Using Video to Improve Customer Engagement & Conversion

Using Video to Improve Customer Engagement & Conversion Speaker 2: All right. Welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I'm incredibly excited to have one of my favorite people on the podcast, Emery Robbins from BTR Media. Hi, Emery. Speaker 1: Hey, Destaney. So glad to be here. Speaker 2: The last time we were together in person happened to be the Prosper Show, where you put together an incredible presentation around video. Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's been really fun to find something that I'm really passionate about within the advertising space specifically and video has been that and I'm excited to kind of dive in a little bit more today to talk about it. Speaker 2: Video is a fun one because it feels like sponsor brands video is still brand new. It's still being completely underutilized. But in the last few years, we've seen sponsor brands video rollout, which led to sponsor brands video to a store, sponsor brands video top of search, AI video creator, streaming TV, and everything we're going to talk about today, which is even more upper funnel activations using video. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah, the conversion rate really improves when you get to talk about your brand even more, show your product, bring that potential customer into the fold of who you are as a business versus just a static image. So it's really cool. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think the biggest piece that people miss is one just getting confused. They see video as its own ad type, which it is in certain areas, but there's many different, not platforms, it's not ad units, I guess, that you can buy. And depending on where your ad is showing up, it really depends on the type of video you're having created. And I think that is a barrier that is difficult to understand and hard to scale for brands. What are you seeing in that regard? Speaker 1: Yes, definitely. The hard to scale piece. Placements that you want to have a different kind of video set up for, but at the end of the day, getting one high quality video for a product launch or for a brand is kind of hard in and of itself. So seeing brands, hey, we have this one video kind of use it for everything and we just have to run with it where different ad units really I'm the CEO of BTR Media, and I'm here to talk to you about how brands can play a different role in the customer journey. And so brands who are able to use their resources well or use AI video, et cetera, to have different types of videos for different placements, I think are really going to win long-term. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And it's all about, it's about that timing and utilizing your resources, as you mentioned. A quick example, if you're running a sponsor brand's video ad Makeup brush. You should create a video specifically for that search term, makeup brush. On the flip side, if someone types in beauty kit, makeup set, you should create a video that is maybe a little bit more overarching, a little bit more brand focused. And that's just talking about on platform. We can now run a lot of off platform ads directly through even ad console. You can run a streaming TV campaign directly through your ad console. No agency, no minimum. Nothing along those lines. When you start talking that language, I think it's really exciting because it's opening up a big opportunity for those mid-sized brands who maybe haven't been able to access a national media buy or anything along those lines. But the creative is the barrier because now you're playing an ad that's showing up on someone's TV or maybe they're sitting at home on their couch and they're watching The Boys and they're seeing that ad. It's a little bit more disruptive and you really need to adjust your creative for that new audience. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I do think with sponsored TV easily accessible for most brands, people are starting to understand, okay, what kind of video? They're asking the question, at least, does it differ from what my sponsor brand video is or even my sponsor display video is? And I'm like, Yes, and it depends on what product and what's the timing of it. If you're trying to do a campaign before Prime Day, leading into Prime Day, that's an amazing time for a high level branded video. But if you're doing a new product launch, then your video needs to be specific about what your new product is. So there's a lot of good questions being asked. It's how do we scale it and make it happen as a brand? Speaker 2: The scalability is a fun one. We're going to get into that towards the end of this conversation. But you gave a really great example, and I think something that's also making it a little bit more accessible are things like AMC. Because the problem with a media buy that was TV-based was, okay, how do we actually know if it's working? Maybe put a direct QR code and have someone call, things like that. They can be hard to track, but when you layer in things like path to purchase or ad type overlap, we can very clearly see that if someone is exposed with this video ad and then they go click on our sponsor product ad, they have a much higher likelihood to convert. And I think access to that information has been helpful because when people are stuck in this like search mentality, it's very profitability focused. It's very Immediate, driven, click, purchase, done. But when you start incorporating something a little bit more disruptive, like off-platform video, you really need to change your expectations and widen your scope of how long it takes to convert a customer. