On YouTube, people can discover videos in various ways (for example, by searching on the YouTube search page, clicking suggested videos on the watch page, or choosing a video from the homepage feed). You can use YouTube to advertise more effectively to people who are searching for your product or brand.
- Connect with your audience: Ads that play on or run next to YouTube videos can help you connect with potential customers in a unique and memorable way. You can be personal, share your expertise with the world, or put the camera on yourself and explain how your product or service can benefit your audience.
- Reach the right audience: Reach your customers on YouTube by topics, keywords, or demographics, like "women under 35."
- Create a campaign in only a few minutes: Create your Google Ads account, set up a campaign, and reach your audience.
- Measure your success: Find out if you're reaching the right audience. Check your Google Ads account to track views, costs, and budget details. Visit the "Analytics" tab in your YouTube account to learn more about your viewers. For example, you can see which videos your customers are watching and for how long.
YouTube's unique combination of video access, sharing, and community creates an unmatched opportunity for audience engagement. Sight, sound, and motion can elicit emotional involvement with content that you don't get with other forms of media.
You can facilitate discovery of and engagement (shares, comments, and likes) with your ads by promoting them using YouTube advertising and hosting them on a YouTube curated profile page.
Video creators can learn an enormous amount about their viewers through a sophisticated set of measurement tools, including YouTube Analytics. Audience demographics, levels of engagement, and performance compared to similar videos are just some of the data available. Video creators can use this data to drive larger and deeper viewership among a target audience.
Creative and ad quality guidelines
All ads and creatives must comply with Google’s advertising policies. When making your creatives, make sure to follow our guidelines to give your ads the best chance of reaching customers and driving performance for your business.
Ad formats for YouTube
Depending on your goal, you can use different ad formats built for YouTube. These ad formats are:
- Skippable in-stream ads
- Non-skippable in-stream ads
- Bumper ads
- In-feed video ads
- Masthead ads
- Responsive display ads
Reaching potential customers
There are many ways to reach people at moments that matter using YouTube ads. With a wide variety of targeting methods available to you, such as demographic groups, interests, placements, and remarketing lists, you can reach specific or niche audiences based on who they are, what they're interested in, and what content they're viewing.
Odds are that you’ve seen a ton of different advertisements on YouTube while watching your favorite channels, but have you ever thought about putting your own content out there to help advertise your business?
Anyone can easily advertise on YouTube, and there are a ton of benefits to doing so.
Still not convinced that YouTube advertising can work for you? Stay tuned for seven benefits of advertising on YouTube and how to do it effectively.
1. YouTube Display Advertisements Are More Engaging
Video advertisements are a great way to make your content memorable and more engaging for viewers. In a world where people are bombarded with ads at every turn, you want your content to stand out and really grab the viewer’s attention — what better way to do this than a YouTube video advertisement?
By creating an effective and memorable video ad, you are increasing customer engagement and hopefully ad recall — both of which are very beneficial to any growing business.
2. YouTube Has a Massive & Unique Reach
The size and reach of YouTube is unprecedented. YouTube has 2 billion users that view almost 5 billion videos every day — that’s right. 5 billion videos in one day. If that sounds huge — it’s because it is.
In fact, YouTube was the most downloaded iOS app of 2018, with more downloads than other popular platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. Plus, 50% more people are watching YouTube over Facebook when making a purchasing decision.
So, if you’re looking to reach a lot of people with your content, YouTube is clearly the way to go. Click here to learn more about 6 Industries that Must Have a Youtube Advertising Strategy.
3. Video Ad Targeting on YouTube Is Extremely Effective
You can use video ad targeting on other platforms, but it’s especially effective on YouTube. You can choose to go with contextual targeting which targets content that relates to your own content.
You can choose to go with demographic targeting which targets people based on set age and gender specifications. Other types of targeting include affinity audiences, in-market audiences, life events, video remarketing, and more.
4. Advertising on YouTube Is Easy to Track & Measure
Another one of the advantages of advertising on YouTube is that your ads are easy to track and measure.
