Advertising on YouTube is often one of the last steps that marketers undertake.Not only are people scared of the assumed effort it takes to produce a video, but are also often not aware of the power and reach of this medium if it’s used correctly. After my colleague Elodie recently took part in the YouTube Brand Academy, I wanted to highlight 5 reasons why video campaigns should be a part of any successful digital marketing strategy and why “I don’t have time and money for this” is no longer an excuse.
Massive reach
The first and probably most obvious reason is that YouTube has a gigantic reach on both desktop and mobile devices. In Australia alone, 48 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In the same time, 400 Twitter tweets contain a link to the video platform. According to the company’s own statistics the growth in watch time is up at least 50% year on year for three consecutive years. More than half of these views are coming from mobile, which opens up a lot of chances for advertisers as the shift to a “mobile-first world” is no longer a novelty to digital marketers.
Effective targeting to reach the right customers
It’s not only the massive reach that makes YouTube such an attractive advertisement platform. Reaching thousands of potential customers every day is great, but useless if they are not interested in your product. Thanks to specific methods like topic, affinity audience, keyword or placement targeting it’s easier than ever to show your ads to an audience that is actually interested in what you’re trying to sell. For a retailer of sports clothes, for example, it’s an easy task to advertise their products on the thousands of home-fitness-workout or clean-eating videos out there and thus reach the people most likely to be interested in their products.
Finding monetised videos
A little restriction that YouTube imposes on advertisers is the entitlement for video owners to not allow commercials on their content. If you are working with placement targeting and don’t know about this, you might be wondering why you have a long list of placements, but your ads aren’t showing. However, there are some tools available which can help you find and use only those videos which allow advertisements to be shown. This will not only save you a lot of time compared to your competitors who’ll need to sort it out manually. It also combines quantity and quality to make sure you get relevant traffic only.
Alternatives to conventional video production
Fortunately the days of needing months of planning and expensive video production are gone. Modern video production companies like Shootsta offer the rental of professional camera kits on a fixed plan, so you can do the filming and they’ll deal with the post-production to give your video the professional touch. With this mix of in-house production and outsourcing it’s no longer a costly and time consuming task to frequently produce videos about what’s going on in your business.
It’s a cost-effective solution
Finally, after having sorted out your video production and targeting, you’ll be surprised that video campaigns are a very cost-effective solution to spread your word. The average cost-per-view (avg. CPV) is mostly below $0.50, which makes this type of campaign much more affordable than the average Search or Display campaign.
Summing up, video campaigns on YouTube combine quality and quantity of reach for a reasonable price. No longer are videos “nice to have”; they should be a key element in every marketer’s digital strategy.