A look at how a recent video marketing campaign boosted engagement for one of our clients.
Success can be hard-won in the marketing industry. Despite putting in the hard work and due diligence, there are times when a campaign doesn’t go to plan. Sales can be slow to pick up, and it sometimes takes a few iterations to hit on just the right messaging to move the needle. So, when something goes really well, it can be a cause for celebration.
We recently ran an ad campaign for one of our clients that pulled together a number of the things we believe we do best: digital advertising, video work, and messaging. While the campaign was relatively small, we believe it’s an excellent example of how a targeted marketing campaign can yield excellent results—when the messaging is on point.
The Client: Aperture Content Marketing.
Our history with Aperture Content Marketing began a while ago with a custom development project in which we created a backend tool that would help their clients publish content online. However, our marketing work with them began a year and a half ago, when we guided them through a full brand re-launch, including an entirely new site and a complete SEO and content marketing package.
Aperture serves community colleges nationwide by helping them distribute information to prospective students using their multichannel marketing platform. However, because their industry is so niche, and the service they offer is unique and moderately complex, they’ve struggled to spread their message effectively.
Their greatest success has come from industry conferences and speaking events, where they are able to meet with representatives from community colleges and talk about their services directly. We’ve worked with them to design print brochures and banners in the past, but this year they wanted to do something new.
Before their latest conference began, they asked if we could create a 30-second video ad for Facebook, and use it to target individuals within the conference region whose job title might be relevant for their services.
This is well within our wheelhouse, so we said we’d get right on it. But we also liked this campaign for including three other factors which we were sure would lead to success.
3 Factors that made this campaign successful.
1. We had tight parameters for our target audience.
Generally speaking, broad audiences lead to generic advertisements. But for Aperture, the very specific audience they wanted to reach allowed us to narrow in on exactly that demographic. In our case, we were able to target our ad to people who had listed interests or job titles that included keywords such as “College President,” “College Relations Manager,” “Academic Dean,” or “Academic Administration.”
We also restricted our advertisement to specific geographic regions so that it wouldn’t appear for people who were too far away to be attending the conference.
2. We had a specific campaign message.
With only a 30-second window to work with, we knew we had to keep our messaging tight. Essentially, this meant telling Aperture’s story in three beats:
- Establish the difficulty community colleges have in reaching prospective students.
- Show that Aperture offers a means of providing students with reliable information about their education options.
- Offer evidence that shows how effective Aperture is.
By boiling down Aperture’s message into a few key points, we were able to communicate their value proposition in a memorable way.
3. We had a clear mission and purpose to the campaign.
The ultimate goal of our campaign was two-fold. First, to encourage audiences to click through to the Aperture website to read more about the company and their services. And second, to grow awareness of Aperture’s services prior to their conference event, so that attendees would know something about them before they arrived. With such a specific event in mind, we could clearly show whether we had accomplished our mission.
A look at the metrics: How did we do?
Given the tight parameters of our advertisement, we knew not to expect a viral response. Our goal was to attract high-quality leads, who would click through to the website, read more about Aperture’s services, and ultimately speak with Aperture directly at the upcoming conference. While impressions would be useful in growing brand awareness, we were far more interested in through-plays, which would indicate that someone had watched our video to the end. Most importantly, we wanted to see clicks through to the website.
In the end, our geo-targeted campaign, which ran for two weeks, generated 1,158 through-plays, 12,733 impressions, and 40 landing page link clicks, all on a budget of $10/day.
This was a huge win for our client. In a niche market, to have over a thousand industry professionals within a concentrated region watch your full advertisement provided excellent brand exposure. To have another forty click through to our website demonstrated the power and effectiveness of our messaging.
Video advertising is an evergreen resource.
One point that we don’t want to overlook in our triumph over the Facebook campaign is that the video we created for Aperture is one they have been able to use on other landing pages, and is one that can be reused for future conference events. Given how frequently Aperture attends industry conferences, this video campaign is one they can re-create and re-target for every region where they plan to attend.
There is a powerful lesson here for businesses of any size. Creating an effective campaign isn’t necessarily about going big. It is also about focused, targeted messaging to niche demographics.
If you have a niche demographic you would like to reach, contact us. We would be happy to work with you to hone your messaging for a perfectly crafted video campaign.