find inspiration and instantly shop the styles recommended by their favorite creators. And, more than 6,000 brands partner with LTK to gain access to its global creator network for content that converts against performance-driven, cross-channel KPIs. A three-time honoree on Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Retail Companies, LTK is headquartered in Dallas, TX and currently operates on five continents. To download the LTK shopping app, search for LTK in the App Store or Google Play. For the latest shopping trends and updates from LTK, follow Shop.LTK on Instagram and TikTok.

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Ad Networks, Ad Tech and Martech

Businesses Increase Spend on Digital Advertising But Shift Platform Priorities

Business Wire | July 17, 2023

Emburse, the global leader in spend optimization, released new information today about corporate online advertising spend in May 2023. The data reveals that despite macroeconomic concerns, companies are on track to spend more on search and social advertising in 2023 than in 2022. As companies seek ways to be more efficient with their budgets, they are shifting which platforms they prioritize with their ad dollars, but have not slowed ad spending overall. According to the data released in an infographic today, the top three vendors by share of advertising spend, in order, are Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. Spending on Twitter declined 54% from May 2022 to May 2023, while companies are putting more money toward Gen Z-oriented social media platforms. ByteDance, which owns Tiktok, saw a 55% increase, and Snap, which owns Snapchat, a 41% increase from May 2022 to May 2023. Companies invested 6% more in digital advertising in the first five months of 2023 than in the same period in 2022. Emburse also reported increased investment in newer business applications like chat-based AI tools. For example, the amount spent on OpenAI increased 3,266% from May 2022 to May 2023. Although many people expected companies to reduce spend overall this year, instead the company has seen an effort to better align business values with their budgets. “Online advertising is an essential business function, even as companies look to establish lasting efficiency with their budgets and better manage spending practices,” said Emburse’s Chief Experience Officer Johann Wrede. “Many of our customers entered 2023 ready to make changes with a shifting economy, and found that concentrating their ad dollars on platforms that are giving them high value with little tumult is the way to make a longer-term impact on their bottom line.” More than 18,000 companies trust Emburse for its corporate card and spend management solution, Emburse Spend, representing over $80 billion in spending transactions a year. Emburse tracks corporate financial trends, such as the SpendSmart Travel Trends report, which in Q1 2023 revealed that the number of domestic and international flights, hotels, and car rentals increased year-over-year. Investments also increased across all measurements, with the amount spent on flights increasing by 85% domestically and 178% internationally. Emburse will continue to track the shift in corporate expenses as the year goes on. To view the full infographic and learn more about the data, visit emburse.com/learn/digital-ad-spending. About Emburse Emburse is the global leader in spend optimization. Our expense, travel management, purchasing and accounts payable, and payments solutions are trusted by more than 12 million business professionals, including CFOs, finance teams, and travelers. More than 18,000 organizations in 120 countries, including FORTUNE 100 corporations, high-growth startups, public sector agencies, and nonprofits, count on our intelligent automation, sophisticated analytics, and unmatched spend control to streamline processes, increase spend visibility, enhance compliance, and deliver positive financial outcomes. Our mission is to humanize work by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks, so our customers and their teams can focus on what matters most in their personal and professional lives. For more information on Emburse, visit emburse.com, or follow our social channels at @Emburse.

Read More

Ad Networks

Smartly.io Announces Smartly.io AI Lab at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity

