With YouTube officially being bigger than broadcast television, YouTube’s ad space is one of the best places for your brand’s best promotional content to be deployed. These ads are 15-20 seconds in duration and serve as a snappy sell and impressive introduction to your product or service. They are skippable or non-skippable, either playing before a video or midway through a video that’s 10 minutes long. Owing to their prominent placement and quick nature, pre-roll ads are also the perfect opportunity to add a call-to-action (CTA) to capitalize on the viewer’s attention. Since YouTube sells space for these pre-roll ads on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, it’s very important that you make sure what you’re paying for is worth it, for you and those engaging with your brand.

Get off on the Right Foot

Statistics show that viewers are 23 times more likely to subscribe to your channel, share your brand video, or watch more by your brand if they watch your ad to completion, and are 10 times more likely to do so even if they skip or don’t watch the whole of it.

Getting off on the right foot means getting maximum benefits and avoiding as many hurdles as possible. You have to pack your business ideas into a short video advert, plan and execute its delivery, and make sure the CTA is effective enough to pay off for you.

How can you make sure your Youtube ad hits the mark and that your content meets its target audience? The key is proactive planning (and post-production tweaking, which we’ll talk about at the end). At every step of the way, your content needs to be catered to the consumer. The searcher’s search must be satisfied. That’s really what online advertising is all about.

Even if something comes up at the last minute that makes you realize the video ad isn’t geared toward the goal, it’s worse to deploy your content as-is to save time and money (“But we’ve already done the work, so let’s go ahead with it!”). Instead, factor in the new information and redirect your YouTube marketing strategy. The goal of this sort of content should be making sure your consumers engage with your brand.

Getting off on the right foot also means being way ahead of your competitors by figuring out your needs and your audience’s needs beforehand.

To get ahead of your competition, market research is vital. If your YouTube ad is one that turns off viewers, hence making them want to turn it off, then all your effort is for nothing.

However, consumer traits are the key factor you need to study before planning even a single second of an online ad. Let’s say your CTA is enticing, and it’s something that a member of your audience actually really wants – that won’t matter if you lose them because of something that doesn’t align with how they like their content presented. Make sure to focus not only on your audience’s product needs but also on their interests, likes and dislikes.

Embrace the YouTube Audience

Moving from the planning stage to the execution stage is made possible (and easy) once you’ve mapped out what results you want from your ad. Asking yourself some questions can help you facilitate this transition. Think on logistical or strategic terms: do you want brand awareness, engagement or brand loyalty? Is the goal to direct traffic to your site? Is it leading to a survey or a sign-up page, or more details? It is better to stick to just one goal for each ad.

The next step is to figure out how to best achieve this goal. There are some important factors that directly influence your results. Be very careful in selecting language, location, demographics (age, gender, ethnicity, and so on), trends, interests, and keywords. If all of these are accurate to your target audience, your ad has a much better chance at success.

Ultimately, be cognizant of the fact that this is not a video strategy or any regular marketing strategy. This is a YouTube marketing strategy, and it will serve you best to embrace what YouTube is. You don’t want to have a typical ad on a platform where people choose to view content by independent, often risk-taking creators. Make sure your content fits in and feels more created than generated.

Your video could be funny, weird, conversational, but above all, audiences need to be able to relate to it and it needs to be authentic. Viewers are extremely quick to identify brands that come across as forced and awkward, and it doesn’t end well for them. The best-case scenario would be memes absolutely obliterating the campaign’s legitimacy but more often than not these campaigns end up ignored and unsuccessful.

Focus on the Donut

… and not on the hole.

There are many things that are great and noteworthy about your brand. But what is most relevant to your audience? What is it that will stand out above literally billions of hours of content watched on YouTube every day?

For this, brainstorm attributes of your product and service. These can go from the most obvious and direct (makeup, beauty, fashion) to more descriptive (hip, modern, varied) and then, finally, to what absolutely defines it. This could be its affordability, or that the brand vision is completely contemporary, so much so that it’s always a step ahead.

This will be what defines your strategy for YouTube advertising. Everything else is fluff or, keeping with the metaphor, the donut hole. What you communicate in those few seconds, for which you’re putting in weeks of work, must be unique to you. This is what a potential customer would be interested in finding out. Knowing what not to focus on is also important.

These tips will help put you on the most grounded and clear path to finding out how to advertise on YouTube. Make sure you use advertising statistics to the fullest and track both customer interactions and the performance of your ads. This is information that you funnel into the feedback loop – an essential part of any task or project. Use it to guarantee continued success for your brand and your content. And you can always get in touch with us here at BluLux Media if you want to create YouTube ads for your business.