This is a great way to see if your advertisement is really working and helps you avoid wasting money on an ad that just isn’t hitting the spot. Being able to see metrics and analytics on your ads helps you tweak and adjust things to improve the effectiveness of the ad. You can also see details on viewers of your ad to see who you are actually reaching.
5. YouTube Advertisements Are Affordable
Many small businesses assume that advertising on YouTube is beyond their ability since it’s a big platform with a big reach, so it must come with a big price tag. But that’s actually not true at all.
In fact, a typical video ad on YouTube will cost you between 10 cents and 30 cents per view depending on things like targeting and video quality. YouTube doesn’t even charge you for viewers that skip your ad after the first five seconds.
6. YouTube Offers Several Different Ad Formats
Speaking of skipping, YouTube offers several different ad formats that you can use interchangeably based on your business and advertising goals.
Here are some of the different ad formats available on the platform:
7. YouTube Display Advertising Will Get the Desired Results
Finally, of all the benefits of YouTube advertising, the biggest is that it can help you achieve your desired results.
Before you put out your first ad, you need to think about what you are trying to achieve from this ad.
Are you trying to increase brand image? Promote brand awareness? Convert on a sale? Retarget people who recently viewed your ads or products?
In any case, you can create YouTube content that helps you achieve all of these goals with the overall goal of getting more revenue into your pockets.
How to Effectively Advertise Your Business on YouTube
Now that you know all the amazing benefits of advertising on YouTube, you’re probably wondering how you can get started and begin to actually reap those YouTube advertising advantages.
So, how does YouTube advertising work? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Benefiting from YouTube advertising definitely isn’t automatically guaranteed, but is definitely possible if you put in some work and do it correctly.
That being said, here are several tips to follow to ensure that you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to YouTube advertising.
Prioritize Brand Safety
If you haven’t heard this term before, brand safety relates to the efforts to eradicate or demonetize YouTube videos and channels whose content is considered dangerous, illegal, and universally unacceptable to all platform users.
In a perfect world, these videos wouldn’t be on the platform in the first place. However, the size and speed of YouTube is a double-edged sword in this respect — although it’s a great way to be seen by a ton of people based on a wide range of content, there’s always the risk that something inappropriate content-wise can slip through the cracks. You definitely don’t want to advertise next to something unacceptable that will turn off viewers to your brand and harm your brand image.
That’s why brand safety is so important.
Brand safety involves creating “exclusion lists” of keywords, channels, and overall content that you want to avoid associating your brand with. Brand safety helps protect your image and reputation — both things that are priceless and virtually impossible to repair once damaged.
Don’t Forget About Brand Suitability
On the other hand, you also need to prioritize brand suitability. Brand suitability relates to the alignment of an individual brand’s advertising with content that makes sense for their image, targeted customer base, business objectives, and local markets.
Like brand safety, brand suitability involves creating exclusion lists of more tailored content that the brand wants to avoid based on the image that they are trying to portray to viewers.
For example, some areas of content that brands may want to avoid include political commentary, hot-button social issues, adult language, sexually-suggestive content, or comedy. While some of these areas of content might be perfectly suitable for one brand, they might not be for another one.
However, brand suitability also involves the use of “inclusion lists” of keywords, channels, and overall content that aligns well with the brand image and values. This is content that you want to appear next to as it will help to boost your brand image, brand awareness, customer engagement, and overall ad effectiveness.
Consult the Pros
We understand that all of this seems like a lot, especially if you’re new to the marketing game and are just trying to grow your brand the best you can.
That’s why it’s always a good idea to consult with experts in these areas, like Channel Factory.
Our YouTube advertising service offers amazing expertise and can help you tailor your YouTube advertising strategy, create amazing content, set up your exclusion and inclusion lists, and monitor ad effectiveness to make any necessary changes. While this may require a bit of an investment, the skills and knowledge that Channel Factory can bring to the table are well worth the price.
As you can see, there are numerous benefits to advertising on YouTube that makes it a great strategy for any business. That being said, you can only really benefit if you do so correctly by prioritizing brand safety and brand suitability. If you’re really looking for amazing results on YouTube, working with experts like the Channel Factory is definitely the way to go.
Get started today by downloading Channel Factory’s Ultimate Guide to YouTube here or contact us now.
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