YouTube™ Marketing For Dummies®
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968030
ISBN 978-1-119-54134-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-54135-6 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-54136-3 (epub)
YouTube is one of the most versatile and exciting marketing platforms available today. This book is your guide to putting YouTube to work for you so that you can grow your business, tell the world about your brand, generate leads to sell more products or services, and reach new audiences who want to hear from you.
Chances are, you’ve already tried traditional marketing approaches, such as print, radio, TV advertising, or digital marketing. Maybe you’ve run some ads on Facebook or even set up a paid search campaign with Google. YouTube is often one of the last digital channels that marketers tackle. Why? Well, making video seems hard, and YouTube is pretty vast, so where do you start?
With this book, of course! This book demystifies the idea that YouTube is more challenging as a marketing platform and provides you with all the answers to your questions.
One thing is certain: YouTube is an indispensable part of the marketing mix. It’s the world’s largest video platform, has 400 hours of content uploaded every minute, and more than 1 billion visitors every month. You’re a marketer, and the people you want to reach are on YouTube.
Even though YouTube offers one of the most sophisticated advertising platforms in the world, this book is a simple explanation of the key concepts, principles, and approaches to using YouTube to your advantage. This book isn’t meant to be read from cover to cover (although you can if you want!) but instead used as a reference that you can dip in and out of, depending on what you need to achieve.
I’ve written this book for all types of marketers, from the marketer who works in the marketing department at a Fortune 500 company, to the independent business owner who wears every hat, to the student of marketing just getting familiar with the landscape.
To help you navigate this book and absorb the key concepts, I did follow a few conventions:
www.youtube.comYouTube is improving the platform every day, and so things may change, but don’t worry: The principles stay the same, even if a button has moved. This book is as much about the theory and practical principles behind how to use YouTube successfully as it is about providing a step-by-step guide to navigate YouTube’s tools and features.
I’ve made a few assumptions about you as I’ve written this book:
Icons in this book are used to mark important things along the way:
The Tip icon calls out my top tips and shortcuts for success,.
The Remember icon identifies key concepts and foundational principles that you’ll want to keep in mind.
The Warning icon appears to warn you about common mistakes — and the threat of certain doom.
The Technical Stuff icon marks high-level information that you don’t have to know to understand the concept at hand (but you may be interested in it!). Feel free to skip any text marked with this icon.
In addition to what you’re reading right now, this product also comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that gives you pointers on responding to comments on your videos, optimizing your SEO, using thumbnails and titles to get more clicks, using YouTube as a marketing channel, and creating viral videos. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “YouTube Marketing For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
You don’t need to read this book from start to finish, although you can. Instead, you can scan the table of contents and pick where it makes sense to start. Here are a few more suggestions:
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Discover why YouTube is an important marketing channel.
Choose how you’ll use YouTube for your business and marketing needs.
Distinguish between advertising and content strategies.
Make campaign choices and determine your budget.
Create your marketing brief to guide all your efforts.
Develop actionable insights about your target audience.
Chapter 1
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
An advertiser: The simplest lane a marketer can choose is to be an advertiser on YouTube, meaning that you make ads that run in paid media on YouTube. Advertising is a great place to start, especially if you’re a marketer with existing video ad creative who wants to test how YouTube can work for you.
Choose this approach if you have some video ads you’d like to run on YouTube or, want to create some video ads to test. (Refer to Chapter 7 to get your campaign started.)
When using YouTube as a marketing channel, you can do certain things that will help increase your video’s chances of success. A handful of key components to the secret formula include
Don’t even think about making an ad or a video until you’ve written a brief. A brief is a guiding document that marketers use to collect all the necessary information to create a successful ad or piece of content.
In the brief, you answer questions about what you want to achieve, how you’d like to go about executing your marketing program, and who you want to target — which is perhaps the most important part of a brief,. As you create your brief, you’ll uncover deep insights about your target audience to inform your marketing. (Chapters 2 and 3 cover everything you need to know about creating a brief.)
When you know who you want to reach and what you want to communicate to them, you’ll be able to use the targeting options YouTube makes available to speak to exactly the people you want to reach. You won’t have to waste your media spend reaching people you don’t want to talk to.
After your campaign or first video is live, something magical happens: Every day you’ll be able to learn something new about your audience by looking at the rich analytics available and you’ll be able to talk to the people watching your ads and videos, hearing directly from them. (For more on how to use analytics, see Part 6) This information helps you make choices that make your work on YouTube and all your marketing efforts better every day. You can use the gems you uncover in your reports to develop new briefs for your marketing campaigns and content strategies.
