Every brand wants to stand out on social media. You want to be seen. You want to get your message in front of the right people so they’ll become life-long customers. And video marketing with paid social media ads is an endless battle for audience attention.
You may have tried flashy graphics, celebrity spokespeople, and funny storylines with mixed results. It seems like you’re always chasing the next big trend. But the real secret of how to stand out on social media is actually pretty simple — make videos that blend in.
It sounds counterintuitive but hear us out.
Why You Don’t Want to Stand Out On Social Media
On social media you have fractions of a second to capture user attention before they scroll. If your video is obviously an ad, users are likely to flip to the next video before you even get your message out.
Take this ad I’ve been avoiding on my timeline for a week now.
There’s nothing really wrong with this as a commercial. It feels sincere and genuine. It shows off the product and what it can do for the consumer. But from the first sentence, it’s clear it’s an ad. I skip it because I’m not on my phone to watch ads. I’m there to be entertained during the two minutes it takes for the microwave to heat up my lunch.
Compare that to the following video, which I watched without realizing at first that it was an ad, then kept watching because it was funny.
This ad looks exactly like the kind of song-spoof videos that are all over TikTok. It also breaks many of the rules you may have heard about creating commercials and YouTube pre-roll ads. In fact, you don’t even know the name of the brand or what they’re selling until 35-seconds into the video. But you don’t have to know, because the brand has cleverly made a marketing video that blends in. You watch for the silly song, not for the ad.
Both of the links above come from Facebook, but the same ads run on Instagram and could easily show up on TikTok, Snapchat or YouTube Shorts.
How to Make Effective Social Media Video Ads
Ads on social media need to stand out in a different way than commercials on television or skippable YouTube ads. To succeed, these ads need to match the content that users opened social media to see. Here’s how to do it:
- Know Your Audience – The Papaya brand knows they’re selling to environmentally conscious millennials and gen Z, so they picked a song and video style likely to appeal to this audience.
- Watch the Trends – Music and video styles go through trends on social media. You don’t have to jump on every new trending sound, but keep an eye out for broad shifts in the media.
- Entertain, Then Inform – Give your audience a reason to stick around. A catchy song, an entertaining character, or a striking promise all fit the bill.
- Surround with Smart Copy – Use the ad text to reiterate your brand promise and tell the viewer why they need your product. Strong text can mean the difference between a click and a scroll.
Of course, your ad also needs to fit the standard video dimensions for the platform, have great audio, and ideally also include captions. But that’s the basic stuff that makes any video great.
How to Know If Your Ad Is Succeeding
Likes, shares and even follows may make your marketing team feel good, but they don’t necessarily mean your ad is a success. Smart marketers pay attention to more than vanity metrics. Go for the video metrics that actually measure results. What you really want from your ad is conversions — people should be buying, signing up, or reaching out.
Where possible, use Pixels or other tracking tools to see how people are behaving after watching your ad. You might be able to set up a custom landing page or UTM link to make it easy to see where customers are coming from.
Now that you know how to make your brand stand out on social media, the next step is putting that knowledge into action. That’s where IdeaRocket can help. We create 2d animation, 3d animation, whiteboard, motion graphics, mixed media animation and even live action videos for social media, YouTube, CTV and more. Contact us to get started.
