YouTube Marketing is all about grabbing attention – but whose attention you get is up to smart marketers like you.
YouTube gives you the opportunity to boost your online presence. How you do that is entirely up to you, but one of the best ways to get the appearance of being just about everywhere is through one fantastic tactic. More on that later…
First let’s look at expectations.
YouTube is NOT going to be a massive source of traffic and conversion to your website. It can compliment your marketing mix, but it’s not a big driver of sales.
YouTube IS going to help your brand and help your “top of mind awareness” when customers are in a buying decision. You can make it seem like your product or service is everywhere with some key setups.
To really take advantage of the impact of YouTube marketing, you need to link your YouTube account to your Adwords account – a process you can do in a few minutes (if you have all your logins on one sticky note) by following the prompts here.
Once linked – you’ll see the “Video” Campaign option in your AdWords account. Like this:
Starting a campaign is as simple as pasting your YouTube video URL into the right field.
Ad Options
Depending on your YouTube marketing goals, you can set up two types of ads.
In-Stream – previously called “pre-roll”, In-Stream ads appear before YouTube Videos and in the Google Display Network on video publisher pages. Your Ad will play for 5 seconds before the user can skip it – plus you’ll only be charged for a view after the 30 second mark (provided your video is longer than 30 seconds, if it’s shorter it’ll be at the end of the video). Any user interactions will also be charged.
In-Stream adds are built for branding saturation. These ads are perfect for promotions, specials or to showcase a well crafted video.
In-Display – these ads will appear on the right side of YouTube’s watch list, and you only get charged if the ad gets clicked.
In-Display ads are excellent to places to apply your similar audience and contextual targeting lists.
Now the real power of YouTube marketing…
Showing your videos to the people it’s going to impact the most.
Consider a somewhat un-sexy market – like a roofing company.
Picture the person that finds a roofing company and browses re-roofing pages and leaves their site. Clearly the re roofing process is on their mind.
The next day they’re checking out a YouTube clip and a video from the roofing company pops up all about re-roofing.
Then a few days later there’s an informative clip about roofing in their area at the top of a watch list – from the same.
Through selective remarketing lists you can tailor your YouTube marketing to increase the brand impact. They’re being exposed to your brand in different ways several days after they’ve been to your site. Making your brand harder to forget!
And that’s not even factoring in the Remearketing options you get based on people who’ve interacted with your videos!
Once you’ve got enough views, you’re going to be able to take your remarketing lists to new levels of accuracy!