How To Prevent Your Audience From Skipping Your Video Ads
"5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Skip Ad!"
*a sense of relief comes over viewers when they have this option to select*
Face it: despite being in the marketing industry, you, too, are tired of ads and couldn’t wait to skip as soon as the 5 seconds countdown was over.
2021 has turned out to be the game-changer for video content. Today, consumers are watching more videos than ever, so if, as a business, you fail to capture their attention within a few seconds, it’s game over for you.
Platforms like YouTube give businesses an advantage to run ads, so it becomes easy for them to reach their target audience. However, before watching a video, viewers hope that they don’t come across any ads. So, if you have a chance to display your ads to your potential audience, you need to be more vigilant with your approach.
The video should be part of your marketing strategy. Moreover, to persuade people to watch your entire ad, you need to be more engaging and captivating.
Even though we are marketers, we are likely to concede that online advertising is too much to take. It is exasperating and intrusive, and with unrelated content, it just is a waste of time.
Well, if this is how most marketers think, we can only imagine how others perceive online advertisements.
So, what should be done to engage viewers hate online ads and pursue them to watch the video ads? In short, how to get viewers to stop skipping video ads?
We have beefed up top tips to prevent the target audience from skipping your videos ads. Let’s cover them one by one.
Tips to Prevent your Audience from Skipping your Video Ads
Consumers feel irritated, interrupted, and haunted by clingy and unprofessional digital ads. However, they don't mind watching the good ones. So, as a marketer, if you don’t want your target viewers to skip your ads, you need to make them feel excited.
1. Eye Catching
Most marketers get anxious hearing this term. No matter how easy it sounds, it is a tricky job to do. Remember the earlier times, where we used to sit at the edge of our seats, waiting for the next episode of The Big Bang Theory to air, even if with frequent commercials.
Too many companies still send out traditional TV commercials and expect the same results online. Unfortunately, unlike typical television advertising, frequently delivering a 30-second tale is not suitable for your audience, even if this is what suits television advertising. So, when we talk about desktop or mobile screens, things take a new turn.
Well, do we have the same level of patience today?
Not at all! With mobility being the top priority, viewers today are the least patient to even continue to watch the video they desire. So, when it comes to online video commercials, things get tougher. Your video should be visually enticing to the audience, especially in the first few seconds so that they do not click on skip.
2. Understanding Audience
No matter which type of content you are producing, understanding your audience is always the first priority. Once you know what your audience likes, you are ready to deliver relevant and excellent content.
3. Be Relatable
With cookies and first-party data, you know what your audience is looking for, so you must leverage that data in creating and producing ads that deliver solutions.
4. Storytelling
The best way to not let your target skip ads is by narrating the story. The smart way to do this is to address their concerns, helping them get rid of their dilemma. Make sure your story is not too complicated or hard to follow, and keep it concise with a constructive approach.
5. Speak the Right Visual Language
Visual language turns out to influence the masses – as it sets the tone to whether people will tune in or out on your video ads. Consider the most recent commercial you enjoyed.
Did that bring a smile to your face? Did your eyes well up with tears? Setting the proper tone and visual creative mix in the first five seconds is crucial to capturing the audience's attention.
Apart from this, your video content should not be intrusive or too hard to look at, and for this, you need to have the right understanding of colors, frame rate, contrast, and brightness.
When you provide your viewers with a unique experience, they are more likely to engage with your message and brand. Your company is distinct. The only way to get that message through to your audience is to use unique material like motion graphics.
6. Ensure Creativity and Intelligence
You need to level up when it comes to your audience. Creativity and intelligence should work together. For marketers, who have been dumbing things down, it's time to recheck your buyer personas and concentrate on how they like to be approached.
7. Create Professional Ads
Consumer expectations are likely to be greater than you realize. Conflict, clutter, and a lack of consistency with the ad's placement are all factors that make video ads appear obtrusive. Some of those factors are beyond your control, but you can influence a lot of them through smart design and structure.
