With massive amounts of content competing for incremental moments of our time, it’s easy for an ad to get lost in the shuffle. Incorporating motion has become a great way for marketers to visually separate themselves from the pack. The ability to use mediums like video, motion graphics, and animation has elevated the game like never before, and the results are in.
Views of branded video content increased 99% on YouTube and 258% on Facebook between 2016 and 2017, and they haven’t stopped since. On Twitter, a video tweet is six times more likely to be retweeted than a photo tweet. By 2020, Cisco predicts that 80% of all internet traffic will be video—so the potential market for your video content is huge.
It’s clear that whether it’s video or beyond, motion is crucial to driving engagement with your ads. Let’s look at some examples of why motion’s something to keep top of mind whenever you’re developing a digital marketing campaign.
Improve Your Connection With Your Audience
If a picture is worth a thousand words, adding motion or video must be worth about a million. Motion helps convey ideas and bring concepts to life in ways that are not possible with a static image. It also introduces a sense of emotion and a tone within the content that wasn’t there before for the consumer.
Connecting with your audience’s emotions establishes a link between your brand and your prospect, increasing their interest in what you’re offering. Producing user-generated traffic for a website is a feat in and of itself—but it doesn’t mean much if they don’t stay. Applying motion is a simple way to capture attention and, through emotion, give them a reason to connect.
See how we used video in paid social ads to tell a more compelling story.
Getting—and Holding—Limited Attention
Studies have shown the average person’s attention span is roughly eight seconds. This may seem hard to believe in the abstract, but if you think about the last time you flipped through television channels you’ll probably realize even that may be generous. We need to find better ways to hold people’s attention and keep them from straying.
Adding motion to your creative is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this. Conversely, the average person’s attention span when watching a video is around two minutes, which seems like a lifetime compared to eight seconds. People simply don’t want to comb through a ton of content to find the important parts—they want someone to show them. Video is the perfect solution.
Entice the Consumer
Websites are filled to the brim with all sorts of valuable content, but how does the consumer know what to do when they’re finished taking it all in? This is when the dreaded back button comes into play—consumers don’t always know what the next step is after they’re handed all this information, so they simply leave. Ideally you’re using CTAs already, but upping your game by adding simple motion can make the biggest difference in the world. Don’t overthink it, simple is the key here. Enhancing the consumer’s experience is the point, not hindering it. But when your CTAs aren’t having the effect you desire, sometimes you need to give users a little nudge in the right direction.
Sidestep the Standards
Incorporating motion into digital ad campaigns has become not only a way to make the content more compelling, but also a strategic way to communicate more effectively within social media platforms. Let’s use Facebook’s old “20% rule” as an easy example to prove this point. When you’re only able to use 20% of the ad space to effectively communicate with your target audiences, your campaign objectives become limited. Motion allows us to bypass Facebook’s restrictions on words in our ad content. (Facebook ditched its “20 percent rule,” but still favors static ads with the fewest words.)
Choosing video and GIFs for ads opens the door to weave in as much contextual information as we need. They also give us a one-two punch for our online campaigns. By serving a mixed stream of video and static image ads to the consumer, we’re not just presenting the same thing over and over again, which allows for increased click-through and conversion rates in most marketing campaigns.
A Little Goes a Long Way
One of the most important things your online content has to offer is real sustainable value. In the current media landscape, people want facts more than conjecture, data over opinion. Adding simple motion allows you to distill down complex data into bigger-picture stories and insights that will be more compelling for the consumer. In reality, you may be simply stating all your great value props, but actually seeing them visualized makes a stronger and more memorable impact.
And again, that impact shows in the numbers. Adding motion has been proven to make a front page Google result 53 times more likely, and it’s been shown to double click-through rates when utilised in email campaigns. Motion graphics and video convert more customers, with recent research showing that 71% of marketers say video conversion rates outperform other marketing content.
Use What You Have
When something moves, it catches your eye. It’s true when it’s just someone opening a door in your peripheral vision, and it’s true when it’s a GIF rolling through your newsfeed. And since getting anyone’s attention in today’s crowded media landscape is a very real accomplishment, as marketers we need to use every tool available to us to get it done. Motion drives attention, engagement, and finally sales. Use it to step your game up.
