I’ll start this post by stating clearly that I love YouTube. As a consumer, I probably watch more on YouTube than any other network or platform. I get a huge amount of value from it. And I’m not alone, with 2.7 billion monthly users, it’s officially the second-most visited website globally after Google.
Despite providing easy and instant access to such an audience, there is still a vast amount of untapped potential from both an organic and an advertising perspective, with many brands still putting greater amounts of spend into platforms such as search and Meta.
I find this mad, because we’re essentially talking about the ability to run TV level campaigns, but at any budget to anyone you want to target, at any time. Yet, YouTube advertising still gets relatively little attention.
So what about B2B marketers, and should there be space within your performance marketing strategy for YouTube? I absolutely believe there should be.
For starters, here’s a few reasons why:
Audience growth – build a highly engaged audience with content that proves your value
Targeting – get directly in front of your potential customers in a wonderfully tactical way
Education – educate potential customers and take your thought leadership beyond LinkedIn
Adding to the above, with YouTube you have the chance to build a real asset. Regularly publishing content and building a subscriber base means you’re building an audience of people that are going to keep coming back for more content.
Beyond the typical advertising objectives, the ability to build a long-term audience for your business / client is such a great secondary dimension to advertising on YouTube.
And on the subject of subscribers, we recently ran a campaign for a US client and acquired subscribers at $0.36 each. Now, compare that against the cost per clicks on LinkedIn (just as an example), and you can see the long-term value YouTube can offer. Nice!
If the above has made you consider the platform or start thinking about how it could work for you, we’ve listed out some handy starting points below to help get you started.
KPIs and objectives
Before you start commissioning new content and investing money, you really need to step back and work out what you are trying to achieve. Ultimately any marketing activity needs to tie back to a business challenge that you are looking to solve.
Are you trying to build new audiences, improve awareness, educate potential customers, or drive direct action? All of these objectives will require a different approach, different creative, and different creative.
Once you’ve answered this question, you can select the best KPIs for you and also start to plan your content and approach with your end goal in mind.
A quick word on selecting KPIs…even if you’re trying to improve awareness, always pick something tangible. Think new subscribers or watch hours over impressions. Pick a KPI that means something.
Content and what to test
Clearly one of your biggest considerations is going to be content.
There are hundreds of ways to approach this, a lot of which again needs to tie into your goals but also your budgets and available resources.
You’ll have seen a lot of brands repurposing big budget TV ad campaigns on YouTube, right through to smaller businesses producing effective and engaging content on a shoestring.
Our experience certainly leans into the fact that the production level doesn’t matter as much as the message. Similarly, having a big budget video with one edit and no ability to experiment with different cuts, is almost useless when it comes to driving an effective campaign.
Our priority would always be to sacrifice production budget for great messaging, the ability to experiment with edits, and of course having plenty of budget left for promotion.
Ad formats
Following closely on from the above, you’ll need to consider your ad placements and ad formats. On Youtube there’s a lot of choice, from bumper ads, to shorts, to mastheads and beyond. All of which again, require a slightly different approach.
Now, if you read the Google marketing material, they’ll proudly tell you that you can use the same creative and allow the platform to repurpose and reformat across all placements.
I’m not so sure this is a good idea, and in my view (and experience!) you need to think carefully about what content is going to work best for each placement. A great YouTube short is not going to make a great bumper ad.
Targeting methods
This is where the magic really begins on YouTube, with the ability to be hugely strategic with how you target your campaigns.
Whilst other platforms are losing their granularity (ahem, Meta), YouTube still provides advertisers the opportunity to really hone in on their audience in a brilliantly manual way. You can of course choose more automated targeting methods, but it’s nice to have the option to build your targeting out manually if you wish to do so.
Let’s think about a typical B2B scenario for a moment. In many cases, most B2B brands have got a reasonably long sales cycle and customer education forms a big part of the game. In most sectors, there’s a wealth of related content that your customers will be looking at to keep them informed. This could be tuition videos, online training, or relevant podcasts.
If you’re trying to advertise and reach the same audience, this becomes instantly possible via channel placements, or event targeting specific videos to place your ads. This alone presents an amazing opportunity to get in front of your audience early on in the sales cycle.
I very much hope this post has given you a bit of food for thought, and if you want to talk through YouTube marketing then drop us a line here for a chat.
Happy advertising!
