What Is the Best Way to Use YouTube for Marketing? (Recorded 2021)

What is YouTube marketing?

YouTube marketing covers two big areas, education and entertainment, and getting your content actually found matters as much as making it good in the first place.

Inside education you have things like tutorials, solving people's problems. Inside entertainment you have music, portable videos, gamers. Whichever area you're in, you provide content that's valuable to your audience, and then you make sure that content is actually found, because if you make great content that isn't found, it's the same as making poor content, nobody pays attention to either. The first, organic, way is to make sure your videos are found towards the top of the searches.

Then there is the paid way. Loads of brands are jumping on board with YouTube as an advertising opportunity now, simply because there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage uploaded by content creators every minute, so YouTube can't be filled up with content the way a platform like Facebook can, which has a finite reach in terms of its user base and the space available in people's feeds. We're all seeing more and more ads on those other platforms, but YouTube has so much content that you can still serve ads to your audience at a very low cost.

The issue is that a lot of brands take a spray and pray approach. They know that if someone skips within 30 seconds they don't pay, so they choose an enormously broad audience and see where the conversions land. We'd rather say that in terms of YouTube marketing, you pick where your demographic, your keywords, your competitors' audiences and your placements all overlap with each other, and that's where you place your ads. Your costs are lower, your conversions are more guaranteed, and you get better engagement on the channel, which matters because engagement and watch time is what ranks videos at the top of YouTube search. If you don't get the audience right, you won't get people to stick. So YouTube marketing is ads plus organic.

How do I use YouTube marketing?

Keeping this one short and sweet, come and talk to an agency with a reputation for producing results. We'll be able to rank you and we'll be able to push your ads, whatever size of brand you are.

Is YouTube good for marketing?

Yes, and the danger most brands and most people fall into is overthinking it as if there's a silver bullet, one channel, one way of getting to market. In many years of doing this, don't think in silos. YouTube, particularly a YouTube first strategy, is really good for marketing because it gets you in front of customers, raises awareness, generates a good return on investment, and gets you lots of click throughs. As part of the wider marketing mix, it delivers the best return of any channel online or offline at the moment.

People are also paying attention in a way they aren't with television. With TV, an ad is in the room, but you don't necessarily know who's watching or whether they're watching at all. YouTube is described as "lean in", people are actually paying attention, actually looking at the content.

The whole landscape of how we consume advertising media and messages has changed over the last decade. We're watching more and more video, more of it on mobiles, and YouTube is the best place for consuming that media, catching people who are already interested in what you're talking about.

How do I use YouTube marketing for my business?

It's an omni-channel approach, and it's particularly strong at the top of your funnel, for awareness, where it's killing it at the moment: getting in front of a large number of people for a lower cost, then measuring the result.

As an ex accountant, conversion is the thing that matters here. We can now truly measure the campaign conversion end to end, and the cost per conversion, so you can scale campaigns knowing that if you put x in, you'll get y out, fairly predictably, and build that into cash flow forecasts and stock planning. But it's great as part of an omni-channel approach, tied into all of your other social channels, not as a channel on its own.

If I could give a framework for how to use YouTube marketing, there are four steps. Number one, identify your avatar, the target market, the people you want to attract. Number two, make videos that are relevant for those people, message to market match. Number three, make videos to rank organically. Number four, make videos to run ads with. Follow those four steps, and with a fifth step of a multi-channel or remarketing approach across other platforms, your success could be close to guaranteed.

One of the advantages of working with an agency, or a media partner, like ours is exactly that focus on understanding your customer, the single most important thing you need to do before you start anything, because your customers are who you'll live or die by. One of the things becoming new in the SEO industry is that we have offered people the chance to rank their video at the top of YouTube search before we charge them, prove it works with one video first. You can't do that in SEO, nobody's going to promise you a page one, top three ranking for a competitive keyword and then charge you, because it could take months and months of work. What we've found is you can rank within a day, sometimes within hours, at the top of YouTube, and that's changing the way marketing works.

Is YouTube effective for marketing?

