VidMob Uncovers the Secrets to Creating Effective Videos for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Lead Generation

Editor's Note: This guest post was co-authored by Sarah Graham, Research Strategist at VidMob.

To shed light the mysteries of effective video, VidMob analyzed more than 19,000 videos that delivered 425 million impressions on LinkedIn from 2019 and 2020. Using Creative Intelligence — VidMob’s AI technology — the company identified creative attributes and performance metrics. VidMob then analyzed the creative frame-by-frame to understand the specific creative elements that are over- or under-performing against primary performance metrics.

^{Watch the recent webinar on Successful Content Marketing, which LinkedIn leveraged VidMob’s data to illustrate what creative strategies work best for campaigns aimed at three advertising objectives: Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership, and Lead Generation.}

The VidMob analysis helped answer some of advertisers’ toughest and frequent questions:

• How long should content be?
• When should branding be introduced?
• What words to use in a call to action? 

Below are some of the answers the analysis found for brand awareness, thought leadership, and lead generation videos.  

How to Build Your LinkedIn Content Strategy Based on Your Advertising Goals

Brand Awareness

Building brand awareness is all about staying relevant to consumers by communicating brand values, culture, or background. While lower funnel content can reach a plateau in sales lift, brand building content can lead to long-term unyielding growth. So what creative elements can drive upper funnel success, according to VidMob’s analysis?

1. Personalizing human presence. A smile or a face led to a 13% lift in Video View Rate compared to the average. At the same time, more generic visuals of human presence, like crowds or an audience, dropped View Rate.
2. Incorporating aspirational messaging. Use of words like “succeed,” “future,” and “transformation” led to a 31% lift in View Rate.
3. Introducing branding later. We saw a 40% lift in Completion Rate when branding appeared in the second half of the video.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership creative can position a brand as the subject matter expert, pique interest, and elicit reactions. Want your video to break through? Consider these creative guidelines for your next Thought Leadership campaign:

1. Introducing branding in the first two seconds. As opposed to brand building content, in thought leadership content, brand introduction in the first two seconds led to a 16% lift in Engagement Rate.
2. Creating short GIF-style content. Thought leadership content usually leads to another location such as a blog post or interview, so GIF-style creative less than five seconds increased Engagement Rate by 52%.
3. Getting buzzy. Buzz words like “workflow” and “productivity” led to a 31% lift in Engagement Rate.

Lead Generation

Lead Generation content is often solution-specific, builds a pipeline, and encourages consumers towards an end goal. Creative elements should work to convince consumers to take the next step. Some that are effective at achieving this include:

1. Introducing branding early (and at the top). Similar to thought leadership, there was 58% lift in Company Page CTR when branding was introduced in the first two seconds, and a 50% lift in CTR when logos were introduced in the top third of the screen as opposed to the middle or bottom of the screen.
2. Prioritizing action-oriented CTAs (“start,” “make,” “discover”) over human presence. When action-oriented words appear on screen as opposed to a human presence, the CTR was 20% higher on average. At this point, consumers hopefully know and trust your brand and these action words help move someone to further action.
3. Leveraging quick scene changes. Incorporating four or more scene changes within the first three seconds of a video led to a 19% increase in CTR.

The insights from VidMob’s analysis represent a foundation for brands to start with, but the best results require constantly asking brand-specific questions and answering them through testing and analysis of creative data. With a full-funnel strategy and a willingness to iterate creative tests, brands can finally optimize their assets to unlock performance gains.

As a LinkedIn Marketing Partner for Content & Creative, VidMob works directly with clients to make video assets and analyze their advertising efforts based on their specific campaign objectives and help them understand the “why” behind their creative performance.

If you’d like a preview of how VidMob’s Creative Intelligence tool can advance your advertising efforts and help improve your creative performance, email LMSContentPartners@linkedin.com or see more detail on the LinkedIn Marketing Partners here.

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