Module 2 - What you are going to need to get started

What is the first thing to sort out before advertising on YouTube?

Your budget. Step one is really basic. All you need to think about is how much you want to spend on your YouTube advertising.

Think about how much you are wanting to spend in a month, and then when you get to the campaign and ad setup stage you can break that down into a daily budget. Remember that YouTube is an investment.

Welcome to module two. This is the groundwork stage, which is an incredibly exciting part of the course, because you are getting ready for YouTube advertising. In this section I want to talk you through what you need to get started, and I have broken it down into ten steps to make it as simple and as easy to follow as possible.

What do the discovery session and customer profiling sheet do for you?

They make you think about the business in far more detail before you write a word of script. Other people will take you through the discovery sheet in a lot more detail in this module, and the sheet will also be available to download.

By completing a discovery session you are going to be able to think about your business, or your client's business, in a lot more detail, and then apply that to the scripting stage and even to the advertising stage when you are setting up those campaigns and ads.

Once you have done the discovery session, you fill out the customer profiling sheet. By filling that out you are going to be able to understand what your perfect target customer looks like. By doing that you are allowing them to feel understood, and you are going to be able to answer the questions that are already going on in the mind of the customer at the scripting stage. You are also going to be able to take that information and apply it when you are building out the audiences at the advertising stage. This is a really important part of the process.

How do you set up a YouTube brand channel?

Through the settings menu of your Google account, using add or manage your channel.

An even more important part of the process is obviously making sure you have a YouTube channel. If you already have a brand account and a brand channel, you do not need to listen to this bit. This is just for people who do not already have a brand channel set up.

Here you can see my Google account, and I am logged into YouTube. There is the little icon in the top right hand corner. Click on that icon, then go down to where it says settings in the menu, then click where it says add or manage your channel. There is a list of channels already here, but you are going to want to create a channel.

Then you name the channel. You need to make sure the name is on brand and consistent with your website. Once you have created your channel name, you will have a brand account and a brand channel set up, ready for you to add the assets that are on brand.

Later in this course, in module 8, we are going to talk you through how to connect your YouTube channel to your Google Ads account, which is incredibly important for the remarketing stage of this process. Once you have connected these, you are going to be able to use that data for your remarketing lists and your remarketing audiences.

What is a YouTube readiness audit?

It is a check of whether your YouTube channel is on brand and consistent with what is on your website.

A couple of the things we have listed here are whether the name is on brand and consistent, and whether the channel assets are on brand and consistent as well. Do you have your logo on there, and is there a YouTube header that clearly communicates to the target audience what that channel is about?

You also need to make sure you have got an about section completed and your social media accounts linked. Then you need to do a website audit, so things like whether the schema is implemented and whether you have any inbound links from your YouTube channel. Is there a landing page? I will come on to that later.

Once you have completed the YouTube readiness audit, you need to start working on those actions to make sure your channel is ready for advertising.

Do you need to create the Google Ads account now?

You need one, but you do not need to create it at this stage, because module 3 takes you through it step by step.

Here you can see our Google Ads account, our MCC account, and if you have not already seen it you will be seeing it a lot more later in the course. Having a Google Ads account is where you are going to advertise from, and in module 3 you are going to learn how to set that account up, so I am not going to go through it now.

How should the ad itself be structured?

Hook, educate section and first call to action, all before 29 seconds.

One of the things you obviously need to make sure you have is an ad, and we do recommend you create two ads for A/B testing. That will be touched on later, in module 12. You want to test the hook. That is the bit where you are capturing the attention of the audience and exciting them to watch on.

Here you can see our scripting template, which you will see again later in the course, and we will talk you through what to write in these sections, how to create a great script and how to create a great ad. This is just a basic overview of the ad structure.

The reason the hook, the educate section and the first call to action all come before 29 seconds is that you do not pay before 29 seconds. You only pay once the person has watched past 29 seconds, or if they click on the ad and go through to the website.

Why does the campaign need its own landing page?

So that the landing page ties into the campaign and you can track the traffic and the conversions coming from YouTube advertising.

This is just an example landing page. If we at s.media wanted to advertise YouTube advertising to orthodontists, this is the page we would use. You want to make sure that the landing page ties into the campaign, so you do not want the creative on this page to differ too much. We would want to make sure our ad was talking about orthodontists doing YouTube advertising, and that the creative used on that ad was also on this landing page.

Do not worry about a landing page right now. We will take you through landing page considerations and the best way to build one out in module 7.

What do you need to do with Google Tag Manager?

Agree your conversion events before you do anything else, then set them up in Google Tag Manager.

As you can see, I have just created this Tag Manager account as an example for the purpose of this course, so the code has not been installed on the website yet. Before you do anything, and before you create your ads, you want to make sure you have agreed the conversion events you are wanting to track. Once you have agreed them, set those conversion events up in Tag Manager.

Why remarket, and what has to be in place first?

Because YouTube is really good for advertising to cold audiences, and the other platforms are really good for advertising to warmer ones. We would highly recommend that you do remarket.

We also recommend, and you will have heard this before, a YouTube first strategy. You advertise on YouTube first, and then you use other social media platforms to remarket to those people later.

If you are using Facebook for remarketing, you need to make sure you have a pixel installed on your website. You go to your Business Manager account, then to Events Manager, and here you can create a pixel. You need to make sure this is done before you start advertising on YouTube.

So there you have it. Those are your ten steps to getting started with YouTube advertising.