You’d like to give more visibility to your video projects (films, web-series, educational contents, e-learning …) to develop your audience, and why not monetizing your contents ? In this blog, we usually deal with marketing and promotional tips to help you in this way,  and in most of the cases without spending money !

But sometimes, to speed things up, paid solutions can be efficient. Today let’s talk about advertising !

Advertising is a crucial moment when you are promoting your video projects :

• Which video to choose?
• At what time should I post it?
• Facebook or another platform?

are examples of questions you can typically ask to yourself. It is true that this environment is complicated to master because it involves knowing pretty well its audience (theoretically).

With the arrival of many pay-as-you-go tools, really easy to use, advertising on Facebook is becoming almost as intuitive as switching on your computer.

Of course, we tend to rely a lot on these tools since they are (almost) free and allow us to acquire a strong package of data about our fans. And this trend is definitely not about to stop with the sensational entrance of Facebook Audience Insights on the market.

 

A tool to go further

Facebook Ads Manager already allows you to globally understand your target and to establish relevant segments to properly place your video products. But it is now possible to go further in your targeting through the tab “Audience Insights”. Because it is not always easy to see clearly among the limbo of the almost 2 billion of Facebook users ! 

Your content may be perfectly suited but still not make your campaign a success because of subtle lack of information about your users.

Thanks to this new Facebook feature, you can now build ultra-targeted campaigns, by going to fathom the information that users fill throughout their lives on Facebook :

• General information available on Facebook: age, gender, relationship status, current employment, geographical area, pages they liked …
• Information coming from websites with a connection “Sign in with Facebook”. For example, the user’s home price or the purchase behavior (for now, it’s only available in the US).

You will be able to analyze the criteria of the population following you on Facebook (wheeee no scoop until there), your competitors’ fans (convenient if you are neck-and-neck with other broadcasters / producers of content in VOD, SVOD …), but above all, a market that would be potentially interesting for you.

 

But what are we talking about ?

First, you need to access to your ads manager and to go to this tab :

 

Illustration: Netflix’ audience

To understand some features in details, there is nothing better than an illustrated example !

Let’s imagine that we want to analyze the audience of our favorite streaming video platform Netflix within the French territory

So here we go 😉

 

AGE AND GENDER

* 1 = between 4000 and 4500 people who interact with Netflix, per month and only on Facebook.

* 2 = The majority of these users are male fans with 56%.

* 3 = Netflix’s most affluent population is 18/24 years old (but closely followed by the 25/34 years old).

RELATIONSHIP STATUS & EDUCATION

 

* 4 = We note that among Netflix’ fans, there are more single people than the French average.

* 5 = There are hardly more people with a university formation.

 

JOB TITLE

Here, we can see that the most active sectors among these users are the arts / entertainment / sports / media, production and sales ones. These indications can guide us on the type of vocabulary to adopt in our strategy.

 

BEHAVIOR

These graphs show that users are quite sensitive about the advertisements since they like and click on the Netflix’ publications, which are composed of trailers, video clips, and so on. This is an interesting point to truly understand how your crowd reacts to your advertising content.

 

DEVICES

 

This section provides crucial information on what kind of content should be displayed depending on the device. A mobile advertising will, of course, be different from what’s seen on a computer. Especially since by 2020, we must keep in mind that more than 80% of the Internet traffic will be composed of videos, a clear thought about what’s relevant to post is therefore essential. Going back to our statistics, we can spot that here Netflix’ fans visit this page more often on mobile, thanks again to the short format of the videos used.

 

PAGES

So there,  we clearly have a gold mine of information about the deepest interests of Netflix’ users.

We can see some categories emerging :

• Youtubers and other influencers
• Mobile games
• Food

 

 

What lessons should we learn from it ?

If we would want to reach this audience dedicated to Netflix, we should adjust our publications with a more focused-centered approach to the topics covered by the popular Youtubers. Or trying to highlight thematics or video in our catalogue related to cooking and/or sports. This would allow us to federate a larger community through targeted advertisements that did not fit our criteria in the first place.

Concretely, the analysis performed by Facebook Audience Insights allows us to renew the way we think about the advertisement, by keeping an eye on what is working on the competitors’ side and thus expand the way you are targeting. Don’t hesitate to take your cue from what is working somewhere else, to get lessons from it and to improve your engagement strategy. Benchmarking your competitors will allow you to gain time by understanding quickly behavior of their fans in order to activate the right levers.

 

Some good practices for an effective advertising :

• Bring value to your audience (with promotional codes for your videos or exclusive content)
• Think “buzz” by focusing on feelings, how to create reactions, emotions, to generate shares …
• Lure people on your ads with easily decipherable contents and colorful visuals (but not too much)

 

The other side of the coin

However, this tools remains associated with the advertising world and only sticks to Facebook’s (or Instagram’s) perimeter. Basically:  You will only be able to benefit from it if you run a Facebook advertising campaign !

Other dark sides of advertising practice can be listed here :

– Ads can be intrusive and polluting

– There is a general mistrust for advertising

– There is sometimes a gap between the actual visits and the “false” clicks due to the lag times of the interface (yes, you know that moment when you click everywhere, hoping it will speed things up, in vain), resulting in unnecessary (CPC) payments.

– The regular updates in Facebook design interface, which do not immediately consider the responsive side of our ads (and so, we pay for it …).

– A low click-through rate (and therefore a pretty bad conversion, although this figure is difficult to evaluate), compared to what’s been invested in the different campaigns. On average, the click-through rate (CTR) is around 1%, and for the entertainment sector 0.439%.

– And finally, Facebook keeps all the data they have on your audience and don’t give you much reusable information outside of a Facebook campaign.

 

How to solve it ?

More and more Big Data solutions are emerging and becoming accessible. They allow us to see clearer within our target audience and fulfill the needs of our customers.

Coupled with OKAST, the FlameFy solution offers many tools to give you a better understanding of your audience. Especially :

• We collect data from multiple platforms and social networks (less effort for you) to analyze your audience
• We qualify your audience based on their level of interest in your video contents
• We identify influencers on the topic you are dealing with
• We analyze competing contents to help you increase your visibility against them

>> These actions allow us to implement specific and automated actions with your potential audience to generate engagement and therefore more views on your videos (or more subscribers). The most beautiful in all that: THIS IS NOT ADVERTISING so you can boost your sales thanks to a conversion rate between 30 and 60% (not bad eh ?).

Most important thing for us: helping you to know the essence of your audience to offer them a video offer adapted to their interest !

You can have a look to our solutions and references here :

FlameFy – It’s time to give your contents the VERY audience they deserve !

OKAST – Launch smart video services, in one click !