Yes, and one story makes the point well. On a call with a potential new client, a traditional media buying agency partner who runs TV, sponsorships and out of home, on the same call as us running YouTube and digital, said something brilliant to the client: the great thing with these guys at s.media and the YouTube side is that as a client you're going to learn so much more about your customers through the data than you'll ever have known before, and that helps him come back later with better out of home proposals, bus shelters, TV, sponsorships, because he'll understand the sweet spot customer far better through campaigns like these.

So is YouTube effective for marketing? Absolutely, because it helps in a much wider omni-channel way, understanding customer age, what they're watching, their habits, what videos and things they're interested in. It has a positive impact on everything else.

There's another example, a cycling holiday business. The client's perception was that his market was men in their 40s with disposable income, doing a more experiential type of holiday. When we ran the ads, it turned out to be a younger demographic, which completely transformed his marketing going forward, because it was a market sector he hadn't even considered. Going into a campaign with an open mind helps you discover new avenues for your customer base.

What are the benefits of using YouTube?

Understanding your customer and your audience better, and using that data to drive other decisions in the business, is one big benefit, and there are also wider SEO benefits worth touching on.

Google has openly said it wants to be predominantly video, and said, three years ago, that it expected to be mostly video by 2020. It hasn't achieved that yet, because people aren't making enough video. There are hundreds and hundreds of hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, but most of the content creators doing that are trying to monetise their own channels, it isn't business to business or business to consumer, ad-worthy content. What we're finding is that putting the right content in front of the right people at the right time makes a huge difference to brand awareness and website traffic.

If we can rank a video at the top of YouTube for the right keywords, we're seeing those videos appear at the top of normal organic Google results almost straight away. People in SEO don't tend to recommend video, partly because they don't want to see video pull SEO budget away from them, but Google sees video as such an important part of the puzzle. Here's an example: best barbecue. I'm 49 years old, looking for a really top end barbecue, prepared to spend a significant amount, and I'm going to do my research. I'm not going to buy that barbecue off a text based listing, I'd have clicked a few ads, done some research, but now I'd go to YouTube and watch videos of the different barbecues in use. A 20 year old wouldn't be looking for the same barbecue I am now.

If we both clicked the same text based listing, we'd probably spend a similar amount of time reading it, because it takes a similar amount of time to digest a page. But with video, Google is measuring exactly how long I spend watching, how far through I get, where I disengage, and adding that data to my personal profile. Google, along with Amazon and Apple, wants to get to proper voice search, AEO, answer engine optimisation. We might get there in three, five, ten, twenty years, I don't know exactly when, but the only way Google can get there is by measuring engagement against the questions people are actually asking, because a 20 year old and I asking "what's the best barbecue" need different answers, and right now Google, Apple and Amazon can't work that out. Video is the bridge between text based search and answer engines, which is why it matters so much to make videos that answer people's questions.

Should I use a specialist YouTube ads agency?

Yes, if you've got the budget and you need the help, you should use a specialist agency, because it's a lot more complicated than it first appears, more complicated than pressing a boost button on Facebook.

We are a specialist YouTube media planning, targeting and buying partner, and we built a system a couple of years ago called IDAH, intelligence driven ad results, essentially programmatic buying with human intelligence layered on top, that's continually adjusting people's campaigns. The issue, particularly on the display network and YouTube, is that there are billions if not trillions of placements available, and Google will happily serve your content into that entire ocean unless you know what you're doing. Unless you can place it properly to get conversions, you can throw money away. We've been lucky enough to have clients spend millions through the agency over the years, and that's let us test, learn and optimise the placement opportunities. If someone wants to run YouTube ad campaigns themselves off their own Google Ads account, as Facebook agencies often try, they can, but they'll likely waste money without specialist help.

Can I set up a YouTube marketing campaign myself?

Yes, you can, but it isn't easy, and the setting up isn't really the hard part, the ongoing management is what gets complicated.

Google's objective is to get you to open your wallet and spend as much as you can, and you will get phone calls from Google's own team suggesting things to try, with that same objective behind them. A prime example is the conversion action called "maximise conversions". You'd think choosing that as your objective means Google will get you the most conversions, actually it translates as "please spend all of my budget". Set it at £100 a day and it will spend £100 a day, but that doesn't mean it maximises your conversions, it maximises the opportunity to show your ads, not necessarily to the right audience. Having worked on Google for 20 years, there's still probably half of it that isn't fully understood, anyone who claims to understand it all must be exaggerating, but understanding how it works and how to tweak campaigns matters hugely.

