YouTube is the favourite channel of millennials and an absolute must for a marketer if they would like to reach younger audience. It’s a music, fun, social causes, inspiration, how-to channel and 1,300,000,000 users community. Even though it is a part of Google’s Display network, YouTube is more of a search engine in itself. It offers great ways to each your target audience at the time they are searching for your service.
When it comes to the format there are several options: a card on the side, as an overlay on the video, skippable video ad, non skippable ad, nun skippable short bumper ad or sponsored cards on the side of the video. In this article I will focus more on the skippable format, as it is one of the most popular ones.
When YouTube opened to ads first, a lot of advertisers simply posted their TV ads in the exact same format and let them run. This is a big mistake, as one of the reasons a lot of people are on YouTube is to avoid this kind of TV ads. The way users are interacting with the channel is very different than TV – it’s all about choosing what to see for how long. If an annoying ad is skippable, it will be skipped. Youtube charges advertisers only if the viewer continues watching the ad video more than 30 seconds, but your goal is to make people watch your content.
1. Create interesting content.
First of all, create engaging content – a video that looks less like an ad, but more like a YouTube video your audience would watch. For example, a fashion brand can create video create video resembling a fashion vlog or DIY video. I will share more on how to create great YouTube content in my next articles.
2. Remarketing to web visitors or subscribers
One of the great ways to utilise YouTube is to show it to people who already interacted with your brand, but did not convert.
Setting up remarking lists for YouTube is similar to the way you set up remarking for any other display campaign. (More Details in my other article on remarketing here) First create your audience in Google Adwords or Google Analytics. You can either upload lists of subscribers or set up a URL rule to follow visitors of particular pages. Affinity groups and in-market segments are also great resources. as to big extend these categories are created based on what content people watch and share on YouTube.
3. Target viewers of your channel
Another feature which seems very attractive is to target visitors of your YouTube channel. Here is a list of the actions by which you can segment your audience by:
• Viewed any video from a channel
• Visited a channel page
• Viewed any video (as an ad) from a channel
• Liked any video from a channel
• Commented on any video from a channel
• Shared any video from a channel
• Subscribed to a channel
• Viewed certain video(s)
• Viewed certain video(s) as ad
The last option is particularly interesting as you can select an audience of the
people who viewed more than 30 seconds of your ad and remarked to them with
a different video format.
YouTube is a very versatile and engaging platform for marketers and it has great features available to reach the right audiences. Happy targeting from me!
