You sure understand every bit of your business and what it sells, but can you summarize it all into a 60-sec commercial that persuades?
Ads present the ideal opportunity to attract new followers, introduce fresh products and retain loyal customers. Through a 60 sec commercial, you can:
- Introduce your business to clients (or remind followers about you)
- Prove that your brand understands customer problems and explain how it solves them
- Impact customer emotions through compelling stories
- Show how your brand stands out
- Make a call to action
Your 60-sec ads can be a video or soundtrack. Videos help sell your brand on TV and social media, while audio ads are meant for platforms like radio, podcasts, and these days, YouTube.
But as with movies and music, there’s no secret sauce to ad project success: you can steer towards a happy ending by pulling the right strings throughout your campaign.
What is a 60 Sec Commercial?
A 60-sec commercial is a one-minute-long piece of marketing content, either in audio or video, where businesses record, edit, and share with their audiences through streaming and broadcast platforms.
More specifically, it involves:
- Deciding the message
- Writing a script
- Fine-tuning it to align with the brand’s goal
- Searching for talent
- Gathering resources
- Recording the audio/video or both
- Testing the commercial
- Doing a final fine-tuning
- Sharing with the audience.
Commercials are considered vital marketing tools in building relationships, encouraging conversions, and boosting customer loyalty. Since time immemorial, most marketing ads tend to run under a minute, prompted primarily by two factors:
- Customers have short attention spans.
- Broadcast platforms, i.e., TV and Radio, have long used short ads due to limited air time.
In all honesty, customers who listen to the fuss about a company for longer than a minute may find the ad off-putting. Hence, your marketing material should only spark the customer’s curiosity–and make them want to know more about your brand.
How Can You Ensure Your 60 Sec Commercial Attracts Your Audience?
As hinted earlier in the post, you can’t tell whether your current project will bear fruits or not. Experienced marketing teams will tell you that success (in ad projects) is sometimes a hit or miss–you never know until you share it with the target group.
Remember, even the most underrated projects can have a substantial positive impact. With the same breath, overhyped projects may turn into total disappointment.
So what are some best practices to ensure a successful 60-second commercial?
i. Be realistic
What are your expectations? What response do you intend to trigger with the commercial ad?
Be realistic. Lay down a well-defined plan with measurable goals. This approach will help you gauge your project’s success versus your brand’s expectations.
ii. Test your ad
Before sharing any marketing material, it’s essential to test and optimize it for your audience.
Analyze the commercial to see if it aligns with your business’s objectives and conduct pilots to check if it will indeed trigger the desired response from prospects.
That way, you can make tweaks, i.e., by including whatever you missed or eliminating anything that may put your brand in a bad light.
iii. Don’t work in a silo
While you want to be original, it’s essential to check out whatever your counterparts are doing. If possible, draw inspiration from their work.
Emulating industry giants makes your ad content relevant to your audience while reducing the chances of potentially harmful marketing mistakes.
Lastly, checking ads from other brands reminds you of any information you may have forgotten to include.
iv. Focus on what fits your brand
There’s no one-type-fits-all when it comes to marketing. Each industry targets its customers differently. Because all marketing hinges on the customer’s emotion, it’s essential to identify which feelings to address within the seemingly short 60 seconds.
Should You Hire Creatives for Your 60 Sec Commercial?
Whether to outsource or tackle the project internally is a tough decision for most brands. Most entrepreneurs who’ve never marketed using commercial ads may feel that this should be an in-house job.
But with so many factors to consider, it makes more sense to let an experienced team of creatives handle the job.
For this task, you’ll need to work with several creatives, including:
- A commercial scriptwriter
- Voice actor/actress
- Video editor
- Audio expert
However, needs may vary based on the type of campaign–whether video or audio.
Also, when hiring, it’s crucial to ensure the team understands your brand’s culture, what it stands for, and the campaign’s primary goal. This team should work closely with your marketing department to ensure the deliverable represents your brand’s interest.
When searching for online talent, use freelance platforms like Bunny Studio. Such platforms allow you to vet and hire a voice bunny, video/audio engineer, and scriptwriter, no matter your budget.
10 Tips to Build an Audience-Friendly 60 Sec Commercial
Brands spend plenty of time and money working on a single ad. Therefore, to enjoy a good return on investment (ROI), a business must ensure that the audio or video it puts out impacts its audience positively.
So what are some tips to consider when creating a 60-second commercial?
