How Do You Advertise a Product on YouTube and Grow the Channel at Once? (Recorded 2021)

Can you advertise a product on YouTube?

Yes, absolutely, you can advertise a product on YouTube. We're talking to a UK-wide furniture company with lots of products, and to a global brand with a large range too, and YouTube is brilliant for both because you can tell a story around the product, educate people about it, entertain with it, and show it being used.

Unlike a normal 30 second TV commercial, where you pay a lot of money without really knowing if people are watching, on YouTube the "taxi meter" isn't running: an ad could be ten minutes long and still only cost you pennies once someone chooses to keep watching. If it's a barbecue, you're not limited to showing that it works, you can show someone making burgers and genuinely enjoying it. On the numbers side, you don't need any particular view count to run ads yourself: you can start with a very small budget and have an ad live within an hour. Monetising your own channel with ads showing on your videos is a separate thing, and needs a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours.

What's the difference between organic and paid YouTube advertising?

There are two ways to advertise on YouTube: the organic way, where you rank your videos for the keywords people search so your video appears in the top five results, and the paid way, which is faster. On the organic side, if you're not in the top five for a relevant search, people generally don't watch past that point, so ranking position matters.

If you want to move faster, paid ads are the option. Simon puts it simply: you specify an audience, grab attention within the first three to six seconds, educate the viewer, and offer them a way to click through and find out more. A common misconception is that an ad has to be short, thirty seconds or a minute; in fact a YouTube ad can run for ten or twenty minutes. The aim is to warm up a cold audience to the point where, by the time they've watched, they understand the product and are ready to buy.

What types of ads are available on YouTube?

The main types are bumper ads, in-stream ads and discovery ads. Bumpers appear in front of someone's content and can't be skipped. In-stream ads interrupt what someone is already watching, which is where a "pattern interrupt" comes in: if someone is watching content about barbecues because they're researching what to buy, and your ad for the right barbecue appears and fits their demographic, it stops feeling like an ad and starts feeling like a continuation of the topic. We expect a lot more of this kind of pattern-interrupt, topic-matched content over the next year to eighteen months.

Discovery ads sit alongside suggested videos when someone searches a topic, and because people are naturally lazy searchers who tend to click the top result, a discovery ad can get clicked without registering as an ad at all, even with the ad badge next to it. Discovery is strong for brand awareness but doesn't give you the same call-to-action opportunity that in-stream does, since it lacks that same click-through moment.

What audience should you target for product ads?

The starting point, as Andy puts it, is understanding your customers first: who they are, what their lives are like, their interests, and what they've been searching for. You can't build the right audience until you understand that.

From there, Simon's approach is to build in-market audiences rather than relying purely on keyword-driven PPC. With traditional PPC, someone searches a term and clicks your ad, and that click might cost anywhere from 50p to £10, or in some sectors £20 to £30. With YouTube, you can overlay what someone has searched for with the sites they've visited to create an in-market audience. If someone has been searching for golf clubs and visiting sites like Sports Direct or American Golf, you can target that person directly for a fraction of what a competitor is paying to drive them to their own website through PPC, sometimes for a penny or two rather than several pounds a click.

Is it worth working with YouTube influencers?

It depends on the influencer's actual audience, not just their size. We were dealing with a fashion influencer with around seven million subscribers, but the honest question is whether all of that audience is genuine, engaged, and actually the target demographic, rather than people simply looking at an attractive face. Running ads into an established influencer's channel to leverage their existing audience is one option, but placing product directly with an influencer as sponsored content is different, and audiences are increasingly able to see through it when it's obviously paid promotion.

We think the trend is moving towards influencers genuinely using and recommending products they actually use, rather than paid placements dressed up as recommendations. On the numbers, one influencer deal we looked at for two YouTube and Instagram posts and stories came to £200,000, compared with the fact that £200,000 in YouTube ads could reach around 100 million people, of the right people, rather than relying on an influencer's engagement rate, which even at two percent on seven million followers doesn't mean all those people are engaging with your brand rather than simply the influencer themselves.

Which products and industries work best on YouTube?

Almost any product can work, including ones people assume wouldn't. We sat in a meeting with a board of directors who insisted their customers weren't on YouTube, until one director in his fifties admitted he was, which rather answered the question. Before Christmas we worked on a highly specialist, highly engineered tool product, the kind you wouldn't expect to succeed on YouTube, using simple how-to videos, and it worked phenomenally well: around 160 downloads led to a £900,000 order. Plenty of B2C products work just as well.

On the paid side, Simon's personal view is that ROI is the wrong metric to obsess over. What actually matters is profit: a product with modest margin can still be worth running if you understand the customer's lifetime value, because a low-value product can be a customer acquisition piece that leads to an upsell where the real profit sits. Currently, coaches and course creators are among the heaviest users of YouTube advertising, alongside businesses already succeeding with Facebook ads, but the vast majority of businesses, in any sector, still aren't using YouTube ads at all. We've also worked with a screwdriver manufacturer who took some convincing before selling over a million pounds worth of product in a single month from a campaign that cost £10,000.

How do you build an audience on YouTube for your product?

There are again two ways: the organic route of ranking your videos, or the faster route of running ads, and YouTube's targeting is uniquely specific because if someone skips your ad before 30 seconds you pay nothing at all, which makes brand awareness essentially free.

One tactic that a lot of people don't know about is building an audience from people who have hit a competitor's checkout page specifically, not just their general website traffic, because those are the people your competitor has already paid to attract and who are demonstrably ready to buy. Serving your ad into that audience is effectively borrowing your competitor's traffic. Do that alongside good content and people will also start finding you organically, like a snowball rolling up.

Can someone buy your product straight from YouTube?

This is something YouTube will be pushing hard over the next couple of years. It's currently in beta and being trialled across different countries, but the direction is clearly towards full click-and-buy functionality on YouTube.