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And that was one of the big topics that I spoke on or wanted to speak on in my Prosper talk was Amazon has done the heavy lifting, right? They are bringing the demand to the Amazon app, right? I am someone who needs a new makeup brush. I'm going to Amazon. Fast shipping. I can read the reviews. I already have Prime, etc. But now as a brand, if you want to grow and scale long term, we believe at BTR Media, you need to be creating your own demand, which is going more upper funnel. And investing in video to grab those new to brand shoppers and not just rely on a search term, right? We're going higher up the funnel to different audiences to drive that new demand. And then they come to the platform and search your brand name or, you know, specifically the product. Speaker 2: Not to mention how competitive it is when you wait to capture that demand. If you're just sitting there with every 300 other makeup brush that's potentially lower priced than you, potentially a different color, It's competitive. You have to find a way to stand out. And I'm sorry, but a race to the bottom is not the best answer for everyone. But when you go off platform and you cast a line there to catch someone and create your own demand, you're capturing their attention where maybe they're not ready to check out at that moment, but that's fine. You're driving awareness where they're not distracted and directly comparing you to the other 700 makeup brushes on the page. Speaker 1: Exactly. And I love your point about how Video plays so well with other ad types and this is just straight from Amazon Advertising's website. Basically, they came out with these stats saying that if you run two or more video solutions, You can see up to 142% increase in detail page view rate, 84% higher purchase rate. And that is because you had that initial touch base with them. And then they go and search makeup brush, see another video or on the homepage, see a static DSP ad. And they're just getting more and more touch bases with you as a brand. And then when they're ready to check out, They're like, oh yeah, I'm going to buy from this brand because I've seen their ads so much and I'm interested in the product. Speaker 2: That's incredible. I mean, the data is there. We now have access to it. I want to reiterate that it's not just blanket stats given by Amazon. Emery has managed quite a few brands that were actively running this on. And when you're able to layer in the AMC piece and not view things in a silo, that's where people get caught up. Even though they're on DSP campaigns, they view their budgets and their performance in a silo. They say, you know, this line item is performing like X posit. In reality, when we have tools and access to things like AMC, we can paint a much bigger picture. We can layer in branded searches. I know that's something that you speak on really frequently. If someone views your ad, then comes to the platform and types in your brand name, The ad did its job. If it didn't convert, like you have a listing problem that we need to chat about, but we have access to the appropriate data. It just can be a pain to piece it all together. And I think like you've come to specialize in that, but I don't think most agencies are willing to provide that level of depth because it's hard to scale again. Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. We like to report on the numbers, what's going on, but also how did we get there? The why, how can we change this or make a change? But yeah, brand metrics is a great way to look at branded searches. Search query report is another one that I look at often if I'm working with a brand and they're like, oh, we were down last month or we're up last month. It's like, okay, did we have a big drop off in branded search or did we You know, not win a certain keyword as aggressively as we did, you know, the prior month. So those are things that we like to look at. It's not just, you know, punching in an ACoS target and running with it. It's a lot more detailed than that. And when we talk about going upper funnel with online video or sponsored TV, We are setting the tone around this is a long term investment for your brand. This is not a quick fix. You know, you're going to spend X amount on online video and you're going to see an X amount of sales, right? This is a slow burn. You are getting people interested in your brand. If you're interested in the product and then when that deal season hits or prime day hits or that new product is launched, they're already familiar with your brand and that helps with your branded search and your return on ad spend on the platform. You can't just look at it in a silo, which is I think what Destaney, you're saying with the path to purchase is like looking at it And I'm here to talk to you about how you can help with other ad types and not just looking at it in a silo. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And considering customer psychology. That's the piece that everyone in our space who got started off or started in search and has struggled to move to display has that issue. Now, on the flip side, everyone who started on brand marketing and moves to performance marketing, I think is like, holy crap, you have access to all of this information. But you can often become too reliant or overly reliant on the data. And sometimes you need to zoom out and just understand the customer journey. You know, we all know the path to purchase is not linear. How many times have I been walking through a retail store and then pulled up a listing online to look at the reviews before buying a product? Product discovery can happen in a retail store, but it also happens on TikTok. And then I transfer over to another platform. And when you start to understand that, what we're really paying for is attention and education. Awareness is the top of the funnel for a reason, but nowadays it's so much more