8. Work for Leads, but Don’t Mislead
Consumers will not convert into leads if you lure them in with anything that seems hyper-relevant to what they're reading or seeing, but isn't. Such content will only irritate them. Nobody likes to be lied to, especially not the audience you're trying to win the trust of to make your brand appear more credible.
Don't put your brand's credibility on the line just for some views. Make sure your titles only pose questions your content is actually capable of answering.
9. Personalize to Entice
No one likes when you doubt their intelligence, which is why personalization should be your priority for your viewers.
How would you like it if as a young and healthy professional who regularly monitors everything they eat, you were constantly being shown advertisements for joint pain? These ads would feel irritating and irrelevant, right?
By restricting frequency, you can ensure that your advertisements are arriving on sites and locations where the correct audience is most likely to be watching videos – and that they aren't seeing them hundreds of times each day.
Make sure the ad's message and material are relevant to them, and you'll have a greater chance of getting your ad seen. Let’s take a look at this cosmetic surgery video, tailored in a way that the viewer can relate.
Plan, purchase and optimize your campaign utilizing all essential data available on a single platform. Time, day, weather, language, and location can all trigger personalized data.
10. Use Humor as a Key Element
Funny video ads are typically linked to greater view-through rates and do an excellent job of raising brand recognition. Consider how many times you've watched a humorous video and felt compelled to share it with as many people as possible.
11. Make it Engaging
Advertising must interact with viewers to teach them what the ethos of their brand is and why they should pay attention, rather than merely selling features and functionality. This doesn't have to be lengthy or complicated; in fact, the shorter the better.
12. Get the Creative Dice Rolling
While a high-resolution film with all-things-shiny is vital, it's just as important to know what your consumers care about the most. They're seeking a genuine experience and want to hear about something that matters to them.
In addition, making your ad about your customers is the greatest approach to get them interested in it. It's easy to understand your target market, its preferences, and dislikes, thanks to a variety of tools and data at your disposal.
While your creative skills may prompt you to attempt something unique, as the saying goes, advertising that doesn't sound like ads are likely to upset customers. Many customers dislike having to use their minds to figure out whether a video is an advertisement or something else.
13. Keep your Audience Curious
If you introduce your business too early in your advertisement, it may come out as aggressive and irritating. And the last thing you want is for this to happen. Here’s an example of how you can create a persuasive and non-clingy ad that will attract your audience.
14. Avoid Being Perky
It was observed by several marketers that seeing too many cheerful, often artificially pleasant individuals in the opening few seconds of an advertisement is irritating. Artifice takes away from your credibility too as it is difficult to trust people who are clearly being fake-nice. This gets especially annoying when the viewer is not in a good mood. This has such an impact on the user that they are more likely to ignore YouTube advertising when on the go.
15. Get Handy with Engage-to-Skip
You may not always have an option in terms of creativity, and the customer may accept a piece of material that you aren't convinced is up to par. Make the information skippable in this scenario, rather than forcing it down the consumers' throats.
Before the customer may skip away from the content, engage-to-skip units need interaction from the consumer, which is frequently in the form of a survey question. While your ad may not get fully viewed, you do gain vital information about your customer that you can use to better customize future campaigns and messages.
The truth is, the audience will skip, and only a few of them will watch. So, why not focus on the skippers too?! And survey videos are the best way to do so. You can add a short form, consisting of 2 to 3 questions right after the viewer skips the ad. This will help you gain the right feedback.
Wrapping Up
Today, consumers have all the power. Thus, you need to be more persuasive yet subtle to meet your end goals.
The simplest way to overcome the challenge is to recognize it and quit avoiding it. Recognize that there is a reason why people skip video advertising. Keeping this in mind, you'll naturally strive to create content that is both worthy of their time and beneficial to your brand.
Video marketing is here to stay. So, you need to get onboard on creating content that will entice your audience, because your competitors are waiting like vultures to grab your audience with power-packed video content strategies.