Business Wire | June 19, 2023

Smartly.io, one of the world’s largest SaaS digital advertising platforms, today announced the launch of Smartly.io AI Lab. This innovation hub serves as a meeting point for artificial intelligence and marketing expertise, driving advancements in Generative AI and other AI technologies to simplify campaign management and enhance creative scalability without compromising marketers’ brand governance. For the past ten years, Smartly.io has been at the forefront of AI-powered creative and campaign innovation, transforming digital advertising through its unified, AI-enhanced campaign management platform and creative automation solutions. In 2021, Smartly.io acquired Stanford-graduate founded Viralspace.ai, an industry leader in AI-driven creative optimization. The combination of Viralspace.ai’s custom AI models and Smartly.io’s Workspaces platform has resulted in an unrivaled approach to social advertising, integrating creative, media buying and intelligence seamlessly. “We’ve only just begun to see AI technology, specifically generative AI, unlock value for marketers. From enhanced campaign efficiency, creativity, and effectiveness, AI technology has the potential to make creative the most powerful performance lever of our time,” said Arto Tolonen, Head of Smartly.io AI Lab. “Our mission is to empower marketers to take ideas to ads with intelligence while maximizing their return on investment.” From scene generation that enhances a brand's product photos with new backgrounds and text iteration that powers translation, personalization, and iteration in natural language, to image generation from scratch and video ad assembly and iteration, the Smartly.io AI Lab is equipping marketers with the tools to get to use cases faster and transform their creative quality and time to campaign. “In this way Generative AI serves as a co-pilot to marketers and platforms. What Smartly.io AI Lab is building is already feeding the infrastructure that marketers, creators and even designers use, and increasing simplicity without sacrificing ideas and quality,” said Laura Desmond, CEO, Smartly.io. “The companies that seamlessly adopt generative AI into their platforms will be the early winners in a decades-long race. Smartly.io is poised to be among them.” The Smartly.io AI Lab launch represents the company's commitment to empowering marketers to unlock greater value from their digital investments without sacrificing their brand governance. By advancing the state-of-the-art in Generative AI and other AI areas, the company is poised to provide marketers with a significant advantage, simplifying creative scale while enabling agile campaigns and unified workflows across the evolving social and digital advertising landscape. About Smartly.io Smartly.io is one of the world’s largest SaaS digital advertising platforms, managing nearly $5B in ad spend with 700+ brands worldwide. Our leading end-to-end technology and outstanding customer service help brands such as Walmart, FanDuel, L’Oreal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Nestle, and Disney/ESPN to better reach audiences, engage creatives and learn what performs best—consistently driving scale for brand and performance across the largest media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Pinterest, TikTok, and Google. Visit Smartly.io to learn more.

Read More

Advertiser Platforms

Creator Guided Shopping Platform LTK Launches Social Media Advertising for Brands

Business Wire | April 03, 2023

LTK, the global creator marketing platform, today launched social media advertising for brands to further leverage LTK Creator content to drive business outcomes. The new LTK Boost™ advertising solution allows brands to amplify creator collaboration content directly from the creator’s social media handles – leading to higher engagement and conversion. Brand investment in LTK Creators continued to increase last year with brand campaigns growing nearly 50% in the second half of the year. In a recent study, LTK found that Gen Z and Millennials rank influencer content over brand and even user-generated content when making a purchase decision. With LTK Boost, LTK can now run social media ads directly from creator profiles on behalf of brands -which creates a more authentic message, reduces the cost of content production and drives higher engagement and conversion versus traditional social media advertising. In an initial offering, LTK worked with several brands across multiple categories to run LTK Boost ads from creator profiles, which led to an increase in traffic to the brands’ sites, as well as a significant lift in sales with some brands seeing nearly 4X sales growth. All brand results outpaced social media ad industry click through averages by 80%. In addition, creators that participated in the trial saw significant impact with increases in audience reach, outsized gains in new followers and incremental sales and commissions for each creator. Participating creators saw nearly 200K new audience views per post and reached a near 30% increase in retail sales. “Creators are undoubtedly having an impact on consumer shopping behaviors. 92% of Gen Z – a group that will make up the largest consumer segment in a few years - rely on creators to inform their purchases across virtually every category. And, creators are the number one most trusted source to help with purchase decisions for Gen Z and Millennials – beating social media ads and celebrities. That’s why we continue to introduce solutions like LTK Media Boosting to help brands to fully harness the power of creators and reach their customers efficiently and effectively,” said Kristi O’Brien, General Manager of the LTK Brand Platform. LTK Boost is available now in the LTK Brand Platform. For more information, please visit https://company.shopltk.com/en/brands. About LTK As the founder of creator guided shopping, LTK is the trusted and effective platform for creators and their businesses by powering the connection between content and commerce. Founded in 2011 by Amber and Baxter Box, the LTK mission is to empower creators to be as economically successful as possible. World premium lifestyle creators in 150+ countries drive more than $3.6 billion in annual retail sales through their LTK Creator Shop profiles. Today, more than 18 million consumers turn to LTK Creator Shops in the LTK shopping platform each month to find inspiration and instantly shop the styles recommended by their favorite creators. And, more than 6,000 brands partner with LTK to gain access to its global creator network for content that converts against performance-driven, cross-channel KPIs. A three-time honoree on Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Retail Companies, LTK is headquartered in Dallas, TX and currently operates on five continents. To download the LTK shopping app, search for LTK in the App Store or Google Play. For the latest shopping trends and updates from LTK, follow Shop.LTK on Instagram and TikTok.

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