How Marketers Are Approaching Digital Video: Video for Direct Response

To find success in video, marketers must stay ahead of the rapid pace of innovation in the industry — and recently, major digital destinations like YouTube and Facebook have invested in sophisticated new ad products and tools to help direct response marketers engage their audiences through video.
Pixability commissioned a survey to take the pulse of the digital video industry, and understand how marketers were approaching video. In particular, we sought to understand if marketers saw video purely as a method of driving awareness, or as a way to engage their audience throughout the buyer’s journey.
While we found that marketers overwhelmingly agree that digital video is a highly effective way of driving awareness and branding, a significant number of marketers recognize that video can make an impact across the entire consumer journey. This latter set of marketers has increasingly invested in developing more sophisticated direct response strategies around video.

What’s stopping many marketers from utilizing video for direct response? We found that marketers’ chief concerns with direct response lie in proving its effectiveness, followed by questions of measurement. Scalability is also seen as a problem for direct response campaigns. However, the primary video destinations for modern digital audiences, such as YouTube and Facebook, are increasingly rolling out new solutions to drive and measure conversions and purchases, including in-store visit tracking and brand lift analysis, while third party technology providers can offer transparent measurement of brand-specific KPIs and deep-funnel analysis as well.

Looking to test out a direct response strategy? Pixability recommends experimenting with sophisticated direct response advertising products, including TrueView for Shopping and TrueView for Action on YouTube, as well as Carousel, Collections, Canvas ads on Facebook/Instagram, to engage consumers when they’re looking to make purchase decisions.
Need help navigating the challenges of the rapidly-evolving digital video landscape? Let’s connect to discuss how Pixability can help you maximize the impact of your video advertising.