Advertising on YouTube
Marketing on YouTube is a great way to attract users to your message in an engaging, cost-effective way. This article covers the basics of how to put ads on YouTube, as well as best practices for targeting and optimizing content to serve relevant, engaging messages that won’t make your YouTube ads annoying or intrusive.
Make sure your YouTube account is set up for business.
A good way to set up a YouTube account that will be used by multiple people is to make sure your account is set up for business. Simply sign into YouTube and under “settings,” make sure to click “create a new channel,” then choose “use as business or another name” and create!
Pro tip: If you have a Google account, Google automatically gives you a personal YouTube account. Just be sure to adjust your settings to a Brand Account.
Who is your target audience?
YouTube ad targeting gives you access to your channel’s analytics when you create an account for business. The analytics tab contains stats directly related to your channel and includes information such as audience behaviors, view counts, average watch time, revenues generated, etc.
This feature helps you to answer questions such as: Where/When are your videos being viewed? What is your viewer’s age range?
While analytics and quantitative metrics are helpful, there is still much to be learned by simply reading the comments section. While this isn’t always fun to do, the comments section provides information from a variety of different viewpoints that can help with informing different aspects of your marketing strategy.
Check out what your competitors are up to.
If you want to know what’s hot, then take a look at what your competitors have been posting. Competitive analysis is the key to driving a successful YouTube channel. Identify which videos are capturing the most attention, and watch them to get a sense of what kind of content your audience is interested in. Apply this same strategy to your own channel, and don’t be afraid to read your comments section. It’s okay to respond to viewer feedback – it shows that you’re not afraid to actively engage with your community.
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!
The first rule of SEO is making sure you have an appealing title that is relevant to your video. YouTube titles can contain up to 70 characters, but less than 60 is typically recommended in addition to an eye-catching thumbnail. The description should contain a short explanation of your video along with any links to your company’s website or additional social media pages. The description of your video can also contain up to 15 hashtags, which assist in making your content more searchable. However, YouTube guidelines state that any more than 15 hashtags in a single post may automatically be ignored by the YouTube search engine, so choose your hashtags wisely.
So what have we learned?
YouTube advertising is a great resource for promoting your business and allows for collaboration between employees by setting up your channel as a brand account. YouTube also offers analytics based on your channel and provides stats that include information based on audience behavior. While these points of data are useful, it is also helpful to do a little research of your own like reading your own comments and checking out the competition. By seeing what works (or doesn’t work) for competitors, you can identify trends that might work best for you. We’ve learned that the way you describe your videos is important, too. Your title and description should only contain keywords relevant to the video topic and include common search words that will get you more clicks. Once you have your channel up and running, it will require more than just constant monitoring. Practice some of the steps mentioned above to help grow your channel and keep your message relevant.
