If you’ve been following PCG Digital for the last few years, you know we’ve been preaching the importance of short-form, mobile-first video content. From TikTok to YouTube Shorts to Meta Reels, the endless feed of short-form vertical video has prevailed as one of the main ways we consume content on social media. According to Meta, more than half the time spent on Facebook and Instagram is spent watching videos!
Video is the most effective way to improve brand awareness on social media, which is why it’s important to align your organic content strategy with your paid advertising strategy. When developing Meta campaigns for our clients, we encourage brands across industries, but especially in the automotive space, to implement Reels as part of their strategy.
Why Reels?
More efficient performance
A study found that adding Reels to your existing creative mix compared to campaigns without led to:
- 16% improvement in cost per action
- 13% higher return on ad spend
- 29% higher conversion rate
- 11% higher reach across all placements
If you already run video ads on Meta, you may be asking “Wait, I thought I already run Reels ads?” It’s true that if you are using Advantage+ placements, your ads will be shown in the Reels feed along with all other ad placements. But for a Reels-specific campaign, you would select the Reels placement so the video is served in a user’s Reels feed –if you’re creating a Reels ad, here are some best practices to follow:
Best Practices
- 📲Create vertical videos (9:16 aspect ratio) to fit the Reels or Story ad placement. This takes up the full screen and captures more attention. You can also use Ads Manager’s creative editing tools to crop and resize videos for other placements.
- ⏱Get your message across in the first 3 seconds
- 🔊Create with sound-on. Over 80% of Reels are viewed with the sound on, so create a video with the audio experience in mind. Use music and voiceovers when you can and add auto-generated captions for when the sound is off.
- 🙋Get your people in front of the camera! Use your people in video content to give your audience someone to connect to. Reels ads with a human presence had a 25% higher CTR than those without people.
- 🤳Authenticity wins. Reels ads with an organic production value result in better ad recall than more polished videos with a higher production value.
- 📖Tell a story! Don’t just show off the new vehicles on the lot, demonstrate how their features can relate to your customers’ everyday lives. For example:
- These are the top models we would recommend to new parents because of their safety features, space for car seats, and trunk storage.
- Long commute? Here are our most fuel-efficient hybrid sedans so you can save on gas.
How We Are Putting This Into Practice
When I-95 Toyota signed on to work with PCG, they already had a heavy focus on social media. Their investment in organic video content paid off and social media was consistently one of their top sources of traffic. They had a process in place for creating fun and engaging Reels, so we were excited to build their video content into our overall campaign strategy.
We decided to choose three new Reels each month to promote, covering different areas of their dealership. One would focus on sales, one on service, and one would be on general customer experience.
For month one, we chose these Reels to promote:
- Budget: $1,000
- Campaign Objective: Awareness
- Optimization goal: Video ThruPlays (amount of times the video was played in its entirety)
- Audience: We targeted a 50-mile radius around Brunswick, Georgia, where the dealership is located. In addition to geographic targeting, we narrowed our audience with detailed targeting. I included users who matched automotive-related interests. This gave us an estimated audience size of 328,500 – 386,400 users.
*Note: while the goal of this campaign was to reach a wider audience of new prospective customers, there is definitely an opportunity to remarket to existing customers and website visitors as well. Now that we have built up an audience of users who viewed our Reels ads, we can create a custom audience to retarget video viewers in future campaigns.
After running the Reels ads for one month, the campaign generated these results:
- 63,875 video thruplays
- 24,652 users reached
- 86,385 impressions
- Cost per result = $0.02 per thruplay
- Above average ad quality ranking
While each video achieved the same cost per result, the top-performing video was the Service Reel which was viewed over 30k times! We allowed Meta’s algorithm to determine how and when to deliver our ads, allowing for more ad spend to be allocated towards the better performing ads. Because of this, the Service ad generated the most impressions (45k) and reached over 18k users.
