1. Reach

As mentioned above, there are billions of people searching for things on YouTube every day: Currently, YouTube is more popular than any broadcast or cable network among users ages 18-49. That’s a pretty big chunk of the population. And YouTube offers advertisers the opportunity to learn all about these audiences and discover what they are most interested in. 

2. Influence

Many people use YouTube to research products or services they might be interested in subscribing to, signing up for, or even buying. Well over half of YouTube users—68%—have watched a video to help them make a purchase decision. 

But it’s not just Gen X and millennials using YouTube: One in three baby boomers uses YouTube to learn about a product or service. Google quoted Barbara, 58, saying, “I use YouTube to get information in a usable format — especially when it comes to techy things that I don’t want to ask my daughter to help with.”

3. Targeting

YouTube offers a vast majority of targeting options to reach your customers.

Some of these can be broad, like topic, demo, keyword, category, and placement.

They also offer three more in-depth audiences to help advertisers meet certain goals.

You can use affinity audiences if your goal is to raise brand awareness. YouTube built affinity audiences for businesses that currently run TV ads and that want to expand their reach and online presence. Use this Google-curated audience to reach potential customers at a scale. 

With that said, you can create custom affinity audiences that are more tailored to a brand. To build these custom audiences, you need to use a combination of interests, commonly visited URLs, types of places that people are interested in, or apps that the ideal customer may be using.

The second in-depth audience is an in-market audience; use this if the goal is to drive engagements. The people in this audience are actively considering buying a service or product like yours. Use this audience to help drive remarketing and to reach consumers close to completing a purchase.

Additionally, you can create a custom intent audience to help you reach new customers based on the terms they use to search for your product or service. 

The third specialized audience is a life event audience. Use this option if you want to reach potential customers when their purchasing behavior shifts due to a life milestone. You can target someone who just graduated from college, someone who is moving into a new home, a newlywed couple, and more. By understanding people’s behavior at moments like these, you’ll be able to tailor each piece of advertising to the right person. 

4. Multiple Ad Options

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to advertising and the same goes for YouTube.  Currently, there are five different types of YouTube ads you can run, all with a different purpose.

• TrueView In-Stream Ads is the most popular type of advertising; they appear before or after the video and are skippable after five seconds.
• TrueView Video Discovery Ads appear in the search results or Related Content section when someone is already watching a video. This format allows the user to navigate to watch the ad instead of them being forced to watch it.
• Pre-roll Ads are non-skippable ads and can be placed before, during, or after the video. Their ads are restricted to 15-20 seconds in length. This format may be annoying to the consumer, but are extremely valuable to the marketer—just make sure your message is clear and concise and captures the viewer’s attention.
• Bumper Ads are non-skippable six-second ads. Google encourages advertisers to use this format as a complement to a larger video campaign. Create a bumper ad when you want to tease a brand announcement, amplify your current longer-form videos, or echo your message to users with a message or product update.
• Outstream Ads are disguised as a native ad that usually appear on partner sites or within apps outside of the YouTube platform. Use this when you want to increase brand awareness.

5. Cost

Unlike paid search, where an advertiser pays for each click of an ad, YouTube uses a variety of cost options based on the formats described above.

• TrueView In-Stream Ads operate with a cost-per-view model. This means you pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your video (or for the duration of the ad if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or interacts with your video, whichever comes first.
• TrueView Video Discovery Ads operate similarly to a cost-per-click model. You only pay when viewers choose to watch your ad by clicking on your thumbnail.
• Pre-roll Ads—the non-skippable ads—operate with a cost-per-thousand-impressions model. You pay based on impressions. This type of ad uses target CPM bidding, so you pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times.
• Bumper Ads also use the CPM bidding model described above.
• Outstream Ads operate with a similar bidding model of the bumper and pre-roll ads, but with a slight variation. You’re charged for these ads based on viewable cost-per-thousand impressions (vCPM), so you’ll only be charged when someone sees your video for two seconds or more.

Now, that you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering what kind of budget to start out with.  We recommend starting out with at least $1,000 per month when entering the YouTube advertising space.  

Beyond that, we’ll monitor the campaign(s), make adjustments as needed based on your company’s goals, and determine if the budget needs to be increased further. 

If you are curious about learning more, give us a call or check out our more in-depth article on YouTube Audience Targeting.

Some of these options are fairly broad, like demographics, topics, or interests. Others, like keywords and placements, are a bit more specific.

Finally, there are some very specific targeting methods: affinity audiences, in-market audiences, and life events. These last three are the best to use to create a successful YouTube ad campaign.

Keep reading to dig into these audiences and find out how they can best be used.

1. Life Events

Within the Google platform, anybody can target a user based on age and gender, but adding a life event can set you apart from your competitors. Life event targeting reaches potential customers when they are going through a major life milestone. For example, if you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, instead of only setting an age range, you can also target people who are about to graduate and could be looking for a new job.