It’s a competitive time for marketers. With the proliferation of digital channels, the bar has been raised for the quality of ads and content, and because there’s so much noise, you need to work harder than ever to stand out. Marketers have many opportunities throughout the course of an average day to reach their audience, but it takes quality work to truly stand out in a sea of messages bombarding people every day.
Decent ads aren’t good enough anymore; they have to be great ads. Marketers must work hard to deliver a compelling ad that catches your attention, stands out, has a clear message, and makes some kind of connection with the viewer so that they’ll think or feel or do something afterwards. The good news is that video is the best medium to make truly great ads with. Sure, video takes a bit more work than a static image and some text, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then video must be virtually priceless.
The Google Ads solution, described in Chapter 7, is possibly the most powerful advertising platform on the planet and is your gateway to uncovering what works best in your video ads.
Just like ads, there’s a lot of competition for content viewership. Think of all the moments during the day where you reach for your phone to read the news, watch a video, check a social channel, post a photo, comment on something, or message a friend. Hundreds of content moments occur throughout the course of a day, and people have become experts at sifting the wheat from the chaff. Their thumbs and eyes work in perfect partnership to merciless scroll past hundreds of pieces of content, slowing to dwell on only the best. The writing of headlines has become an expert skill close to a form of art, designed to catch your eye and maximize the chances of a click and more time spent.
Time spent is the currency of attention, the very thing marketers are trading in. Chapter 9 can help you develop a content strategy that makes sense for your organization.
It’s no surprise that making video is crucially important to success with YouTube! Chapter 11 details how you can get started making videos, avoid pitfalls, and produce something that delivers. Making videos has never been easier as most people have the necessary equipment right in their pockets. Today’s smartphones have such capable cameras that you can make movies with them.
If you’re not familiar with creating video, head to Chapter 12, which gives you options for how you can get help from others to create content for your channel.
Marketers are handling more channels than ever, with the added challenge that digital channels are giving daily feedback, while constantly changing and evolving. Magazines are, for the most part, the same as they’ve always been, with the basic rules of how print marketing works remaining the same for decades. The only way to succeed with digital channels, especially the most powerful and advanced digital channels like YouTube, is to actively manage them. That process requires understanding them, experimenting with them, and regularly reevaluating and maximizing your usage of all the tools they offer.
I’ve seen clients, time and again, who think that a small burst of effort to kick-start their YouTube channel will be sufficient. They then move on to other projects, revisiting YouTube a year later. Succeeding on YouTube just doesn’t work like that. (What does?)
An even worse crime is a common misconception by even the biggest clients that a good strategy for YouTube is to use it as a repository for their TV ads. Sure, you can post your TV ads to YouTube, but it won’t do a lot without a media spend behind them. Even then, creative made for YouTube will always perform better than creative made for TV.
These misconceptions about YouTube mean that many marketers leave a ton of opportunity to effectively reach their audience on the table. Don’t neglect YouTube and let it become a wasteland. If you have the time, you can be doing something every day to make your YouTube efforts even better than the previous day. Chapter 15 walks through the key considerations for active channel and community management.
Knowing what success looks like is crucial. Because YouTube offers so many options to marketers, you can easily be overwhelmed and to think you must do everything. Knowing what success looks like helps you make smart choices and get started without biting off more than you can chew.
The idea here is not to do everything possible on YouTube. The point is to make choices based on what you want to achieve for your business and use YouTube to achieve just that. I’ve had clients who assume that they need to make lots of videos about everything they do at their company, create playlists, work with YouTubers, come up with content series ideas. In reality, all they needed was to make some simple, effective ads to help promote a new product they were releasing that quarter.
It’s easy to want to tackle everything, but instead start by asking “What does success look like?” Success may be
Knowing what success looks like avoids the mistake that measurement is often forgotten. You’ve made a video, worked hard, posted it, and then you moved on to something else on your list. A few weeks go by, and you think maybe you should check to see how things are going. The best marketers make looking at the data a daily task, but more than that, they think about how they can turn that data into meaningful actions and how things like video views and subscriber rates correspond to their marketing and business goals.
A common mistake big brands make is thinking that the important metric they should measure is how many times their video was viewed. Sure, that metric may be helpful for success, but did it drive business results? Marketers should have only one goal: drive business results. How many YouTube video views you have doesn’t matter. What matters is that you drove leads or delivered to customer needs. Spending time in measurement is the key for all marketers to be truly successful at delivering results.
You should spend at least half of your time on YouTube Analytics and tools like Google Ads. Think of these tools as a mine, and every day you have the chance to uncover golden nuggets of information that can change the way you market and deliver amazing results. If you know what business success looks like and if you look every day at the data and results, you’ll be able to connect these two and become a master of making YouTube work for you. Every day is an opportunity to uncover gold.