Recruiting blood donors has become more difficult because donors are not as likely to answer phone calls, but blood banks still need those blood donation appointments to help save lives. This is where digital marketing can help. Digital marketing has allowed blood centers to recruit blood donors on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. But, does your company know what ad type engages best with blood donors on social media platforms? We have found some interesting insights between image and video advertisements that can help your team successfully recruit blood donors online.
Your blood bank can use a variety of different social media platforms and advertisement types to help your blood donor recruitment strategy, but you also need to focus on the best way to narrow down digital marketing strategies to optimize ROI. For example, Facebook video ads receive 10 to 30 percent more views than other ad formats, and consumers want to see more videos from brands. But, does that mean image advertisements should not be used? No, you still should use image ads in your recruitment efforts. Images tend to have a lower cost-per-click, and your marketing team can test out what type of image works best for the specific target audience.
Related Post: 5 Things We’ve Learned About Recruiting Blood Donors on Facebook.
BENEFITS OF IMAGE AND VIDEOS ADS
To begin, we want to think about the importance of images in advertising. Image ads are easy to create, it tends to generate more clicks than videos, and you can show the viewers exactly what you are trying to convey in less time. Also, images help to showcase your brand and support the points your blood center wants to make. Image advertisements allow your blood center to make a connection with the potential donor by using brand-specific images, color palettes, and donor-centered images to bring in a sense of cohesiveness to the overall image. Therefore, viewers enjoy making connections to brands that help tell a story and are appealing to the eye.
However, more marketers are using video ads to provide the audiences with more to look at and give more information to the potential donor. So, why is it important to have videos in your blood donor recruitment strategies?
Well, video advertisements have the advantage over image ads because it gives the audience more information and storytelling than a still image does. It has also been shown that video ads have increased conversions by 20-30% in some tests. Also, video ads can show company personality and attract viewers to a more detailed aspect of your brand content. With video ads, your blood center forces the viewer to stop scrolling through social media and focus on the content marketers created for more information. Therefore, video advertisements tend to perform better with engagement (likes and comments) and views, which allows your blood bank to generate more brand awareness. So, which ads perform better for blood donor recruitment? The answer is that it depends because every audience is different.
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INSIGHTS
There are benefits to image ads that create a better outcome than video advertisements and vise versa, but each ad type is successful in helping to recruit blood donors on social media platforms. An article stated that almost 60% of marketers said video tends to drive more engagement because users have to take that extra time to stop scrolling and look at the ad on their screen. But, another article at Hubspot discussed a variety of tests between their video and image advertisements and has found that dynamic image ads outperform videos in most KPIs on Facebook, such as clicks and engagement.
So, what should your marketing team do to drive a successful blood donor recruitment campaign? Test, Test, and Test. Every blood bank has the same goal (to bring in blood donors) but with vastly different audiences and demographics, so we suggest that the best way to figure out what ad type will work best for your blood center and your donors is to test out different kinds of ads to see what the audience engages with the most. Marketers can try out optimized images, videos, A/B testing, or a multitude of other variations of ads to figure out what engages the best with your audiences and what helps optimize your company’s ROI.
Related Post: Video or Images: Which Performs Better in Facebook Ads?
Consumers’ needs change all the time, so recruiting blood donors online can seem kind of overwhelming. But, we believe that image and video advertisements will always be crucial to your blood bank’s strategies, and there isn’t a clear “yes” or “no” answer for which ad type performs better. We suggest that you test, analyze data, and test some more to figure out which type of ad reaches the audience the best and continue to work toward client goals.