1. Choose relevant words and images
Creative word and image choice are central to a commercial. When drafting a script for your ad, think of the x-factors separating your service/product from rival businesses. That way, you can decide the relevant words and images to present your idea.
Spend quality time identifying the best terms and pictures, as poor choices can compromise the message and undermine your ad’s effectiveness.
According to studies, audio content stimulates the brain to hold 10 percent of the info. Throw in images, and the mind captures an extra 55 percent.
With that in mind, you want to choose your images wisely, ensuring your target group is at the heart of the story.
2. Keep it brief and on point
Sixty seconds is quite a short time. Thus, the priority for all marketers should be to create copy that will inspire more traffic and encourage sales within this window.
With so little time at hand, a commercial is not the time to explain everything about your company. As a rule of thumb, your ad should trigger emotion and push prospects to take action.
Keep your 60-sec commercial message brief and on point. Do not sound like you’re listing your company’s features. Instead, use the problem-remedy approach to prove that your brand understands customer needs and has a solution.
3. Specific your target group(s)
Specify your target group throughout the ad. For instance, you can make it obvious that your brand targets sportspeople, men, women, veterans, small businesses, children, etc., through relevant wording and images.
This way, you speak directly to the people you serve and ensure most of the leads you get are relevant to your business.
4. First things first; start with the benefits
Prospects care less about the founder, the brand, or how long a company has been running. They care even less about the items or services you sell.
More than anything else, they care about themselves and what’s in it for them. Hence, it would help to begin your brief commercial by demonstrating your firm’s benefit(s) to customers with that in mind.
Once you pose as a problem solver, you get more followers and a chance to introduce prospects to your brand.
5. Focus on establishing relationships, not selling to customers
While a commercial allows you to introduce customers to your brand, it’s crucial to establish relationships, not sell to customers.
Do not sound salesly throughout the commercial. Customers will place orders or subscribe to services if they wish to. In a nutshell, focus on attracting your audience’s attention, starting new relationships, and fortifying existing ones.
6. Tell a story that your prospects resonate with
The best ads tell compelling stories in just 60 seconds. Competent marketing crews understand the importance of using real-life stories that resonate with their target groups.
Through storytelling, you achieve the following:
- You attract the customer’s attention and engage them throughout the commercial.
- You can easily trigger the right emotion(s) through a happy ending
Remember, everyone loves tales, even those who don’t are curious about the ending once they follow a story.
The best stories follow the problem-remedy approach to show how a brand excels in solving customer concerns.
7. Spark curiosity through suspense
Instead of mentioning everything about your brand in a minute, it’s crucial to create ad content that encourages your audience to inquire more about your firm.
Carefully crafted commercials trigger customer conversations through suspense, which then sparks curiosity. This can have the double positive impact of attracting followers and encouraging them to learn more about your products.
8. Throw in a catchy hook
Customers are a lively lot. They notice, remember, and fall in love with catchy phrases, taglines, and funny hooks.
Brainstorm for relevant sayings that will captivate your audience, trigger the right emotion, and stay in a customer’s mind even long after you’ve dropped other ads.
9. Feel free to make tweaks
Down the road, you may notice that, despite spending much time and effort, you forgot to include one or two things. What do you do if this happens?
Feel free to tweak the ad, i.e., to fit your audience better or add the vital information you forgot to include.
A flexible marketing team fine-tunes the ad to portray your brand positively while attracting your target audience’s attention.
10.It should be a no brainer
Customers are a lazy lot. They hardly spend time and effort internalizing the content in a video or audio commercial.
So how do you overcome this challenge when creating ads?
It’s easy; make the piece a no-brainer for anyone who runs into your content. The message should be crystal clear right from the first encounter. Don’t assume your audience will connect the dots.
Below are some tips for creating a no brainer ad:
- Tell a compelling story that resonates with your target group
- Do strategic word and image choice
- Be specific about your target audience
Lastly, explain the particular service(s) you offer through words, images, and storytelling.
Get Help Creating Your Ad
A one-minute commercial is a multifaceted process. It would be best if you planned for everything, i.e., set goals, develop a storyline, choose words and images, write a script, find talent, gather the resources you need, record, test, and then share the final product with your audience.
With so much to do, you need a competent team of experts to help you create a commercial that your audience will love.
Submit your project details to Bunny Studio and meet freelance experts. Remember to share all the details with your team to get a custom ad (tailored for your specific target group).
The more info you share, the likelier you will wind up with a deliverable that fits your needs.
