What to Know About Vertical Short-form Videos

Short-form video content continues to grow rapidly in popularity across platforms, making it a powerful tool for businesses to connect with potential customers. By creating highly engaging videos for your audience, you can connect at a more personal level, communicate the personality and values of your business, and stand out from your competition. Maximize the lead generation impact of each video you create by leveraging the same video creative across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook, and Instagram Reels.

What is a Vertical Short-form Video?

Made popular by TikTok, vertical short-form videos are the latest trend in video marketing that caters to mobile users. Unlike the traditional horizontal/landscape video format that requires users to rotate their phones sideways, vertical videos are easily viewed by mobile users on the go.

Creating an Organic Video Presence

Establishing your organic presence is the best way to start leveraging short-form videos — whether or not you run digital advertising campaigns. Top lead-generating accounts feature both organic and paid content across their profile. 

You don’t need a massive production budget or professional videographers. We see the most success with videos that convey the personality of your business. Short-form video algorithms cater to the interests of the user and are a great opportunity to really lean into your niche. Create a business profile, publish videos, and gain initial followers by showing your business’ unique voice, core values, and differentiators. 

Make your videos accessible to hard-of-hearing users and users watching with the volume muted by including closed captions for every video. While your own captions provide the most accuracy, leveraging the free, in-app captioning tools is an easy first step.

Widen Your Reach with Digital Advertising

Once you have established your organic presence, it is time to push your content in front of your target audience through digital advertising. Short-form videos help build brand and product awareness, influencing users to demonstrate low-funnel behavior like searching for your business or visiting your website to convert. Here are some of the targeting options available for vertical short-form videos:

TikTok Targeting

• Audience: Include or exclude lookalike and custom audiences
• Demographic: Target the genders, ages, locations, and languages most likely to make a conversion with your business.
• Interests and Behaviors: Target users with high levels of interaction with TikTok’s defined interests or recent in-app behaviors.
• Device: TikTok advertising enables you to be highly specific about the devices you are advertising to. Target by internet connection type, operation system, operation system version, device model, device cost, and carrier.

Facebook and Instagram Reels Targeting

• Remarketing: Target previous website visitors to focus your ad spend on users already familiar with your brand and known to be in the market for your products or services. Create a retargeting audience by tracking and retargeting previous visitors using the Facebook Pixel and segmenting into specific campaigns based on user behaviors.

• First-party Data: Leverage your own CRM data to target repeat customers. Create custom audience segments derived from previous content consumption.
• Third-party Data: Layer in third-party data to your targeting strategy to connect with in-market shoppers based on the products or services they exhibited interest in. This level of targeting requires integration with a custom third-party data provider, but it’s worth it for the focused approach to reaching ready-to-buy shoppers.

YouTube Shorts Targeting

• Remarketing – Targeting previous website visitors and visitors who viewed specific pages on your business’s website.
• Custom Intent – Utilizes buying intent keywords and machine learning to create lists of in-market audiences with a greater likelihood of purchasing intent.
• Audience Interests – Utilizes Google’s list of in-market audiences based on product brand and type.

This new placement type is continuing to evolve and dynamic inventory solutions are expected to be available soon.

Next Steps

Are you interested in vertical short-form video advertising but need help getting started? Adpearance is here to help. Get the conversation started by contacting our expert team or request a free digital analysis to see how your current marketing efforts stack up against the competition.