Benefits and Tips of Running Ads on YouTube

The rewards of using videos to market your products or services simply cannot be stated enough. Video is an instrumental tool to increase brand visibility and promote a message, and for good reason. It can convey your brand message, product details, and thought leadership content in a more expressive way than static, a way that brings your message to life, leading to higher engagement and interaction rates.

Once you create the video, then the most fitting place to house it is on YouTube. However, the platform has also become a leading digital channel to promote products and services. As marketers, our team sees YouTube as more than just an endless source of cute puppy clips, useful tutorials and entertaining music videos. (Although we do love it for that as well!) We primarily recognize it for its most valued offering to brands — immeasurable reach.

According to Pew Research, YouTube is the most popular online platform in America. It boasts a staggering 2 billion logged-in monthly active users, with extremely high penetration across the great majority of age groups. In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube. Users remain extremely active within the platform, browsing over 6 pages per visit and on average spend roughly 11 minutes per day.

With these statistics and the rise of video marketing, it’s no wonder that YouTube is becoming the preferred place to advertise for many businesses. If you’re thinking about advertising on YouTube as well, then you’ll need to understand the platform and how best to maximize it for great success. Below are a few tips that MassMedia’s digital team recommends.

Take Your Time with YouTube Targeting Opportunities

Like the great majority of digital platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Google, targeting is key. Gone are the days to take the “spray and pray” approach. Ad dollars are valuable and ensuring the right people see your ads is key. Using the wrong targeting can result in unqualified traffic, poor data insights, and a significant amount of wasted ad dollars.

YouTube offers demographic targeting (consisting of gender, age group, and income levels), affinity audiences (specific topics of interest), custom audiences (data provided by the brand), and in-market audiences (for example: audiences in market for a car or a home). These categories can be layered to home in on an audience.

Assess the Various Ad Formats

There are several available ad formats, all of which offer unique opportunities based on a brand owner’s objective. Take a look below to view the full list of available ad formats; this chart can serve as a primer to help you determine the format that makes the most sense for your ad. And remember, there is no one-size-fits-all model. Experiment between ad formats to see which ones are yielding the highest performance.

Consider Running Google Search and Leveraging Performance Data for YouTube

Running Google Search ads can bring forth a lot of valuable insight. The keywords your potential customers are searching for and the text ads that are driving the most engagement and conversions are both important to understand and use to good advantage.

Taking this keyword data and applying it to YouTube can prove to be very beneficial, as this platform is also a search engine that users turn to in order to educate themselves, solve a problem, etc. In fact, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, as people are relying on YouTube videos more and more as they research and decide which products to buy. You may just find that success in Google will translate to success in YouTube. And utilizing YouTube is going to expand your reach and visibility for users searching for answers to their questions.

Incorporate Video Retargeting

Retargeting provides you with the ability to keep your brand top of mind after potential customers have left your website. It is an extremely effective marketing tactic, as it targets an audience that has shown interest in your brand by visiting your website. These users have a higher propensity to convert and you can offer a second touchpoint with video retargeting. When using video retargeting, our team recommends running a non-branding message since the user has been to your website and is already brand aware. Setting these ads up in YouTube will take some configuration but is highly encouraged.

YouTube offers unmatched reach and ad inventory in the digital video space. Its user base is almost as large as Facebook, however unlike Facebook, users are strictly here to view video content, so video ads are a natural fit. While YouTube and video ads may seem complicated, clearly understanding your audience and testing different ad formats can result in positive ad recall and increased sales. Engage with MassMedia to learn how we can use YouTube ads or other digital platforms to help grow your business.

Source: Google
Source: Brandwatch