Chapter 1
YouTube in the Marketing Mix
IN THIS CHAPTER
Finding out about YouTube's power as a marketing channel
Deciding how you'll use YouTube
Distinguishing between brand, performance, advertising, and content
Discovering the secret formula for success
In this chapter, I demystify some misconceptions about YouTube as a marketing tool and explain why YouTube (along with Google search) is probably the most important and sophisticated marketing channel available to marketers today. Few other platforms offer the depth of potential offered by YouTube.
I also ask you to pick your lane to decide how you'd like to use YouTube in a way that's manageable for you, walk through the differences between advertising and content as marketing approaches, and show how YouTube will fit into your marketing calendar.
YouTube Is Important for Marketers
The first thing to know about YouTube as a marketing channel is that the people you'd like to talk visit YouTube anywhere from several times a month to several times a day.
The second thing to know is that they spend a lot of time on YouTube. People watching videos on YouTube are engaged, sometimes watching one video, sometimes staying for an hour or more watching many videos.
Third, they are receptive to messages. YouTube works hard to provide a great viewing experience while finding ways to provide advertising options to marketers that aren't overly intrusive. People vote with their eyeballs and attention, and poorly targeted ads or disruptive ad formats turn people off. YouTube knows that the ads must be a complementary experience to watching videos, or they risk losing audience.
YouTube is often the last channel marketers tackle because video requires a bit more effort than just an image, some text, and a link, but the potential to reach your audience with compelling video ads and content is well worth the effort.
YouTube is big and growing fast
YouTube is massive. With more than 1 billion users visiting the site every month and 400 hours of video content uploaded every minute, YouTube is more massive than you may at first think, especially when you consider that both those numbers are increasing. YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world, after, of course, its big brother Google.
People watch videos on YouTube on their computers at home, their tablets during dinner, on their mobile phones, with friends on a TV screen in the living room, and even on gaming consoles. YouTube is everywhere, and it's set to be (if it isn't already) the most watched format in the United States, beating out TV for time spent viewing.
The benefits of YouTube's big data
You may have read a lot of articles about the benefits of big data for marketers, but sometimes the term big data is used without it being really clear what it means. Big data can mean a few different things:
- Volume of data: A massive volume of data reveals things like audience content consumption habits and confirms them with the sheer volume. Think of YouTube as a giant survey where people are voting for the content they like every day. That's a powerful tool to have access to!
- Velocity of data: Velocity in big data means that enough data over a set period, often a short period, of time reveals when something is trending or emerging. For example, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) uses data from Google's search engine to help track flu outbreaks in the United States. The YouTube equivalent would be the trending videos pages, which uses data to float to the top the videos with the most velocity of views.
- Variety of data: Big data can simply mean variety. If YouTube is a survey tool, it's asking millions of questions every day about everything; what people want to watch, how and where they watch it, what makes it shareable, which devices they use, and more.
YouTube is so big, it has some of the biggest big data around. It has volume, velocity, and variety of data and uses learnings from its data to deliver advantages to marketers.
YouTube's big data helps deliver cost savings to marketers; you have the choice to reach specific audiences who will convert into a click or purchase best, ultimately benefitting from cost savings as you'll only be buying the media that works best for you. It is no longer the case that any part of your marketing campaign's performance is unknown.
You'll find efficiencies in the time it takes to create and execute marketing campaigns, tools, and features that do the thinking for you, such as where media should run, how much money should be spent to give the best return, and analyses of which creative works best and why. These features and options are born from deep research based on YouTube's big data repository. YouTube develops things like advanced audience targeting methods that are so sophisticated and yet easy to action, making your marketing budget work harder and more efficiently.
You also get access to constantly evolving tools that help you uncover insights about your audience, giving you a deeper understanding than in the past. YouTube comes with incredibly sophisticated analytics tools, developed from millions of experiments and tons of feedback, to learn what you can do to deliver more results. YouTube has used its big data to create the simplest solutions for marketers to get the maximum results.
YouTube's place in your marketing mix
Whether you're an established marketer or just starting out, it's important to regularly review all the channels available to you, decide whether they can help deliver to your goals, and choose how you'll spend your time, efforts, and budget.
Many marketers, especially small businesses and independents, may start with digital channels like Facebook and Instagram. These channels provide easy, self-serve solutions to get started and typically require only simple creative, such as an image, text, and link. This simplicity is great, but sometimes YouTube is left until last to be explored and exploited by marketers, primarily because creating video takes a bit more work. As evidenced by the fact that Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels are increasingly turning to video as part of their offering, it's rapidly becoming clear that video is a required component of any marketer's plan. Given that video is becoming an essential in all marketing plans and YouTube is the most powerful video platform available, YouTube needs to be a part of your mix.
Sure, you have to make a lot of choices. You need to make decisions about your media spending and production budget, work through your resources, and decide what video you can make. Fortunately, throughout this book, I break out everything you need to consider into easy-to-manage steps so that you can easily make YouTube a part of your marketing mix.
Using YouTube in Marketing
As a marketer, YouTube gives you choices. You can use YouTube to create more leads, let people know about your brand, solve your customer service inquires, and more. The opportunities are endless.
Advertising versus content marketing
YouTube offers both an advertising platform, a place to run ads in paid media, and a content platform, a place to post your video content for people to discover and watch.
Think of advertising as a classic ad served up when you're watching another video; it may be a short ad, running in paid media, that tells you about a product or service and encourages you to buy or act. You may like the ad; you may not. Part 2 details everything you'll need to know about advertising on YouTube.
Think of content as something you may choose to watch, such as a recipe video or a comedy skit. You're probably watching the video because you want to, not because a marketer paid to make you watch it. Part 3 covers content strategy development.
The best way to maximize YouTube as a marketing channel is to tackle both advertising and content. You can simply run ads, or you can make great content, or you can do both. If you do both, they can work in tandem and deliver a marketing channel essentially unlike any other.
With the proliferation of digital channels and the increasing demands from consumers for smart, compelling, targeted ads, the best marketing messages manifest increasingly as formats and creative that feel more like content than ads. Essentially, great ads are more like content. The best advertisers make ads that are so good they don't feel like an ad,; they feel like content, and people choose to watch them
To keep things simple, I break down how to run advertising on YouTube in Part 2 and how to make content for YouTube in Part 3. I treat these topics as two separate things altogether. Just know that the best marketers make ads that are as good as content.
Picking a lane
You may think the first step in getting started on YouTube is setting up a YouTube channel, but planning how you want to use YouTube can save you time, money, and effort, and should be your first task.
Before you get started, you need to pick a lane. Are you