You've got to let it learn, and the biggest killer of these campaigns is tinkering. If you're a Facebook advertiser you'll recognise this, going in and adjusting things hour by hour, trying to force results, trying to wrangle this massive beast of Google. You can't do that, you need to let it learn and be patient.

Why don't many people use YouTube advertising yet?

There are two main reasons: people are still more focused on Facebook, because it's been the predominant platform in recent years, and it's more difficult to run ads on YouTube because you need to make videos, whereas on Facebook you can run an image with some text.

The barrier to entry is making the video in the first place, and beyond that, people who do try it often go it alone without the experience to make it convert, without the patience, and having got nothing out of it, they walk away thinking it doesn't work. If you structure the ads properly, get the hooks and calls to action right, and target your audience correctly, you still need the patience, the budget and a plan, because unlike Facebook you can't just press boost and expect an immediate result. It needs time. That said, because not everyone is using it, the opportunity is enormous, virgin ground.

The barrier to entry, producing the video, is much easier than people think, and we've talked about that on other videos. YouTube is a proper advertising platform, Facebook can feel a bit more like a cheat with the boost button, so it takes proper marketers who understand how to build and manage campaigns, but the results are far superior. You get out what you put in.

How is YouTube advertising going to affect the marketing industry this year?

An enormous shift, once people understand they can rank video quickly and that Google will let their content sit at the top of search almost immediately while it tests that content, with the good content staying there.

A creative director at one of the bigger creative agencies in the north of England said this is exactly what he's looking for, because everybody's content gets a chance at the top spot, and it's then down to how good that content is. If it's great and engaging, orders, engagement, likes and subscribers all follow. That's the shift that's going to happen once people grasp that they can rank a video at the top within 24 hours and then maintain its position while driving conversions with ads.

There are already signs this is starting to move, with around 16 proposals out in January alone globally for brands wanting to go on Facebook and YouTube, because they're starting to see the benefits and hear about it from others. Marketing departments are increasingly being tasked with lead generation and proving return on investment, as the wider industry shifts away from agencies and in-house resource gets lost through market pressures. When that all gets reinvented, people will be looking for new channels, and YouTube will be at the top of that list.

Are lots of businesses moving from Facebook to YouTube advertising?

Honestly, probably not yet, because a lot of businesses still don't fully understand the opportunity that exists.

If you're watching this and want to learn more, subscribe to the channel, there's plenty of content on it and on the website. There are some brands realising it's an opportunity, but not enough are actually grasping it. In the US market, where a lot of work happens, there are more brands going straight into YouTube, probably a year or two ahead of the UK. In Italy, the market is probably about five years behind the UK, so that shift will happen even later there. What people may not realise is that on YouTube you only pay if someone watches past 30 seconds, so you get a lot of brand awareness for free, which isn't the case on Facebook. If you're only doing Facebook, moving as soon as possible captures a first mover advantage.

YouTube marketing and advertising strategy, who's the best?

There isn't a single "best", because YouTube should be part of the wider omni-channel approach to your marketing and advertising strategy, not treated as uniquely better or worse than any other channel on its own.

It's worth explaining why this is such a strange question in the first place. All of the questions answered in this video are questions people actually type into Google. If you search "YouTube marketing and advertising strategy" and scroll to the "people also ask" section, you'll see the questions Google is recording every time someone types one in. I'll be honest, I sometimes type in an absolutely horrendous question just because at some point somebody's trying to work out how to answer it on the other end, a bit like when kids get hold of Siri and ask it ridiculous things, all of that gets recorded into the back end of the algorithm. Once those questions start coming up in search, that's the opportunity: to answer real questions people are asking, in video format.

So who's the best? We'd like to think we're one of the best. There are many good agencies across the globe, and we're partnering with a number of them, trying to build a network of the best in YouTube marketing worldwide. If you're watching this far through and you're one of those agencies, get in touch. But really, the best are simply those able to get the conversions and make it work consistently.