seamless what that handoff can look like. I mean, something I think is really cool and is really a small feature is We mentioned it earlier, but we have AMC audience opportunity now. That's crazy. We can say, hey, this person viewed my streaming TV ad and then typed in this keyword. I want to pay more to show them an ad. And being able to connect the dots, like that's incredible. We're seeing this convergence of performance and brand marketing because we have so much access to data. Now, that being said, again, we can be way too overly reliant on it. There's no way you can perfectly piece together everything happening, especially with some of the AI things going on. It's exciting when you can combine both like we do the analytics side, but also just psychology and audience targeting. Speaker 1: Right. And historically, if you wanted to run a video ad or even just like a billboard, like you had zero control, like who's driving by that highway, right? Or who's driving by that billboard on the highway or who's watching This TV channel, like you have no control over that, but the audiences that Amazon provides to us for online video are so specific. And I just want to read a couple, um, for makeup brush, since that's kind of what we're the examples. So there's like lifestyle in market, new to category and interest. Like for example, a lifestyle is budget shoppers of cosmetic and beauty, right? If you have them, super premium product, maybe that's not the audience for you. But if you are priced competitively, that's an amazing lifestyle audience. Or there are also new to category audiences, makeup Product purchases new to category, right? Like you're not having to do this crazy guesswork and just put this ad up somewhere and hope for the best, right? Amazon's data gives us access to the right audiences that make it a little bit more helpful when you're targeting who you're trying to go after. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And now imagine being able to customize a creative for each of those audiences. Maybe you do have a premium product and a budget friendly product. Create a video for both. Target both of them in a segmented fashion. Follow up with a separate retargeting ad. Maybe for your budget friendly, you go really heavy on your deal days and you retarget everyone who's aware of your product, but hasn't purchased. If you're a little bit more premium, maybe it's a good opportunity to upsell or cross sale. The combination of granular audience targeting and creative is incredibly, incredibly powerful. But back to our original point, it's hard to scale operationally. Now, I'm a huge believer that the next 12 to 24 months, no brand is going to have an excuse not to be able to scale this out. Video is a bit of a hurdle, but just some of the things that we have been doing with AI in-house to iterate on general brand guidelines to fit different policies and different platforms is insane. Creative teams are going to be completely reworked and re-looked at, and I'm pretty confident we'll get to the point where small tweaks in demographics, maybe showcasing an ad with a cat versus a dog based on someone's household, It's going to be really scary, but really, really powerful because we're going to have the ability to perfectly align an audience with a dynamic creative and brands need to lean into that now. Speaker 1: Yes, I would get the dog ad, you would get the cat ad. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: I'm curious, what kind of brands should be thinking about going upper funnel and building that awareness through video? Like what kind of brand should really be considering this? Speaker 2: I think there's two things that immediately stand out in mind for me. One, brands that have the bottom of the funnel covered. And I say that because there's multiple times where I see a large agency convince someone to go super heavy on DSP and they're serving me this crazy awareness ad on my own app. And then I go and look at their search terms and they have no search coverage. So I would say, you know, definitely start with the fundamentals, which is making sure you have fantastic keyword targeting, product targeting, sponsor brand video ads, and then working your way up, not doing the reverse. If you start at the top, don't have your bottom covered, you're going to hemorrhage money. The second thing I would say, and then I'll pass it off to you, is brand builders. Like truly, are you building a brand or are you wanting to sell a commodity or something that is just your only competitive advantage as a price point? If that's your only competitive advantage and you don't know how to convey that to customers, then brand building is not for you. But if you know who your audience is, you are solving an innovative problem and you have the budget, which I'll let you talk about, then that's where I think brand building and video is really powerful. But you deal with some of the more day-to-day specifics. What are you seeing in terms of budget and spend and things like that? Speaker 1: Yes, budget is definitely a part of the conversation. So I would say now take this with a grain of salt because I do think I don't want to exclude brands from testing this if they're really interested. But I would say Overall, you need to have leadership buy-in for upper funnel strategies. It needs to be clearly communicated, whether you are the director of e-commerce or marketing to the VP of marketing or even the CEO, depending on how your company is structured, that this is a upper funnel brand awareness tactic. We are not going to see Immediate row as like you get to see you see. However, we have data to support the effectiveness of this, which is video completion rate, branded searches, that detail page view rate, conversion, all of that, and then the conversion rate when all of these ads are mixed together, like the path to conversion. You have to have upper management buy-in, and then for the budget piece, We've seen people run as little as 15, 20K for an initial online video budget. However, we've seen a lot of success between the 40 and 60K mark because you're actually giving it time to run. And I would say the timing of this is important, right? Think about, is it a new product we're launching or a new category? And then also, Kind of running it, backing up to a deal period is really wise as well because that helps with, okay, I just saw this ad and I've been retargeted and et cetera. And now it's, oh, it's a coupon or it's on deal. It's really helpful for that as well. