Module 2 - Know your clients audience

Why is audience building the most important part of a YouTube campaign?

Because if you do not build on a firm foundation of researched and profiled audiences from the very beginning, you are setting yourself up to fail. I think personally that the single most important thing you need to understand going through this course is how to build audiences, how not to build them, and how to think outside the box a bit when you are tailoring your campaign to the audience. It is not always obvious.

Presuming things and guessing is not really what we want to do. We need to understand why we are doing things and plan in advance. It is a bit like buying stocks and shares. You would do your research. You would not just blindly plough in.

How does Google decide where to place your ad?

Google is choosing where to place your ad based on four different things: keywords, audiences, placements and topics. You can overlay each of these with another.

You can use an off the shelf audience, or the audiences you have already populated in your own account. Some of the interesting ones are people who have been watching your previous videos, and people who have been on your website. You can go after your subscribers, and you can go after people who have been on your videos in the last 30 days, 90 days, 365 days, and I think it goes up to 540 days.

Whether you would necessarily want to go after people who were on your videos over a year ago is doubtful, though in certain circumstances maybe. More likely you are marketing to people who have been on your videos in the last 7, 14 or 30 days. Try building some audiences out like that.

Where do you build audiences in Google Ads?

Go into tools and then audience manager, and that is where you see all the different ways you can build audiences. You can combine audiences, you can build custom audiences, or you can go with Google's off the shelf suggested audiences.

If you are not sure what you are doing and you just want to get going and start getting a level of conversion, start with the off the shelf ones. We will talk about audiences a lot throughout the course.

Why does naming your audiences matter?

Because you will not remember what is in them. Whenever you are in Google Ads, give every part of it a name that matters to you, whether that is the title of a campaign, an ad group, an ad itself or an audience.

Some of the accounts I have been running, I have been running for 10 or more years. I would never have any idea what those audiences included if I had not given them a decent name. When I build a keyword audience I call it keywords and I give it a date, because I always like to record what date I created the audience so we know in future.

How can an obviously relevant keyword list be completely wrong?

Because the person searching that keyword may be the other side of the transaction. What I am trying to teach in this video is to think outside the box a little bit, and I am going to use evicting a tenant as the example.

We have a client who is a business that collects rent. They help landlords go and collect overdue rent. If you build a custom audience of people who searched for a term like evicting a tenant, Google drops down a list of other search ideas around it: landlord tenant eviction notice, landlord tenant eviction process, evicting a tenant. At first glance all of those keywords look really good, and evicting a tenant looks like our best search term.

I have seen one of our ad execs create an entire campaign and get it completely wrong because of this, and it was not her fault, let me caveat that, because she is not as experienced as I am. What she did not realise is that there are obviously 10 times more tenants than there are landlords. If you are a tenant and you get an eviction notice through the door, what are you going to search? You go straight onto Google and you search evicting a tenant, can my landlord evict me, landlord tenant act, eviction process.

So the majority of the searches under those keywords are not as good as they could be. You have only got to get it slightly wrong, and Google will build an audience around that list which could be completely wrong.

So which keywords should you use instead?

Find very, very specific keywords that only the buyer would search. In the example of the business that collects rent, they only really want to show their ads to landlords, not tenants.

We ended up running the campaign on things like landlord insurance, because landlords are far more likely to search that than tenant eviction. Tenant eviction is searched a lot more by the end user than by the business we are trying to find clients for.

That is one part of the audience profiling and production piece: if you are going to use keywords, make sure they are highly relevant keywords, and be very careful that they really do matter to your business. In the next video I will jump into the Google keyword discovery tool and show you how to find the best keywords, which should help you build your audiences out.