Video Ads

The Key to Growth-Driven Social Media Advertising

Creative

Creative is more important than ever. Good creative focuses on the customer and how a product benefits them, not on the brand and product features.

Did you know that the most effective way to find new winning ads is to test ad creative in bulk? 

You can effectively test, identify, and scale winning ads to meet your goals using Primer’s Outlier Method for Creative Testing.

Here’s how to make sure you’re producing enough ad creative:

• Determine how much ad creative you need. At Primer, we recommend a minimum of 50 ad tests per every $25,000 in ad spending to ensure you’re launching enough new ads to convert consistently.
• Create your testing roadmap. At Primer we launch new tests every two weeks, alternating between a “big idea” (something that’s never been tried before) and an iteration on a previous winning ad. This cadence helps keep your account fresh with new ad creative to test. Plan your tests out two months in advance. This is your testing roadmap.
• Write creative briefs. Dedicating time to developing, reviewing, and revising creative briefs will set you up to have the most effective structure for your ads possible. Essentially, creative briefs help your team align and rapidly produce new creative around defined parameters. Instead of using one creative brief template for every ad, you should create a few different brief templates that reflect the various formats an ad could take. Some key elements to include in your brief are the type of deliverable and its intent (“the ask”), audience, parameters, conversion strategy, message and benefit, and the brand and its voice.
  • “Big idea” briefs help you test a new concept, theme, audience, value proposition, product, or benefit for ad campaigns. An “iteration brief” takes a winning ad from the big idea ad set and creates several variations on that ad, changing only one or two elements at a time such as a CTA, headline, or design element
  • You don’t have to start from scratch. Use our creative brief templates that are proven to convert.
  • Use the creative faucet method to get started on the process.
• Streamline the design and review process. Communicate your brand dos and don’ts with your designer. When you choose Primer as your ad development and testing partner, our design professionals take time to understand your brand and provide specialized support based on the kind of creative you need.
• Repeat the process. To keep your creative pipeline full, it’s important to repeat this process on a consistent, monthly schedule.

A Strong Call to Action (CTA)

Ensure your audience has some clear action to take at the end of the ad.

On platforms like TikTok, the CTA will likely be subtle and blend in with the native style of the platform. Regardless of the social channel where you place your ad, a CTA should feel organic to the platform and tell the audience what to do next.

The most effective CTAs connect the user to a landing page tailored to the user’s ad experience.

Here are a few examples of CTAs Primer has developed that are proven to convert:

Native style

These incorporate the elements used on a specific platform, like text and colors, trending sounds and music, and a video format consistent with other users who post on the platform.

An example would be ending your video ad by showing a user searching Google for a solution to their problem and ending with a CTA that is your search term.

UGC style

This could include a voiceover from a user or on-screen text, mimicking a “user-generated content” style that feels organic to the platform.

For example, end your video ad with a voiceover of a user saying, “Don’t waste any more time. Give it a try.”

Product-focused

This style of CTA drives home a product-focused message for your audience, such as, “Discover [product] just for you.”

Want more examples of CTAs proven to convert? Check out these 25 CTA ad templates we developed just for you.

Video Ad Strategy

Creating successful video ads requires strategy and great creative.

When it comes to strategy, testing is critical. If you aren’t testing, you aren’t optimizing your ad and the strategy surrounding it for your audience.

At Primer, we achieve this using our unique “Outlier Method,” a proven strategy for high-volume ad testing in order to rapidly identify high-performing video ads, scale and iterate more ads to boost.

Creating your video ads in ways that are modular can allow you to test multiple options with less lift instead of creating brand-new ads.

Using the Outlier Method, you can test and optimize every element of your ads, including copy, creative, landing pages, and audiences.

First, you launch a new big idea ad set – including 3-10 visuals combined with different copy, headline, and landing page combinations, for a total of 50 ads per $25,000 in ad spend).

Pause underperforming ads with higher CPAs than average – pause 50% within 48 hours of launching an ad set and 75% within 72 hours.

Scale “Outliers” by adding budget and making iterations – remaining video ads that perform 2-3x better than the rest in their campaign are your “Outliers.” They should have better performance than your account average by at least 10%. Add budget to these ads. Once you have 1 to 4 ads that either beat the previous period’s average CPA or beat your goal CPA, pause the rest.

Iterate new video ads based on your “Outliers” – repeat the process and use your best-performing iterations and to iterate even more winning video ads. Complete this process over a two week period, and repeat twice per month if budget allows.

You can use this strategy to guide your audience’s journey and target them at different stages of the sales funnel.

For example, consider the experience of Proov, a fertility diagnostics provider.

Proov learned through ad testing that they could use different video ads to tell a story to the customer over time.

First, their audience is given an ad that introduces the product as a solution, then they are retargeted to see a “how it works” focused ad, then retargeted again with a founder video.

With each stage, the target customer is pulled deeper into the brand’s story.

Get a Partner
Who Gets Growth

Building sustainable growth for your organization requires high-volume ad testing, so you can identify winning ads, target what works, and use those elements to generate a steady stream of top-performing ads for maximum conversions.

Ad testing at scale requires a reliable set of processes, organizational buy-in, and a substantial volume of ad creative. At Primer, we run thousands of ad tests each month, which has allowed us to perfect the elements of the growth-driven video ad.

We understand what grabs users’ attention in the paid-social landscape, keeps it until the end of the video, and drives them to convert.

Generating the ad volume you need to effectively test and optimize growth can take time and resources that may be more effectively applied elsewhere in your organization. That’s where Primer comes in.

We’re here to help you fill the creative pipeline and position ad testing as a viable strategy within your organization. We’d love to work with you to unlock hypergrowth, and we can partner with you in whatever way best suits your needs.

Agency partner // We’ll handle the creative strategy, design, production, reporting, and media buying. You can just sit back and watch the wins roll in. Book a consultation >>

On-Demand // Get ads that convert in as little as 2 to 4 business days through our On-Demand platform.
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Execution is the hardest part of growth marketing. At Primer, we’re here to help you build video ads that convert.