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think that's really important. A lot of people kind of, again, forget the audience size there and who they're trying to target. And that's why it's so incredibly important to have the other pieces of the puzzle in place. Again, if your only advantage is price, If you're serving someone a video ad, are you really going to be able to showcase why your product is that much better on just price? No. But if you have something innovative or if you have a unique story or something slightly more competitive that you can convey in a video ad, then it becomes really important because then it ties back to the rest of the pieces of the puzzle. Speaker 1: Right. And that video ad needs to do a lot. It needs to evoke emotion. They need to educate, but not over-educate, inspire them with your brand and who you are. And then you have to really grab their attention. It is so important to get them to be interested in your product within the first like three seconds, which is hard to do. Speaker 2: It is. And again, I alluded to this earlier, AI is opening a lot of capabilities. It's not quite there yet, but the direction I see Amazon going is opening up an opportunity for more people to leverage video assets and UGC and connect it with the audience. We know they have a bid on TikTok. That's a whole nother video and a whole nother conversation could be incredibly disruptive and incredibly dangerous to a lot of brands. But you see the roadmap. You can run Sponsored TV directly in Ad Console, which is incredible in itself. You have access to all these networks. They're making a ton of acquisitions. The Thursday Night Football, the WNBA, all of these partnerships are just increasing their advertising bandwidth. Which is a huge opportunity because it does lower CPMs when you have more inventory to bid on, but it also increases alignment. We have some products that I know would do absolutely incredible showcase on the WNBA. And as targeting kind of gets more in line and more strategic, we can do a lot with Maybe not right now, but we can get very visionary on how we can align those creatives with a certain audience with the level of control that we have. A lot of people just aren't aware of the control because again, they're used to those mass national media buys or the traditional kind of branded campaigns. When you can align both of those, it gets really powerful. Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be very cool to have an ad on the WNBA. I would be all over that. Speaker 2: There's a lot of opportunity there. I'm excited because even, you know, we've never had in-house creative capabilities, but with what I'm seeing on the AI front, it's going to empower us to be able to work with brand assets much quicker and go to market much, much quicker, which is a big opportunity. I think you've said opportunity 700 times because like trying to convey how powerful this is to people. I'm like, please test it now. Speaker 1: Yes. So if you're a brand and you're thinking about this and you're not ready yet, this year focus on how do I make sure my PPC and DSP is completely optimized. So then in 2026, You can run some awesome upper funnel awareness campaign and you'll have your other ducks in a row to make sure that people are seeing your product. If, you know, a week later, I'm actually now interested in buying that makeup brush. Your product is going to show up. That is so key and I wanted to kind of double down on that because I agree like I see an ad and then I go and search it and I can't find it because I like forgot the brand name or whatever it is and it's so important to have like that full funnel optimization ready to go when you invest 30 to 50k on online video. Speaker 2: And if you don't think you're there yet, we can also help with all of those areas of the business and making sure you have the foundation in place. I mean, there's many times where I've had brands reach out wanting to test a video opportunity or something crazy up a funnel. And I'm like, you're not even covering your main keywords. I don't even see a headline ad running. Like let's start there and then work our way up because it is confusing. Customers shop in many different ways and we have to account for all of those touch points when looking at this strategy. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely need a partner who knows what's up and is in the weeds too. Speaker 2: I love it. Well, we do plan on sharing this presentation you put together because it's incredible. You and Rob both, and we'll give a shout out to Rob and the VideoFresh team below. We want to share it with everyone, but more than anything, thank you for hopping on. I know you're obviously an expert in this topic. I've seen it through and through. We also have a lot of brand testimonies and case studies on the work you're doing in this regard. So I thought it was an amazing time to highlight that and thank you for taking the time to share with everyone else. Speaker 1: For sure. It's always so fun getting to talk shop with you, Destaney.