Responsive web design wasn’t always the norm. Until Google changed its algorithm in 2015, many websites were built for and looked best on a desktop. Once mobile-friendly sites started dominating the rankings, responsive design became a universal business requirement.

Online video is seeing the same shift. With more and more viewers glued to tiny screens, marketers who don’t produce mobile-friendly video will start to lose out on traffic, view counts, and conversions.

If you’re not a video-editing whiz, navigating the production process can be tricky. With Shakr’s video-creation tools, you can create a stunning, mobile-optimized video in just a few minutes.

In our final webinar video, we walk through the steps of creating a mobile-video ad with Shakr:

Shakr’s tools were built with marketers in mind to catch audience attention and drive action. Here’s everything you need to know.

Who’s watching mobile video?

First, of course, you have to know your audience. Here are a few quick, but important mobile-video stats:

• Your audience is plentiful. Over half of online video views are on mobile.
• Your audience will skew younger. Millennials are 3x more likely than baby boomers to watch video on mobile. Not only that, but 84% of millennials follow brands on Facebook and 40% of millennials follow brands on Instagram.
• Your audience is probably on a Samsung device running Android. Both occupy over half of the market share.
• Your female audience is likely on Instagram. At least 38% of female internet users are on Instagram.
• Your audience may be watching these kinds of videos. The most popular types of video on YouTube are product reviews, how-tos, and vlogs.
• Your audience is watching a lot of social video. Facebook users watch 100 million hours of video per day, and Snapchat counts more than 10 billion video views each day.
• Your audience shares videos with each other. 92% of mobile-video viewers share content.
• Your audience is (most likely) silent. In 2016, it was reported that 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound.
• Your audience is more receptive to marketing content than ever before. Between Q2 2016 and Q2 2017, views of sponsored content on Facebook jumped 258%.

With viewers who are increasingly interested in watching videos and engaging with brands over social media, the timing has never been better for trying out mobile video.

Why Shakr videos succeed on mobile

In our introductory webinar, The Mobile Video Era is Just Beginning, we discussed how good video ad creative can increase ROI by as much as 49%. Shakr’s video templates are designed to help you maximize results from your marketing campaigns. Part of that success comes from making videos that best fit each platform. If the content doesn’t look native to the platform, good luck with keeping audience attention.

Videos that succeed on mobile share certain general traits. We’ve covered them extensively in this webinar series. Here’s a quick recap of our mobile-video creative best practices:

• Make short videos.
• Put the message at the beginning.
• Design for sound off.
• Use a square or portrait aspect ratio.
• Always test new trends, such as Instagram Stories.
• Always use native video (not YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).

Shakr templates have all these features built in, so you don’t have to think about them every time you want to make a new video. But there are a few ways to optimize for individual platforms, like Facebook vs. Instagram. For instance:

• The optimal length for a Facebook feed ad is 10–30 seconds.
• Facebook feed ads should also feature message text in the first 10 seconds.
• Instagram Stories slides must be 15 seconds or less.
• Creating multiple Stories slides will boost engagement.
• Instagram Stories should fill the screen in a 9:16 aspect ratio.
• Instagram feed ads should be about 30 seconds long.

When you browse Shakr, you can filter by length, aspect ratio, and even platform to filter out the templates best suited to your campaign.

How to use Shakr

Here’s are the steps to designing your mobile-friendly video with Shakr:

• Sign up: create an account on https://www.shakr.com/.
• Browse: Once you’ve signed up for a Shakr account, go to the browse section and search until you find something that you like. You can try different filters to find a video design that you like.
• Add stock assets: In the video design detail page, you can see how many assets you need for that video design, but if you don’t have enough, don’t worry. We have an integrated library of stock assets that you can use to search for image and video assets, all for free.
• Customize: Then, simply click the Make My Video button, and start to customize the text, the videos, and the images. Of course, you can use the stock library to search just for shoes, in this example, but you can also use your own assets. Simply drag and drop your images or video clips into the video design, change the cropping, and then go through the process again.
• Add your logo: Once you’re done with all of that, a lot of video designs use a call to action and a logo at the end, so make sure to upload your logo in a PNG format for the best look. And remember, if you don’t want to have any text on a slide, you can easily remove it.
• Add final touches: Just a logo and then you’re done. Simply click the Finish button and it should only take a few minutes to render your video. Remember, you can also change the color and the audio as well if you wish.

The easiest way to level up your ad campaigns

We’re a little biased, but we think Shakr is the easiest way to make video on the web. The best part of using Shakr for video marketing is the fact that you still have creative control. Instead of spending tons of time editing, adding effects, and picking out background music, you can think about your ad’s messaging and making your product look as good as possible.

Another advantage to using a template is the fact that you don’t have to stick with one ad. If you use Shakr, you can switch up your ad creative at any time and still have a great-looking branded video that works on any device. This will give you a library of options to choose from and tons of different videos to test.

And that concludes our mobile video series. We hope you’ve learned some useful ways to build a successful mobile-video campaign. Try Shakr out for yourself, and let us know what you think!