For years, newspapers have displayed silent ads at the bottom of pages or in the left and right side columns. Although it was – usually – just an advertisement for the brand name without a marketing message, or any written content, only the company logo, the advertisers were paying a lot for it.

Today, there are many ways to display a silent advertisement that contains text with a clear marketing message.

As a result, it relies on market research that requires a lot of effort and intelligence in the presentation to achieve its goal. Therefore, written, illustrated, and animated versions have appeared to achieve great success.

A Brief on the Evolution of Silent Advertising

There are many reasons to mute a social video; maybe you are in a public place or at work, or you need some peace and quiet, perhaps the video is in a foreign language, or the viewer has a hearing impairment. Whatever the reason for the popularity of silent advertising, always remember that you are not alone!

In 2016, Facebook created defaults that silently turn on News Feed ads. During that time, 85% of Facebook users watched videos with the audio turned off. As a result, Facebook has reversed the setup, but many people still prefer watching in silence. Today, silent advertising is a creative opportunity for content creators. For them, silence is not a barrier to access, in contrary, its an opportunity for creativity.

If your goal is to reach many leads with your marketing videos, you need to meet people wherever they are.

Be it on the street, in the metro, or at home, using a Pixel or iPad, on a fast or weak Internet connection. or iPad, on a fast or weak Internet connection.

With a few simple techniques and tricks, you can create a silent video ad that is just as effective and powerful as the animated audible ad.

Factors that help you create a silent ad as effective as a voice ad

A silent video ad should not only attract but also keep the viewers attention as well.

Silence adds difficulty to advertising production. However, it has its advantages, as it forces you to create a simple video that is visually interesting.

Hence, it will give more opportunities to influence the viewer. Namely, there are two main ways to enhance your silent video anywhere you share it:

– Text is smarter than speech: Edit your message into quick captions, title cards, and calls to action.

– Actions that speak louder than words: Showcase tons of faces, make bold editing choices and add a flair to it.

When applying these tactics into action, you will tell an interesting and compelling story about your business and products.

A text that is smarter than speech

In silent advertising, the text should tell your company’s story smoothly. In short, to write a great text, you have to think like an editor. Think about lead problems and try to find effective solutions to them. The most difficult decisions are not about what to write, but about what to leave with the target customer.

Lively captions, title cards, and calls to action will enhance ad recall, which is vital to customer conversion and retention.

– Captions

Captions make your content more accessible and can optimize search engines’ SEO.

You can reach millions of people through comments, including people who are deaf or hearing-impaired, and those who speak other languages. In addition, many people choose to turn on captions to better understand the content.

In fact, you cannot rely on automatically generated captions or pay a third-party service for the captions for the videos you created.

You really need to work on it meticulously in the production process, like the shoe brand Antonia Saint NY did. The Kickstarter promotional video includes written caption text.

Within the first five seconds, they described the comfortable high heels as: “Like a sneaker on the inside.” 

Source: Antonia Saint NY

With economic commentaries, Antonia Saint NY is eloquently describing what makes their product different. These short reviews have succeeded, piqued the interest of their target audience of urban women, and helped the company garner more than $1.8 million in pre-orders.

– Title cards

Title cards are another way to highlight key information in a muted ad. Therefore, you can use title cards to introduce your video or product, introduce sharp transitions, break down how-to steps, or even pause for a comedy effect.

Here is an example: Kahoot! It is an educational technology platform that turns learning into fun team quiz games. When presenting its app, they use title cards to guide viewers to key features. A title card is placed at the beginning of the video, announcing what it is about. Also, it includes simple cards as a title at the beginning of each section:  “1. Create a Challenge.” and “2. Accept the Challenge.”

Source: Kahoot!

– Call to action

Without a prominent CTA, the silent video will not attract new customers. For this reason, they will simply move to the next section on the browser.

Although most social media channels and advertisements place a CTA button on posts, it is important to state this clearly as viewers are already searching for the video itself.

According to Facebook, the short video format + clear CTA succeeded. Silent video ads achieved 1 million subscriptions in less than eight months while reducing the cost per subscription.

– Visual Tactics

Words are great, but the silent video also takes a lot of action to convince someone to buy a product, visual cues from faces, fast movement, and design will help convince people of the value.

– Show facial expressions

Our brains are designed to look for faces, we read them for social and emotional cues by placing faces in a video that creates familiarity and directs people to take action. 

You do not need a lot of design experience to create this type of video. In fact, you can interview your own customers and then add them to a template to create an effective and powerful video that will attract clients and help sell your services and products. Just while shooting, make sure you focus on the faces. There is no need to zoom in or out too much, but when framing the face you can capture emotions like excitement and comfort. 

– Dynamic shots

It’s hard to ignore a video with a lot of action, even in complete silence. Ahrefs, with its Site Audit tool, creates eye-catching openings with color illustrations. The video delves directly into the product dashboard, showing fast-moving previews from the user’s perspective; within the first 30, seconds you know how to use it.

Whether you are using digital screen recordings or screenshots of your product in action, it’s important to get the rhythm right.

– Product-focused design

Simple design, including elements like animation, typography, color, and illustration, goes a long way toward directing the eye to important information.

:Summing up

Silent advertising draws more attention the more effort you put into its production. The above tips will help make the maximum impact as people scroll. Once your target customers see them, text and visuals that focus on moving people faster through the buying funnel will work. 

 If you are looking to reach your customers faster, start with a strategy that works well with all audiences, wherever they are. You will see the power of quiet conversions of these strategies we work with because we are committed to working with passion and innovation to achieve success with our partners.

If you are looking for a partner to help you implement and formulate these strategies, Lhamim team is ready. Contact us now.