Google gathers data based on a user’s search queries to determine what is happening or about to happen in their lives. There are many categories to choose from on the campaign dashboard, including business creation, college graduation, home renovation, job change, marriage, moving, new pet, purchasing a home, or retirement.  Additionally, this type of targeting is exclusive for YouTube and Gmail campaigns, which gives you an edge over your competition.

2. Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences are primarily used for building brand awareness. In fact, this type of audience was defined the same way TV audiences are defined because advertisers love using this audience on TV advertisements to help drive offline actions or purchases among their audience.  So, Google created a similar audience targeting option in order to expand both reach and presence online at an efficient price.

Currently, Google has a large list of predefined audiences to reach your potential customers on a large scale. These audiences include anything from banking and finance to media and entertainment to vehicles and transportation. Just like in life event targeting, each category has an additional drop down to get even more targeted.

3. In-Market Audiences

An in-market audience is the best choice if your goal is to drive engagements. It is a way to connect with the people who are actively researching your products and services on YouTube, Google Display, or within the Search Network. Think With Google says, “In-market audiences can drive incremental conversions, helping you to connect with consumers as the last step before they make a purchase decision.”

These can be defined anywhere from apparel and accessories to event tickets or travel; each comes with additional drop downs for more specific targeting. Google offers a predefined list of in-market audiences which you can download here.

Digital Strike Bonus Tip: Customize your audience!

Another way to really target your intended audience in your campaigns is to build a custom affinity or custom intent audience. A custom affinity audience reaches people who are still in the research phase. To build a successful affinity audience, you need to use a combination of interests, commonly visited URLs, types of places that your audience maybe visiting or have shown interest in, or apps that they might be using.

A custom intent audience reaches people who are further along in the sales funnel and who are about to make a purchase decision. To build a custom intent audience, you need a list of keywords as well as a list of commonly visited URLs. Google recommends focusing on 300-500 general keywords to reach as many people as possible.

To get the most out of your YouTube campaign, make sure you’re leveraging these types of audiences in order to raise more brand awareness or encourage someone to complete an engagement on your site.

A professional writer might be able to transition between writing for social media to a blog post to email more easily, but if you’re a small business owner doing it all yourself, it’s difficult to know what to do for each platform.

Let’s focus on writing for social media and email for now, since those are the ways you speak directly to your customers.

What is the best way to communicate on social media? What makes sense for email?

Thankfully, you don’t have to keep the channels completely separate, because they work together pretty well.

Social media is usually used for quick hits of information and spreads your company’s personality and awareness. Email is typically longer content that leads to conversions.

Let’s look at the writing techniques that you can use to succeed at both social media and email.

Tips for writing for email and social media

As a small business owner, any time you can combine tasks or “kill two birds with one stone” is the way you want to go because there’s a lot on your plate. Let’s look at several writing tips that will work for creating both email and social media content.

Brevity is the soul of wit – and social media

Space is limited on social media in a couple of ways.

Twitter literally limits your character options which forces you to edit your message until it fits.

But then there are attention span limits. No one scrolling social media wants to read your 2,000-word post. They just don’t.

You have to learn how to say your messages clearly but briefly to get your point across on social media, and that can be put to good use in email too.

You can tell a longer story in an email, but sometimes brevity will lead to more conversions. You don’t want people to open your email, see how long it is, and then click the delete button. They don’t have time to read an entire book, so you should keep it to a couple paragraphs with a photo and a clear CTA.

Use clear, direct language and take the opportunity to link out to longer content where necessary.

Know your audience

You need to know your customers better than anyone else. Know them like you know your family members. Be able to say what dramatic thing they did at Thanksgiving six years ago.

Or just if they engage more on social media or with email.

Maybe you have a segment of customers who love email, but they aren’t really on Twitter much and another segment who marks every email as read but they never close Twitter.

Try tweeting about your sales more to convert the Twitter lovers and segment your list to engage the email lovers.

Have fun and be yourself

Thanks, Mom.

Social media is where you show personality and can test new things. Try creative emoji use, experiment with hashtags, and let your personality shine through.

Social media posts don’t last long, which is why they’re a great medium for testing or gathering ideas. Ask your followers if they have any questions or if they want anything from you, and then you can expand on that in an email later.

Promote your newsletter on social and let people know you’ll be answering their questions there. That’s a good way to build your email list with followers who already like your brand.

Repurposed content is an underutilized tool

It would be ideal to have the time and resources to write original content every day, but that just isn’t the case for most business owners.

This is why repurposed content is so glorious. Social media posts don’t last long, so you can post and then re-post! Obviously, don’t spam your feed or else you’ll just lose followers.

But it’s not like you’re the Queen – you can re-wear an outfit and you can re-post social media posts.

Use your social media content in emails. Create a roundup of relevant previous content and keep promoting your best evergreen content.

Embrace the neverending cycle

Use your social media to build up your newsletter subscriber list by sharing links to your signup page.

Then use your newsletters to promote your social media by including social share links and links to your profiles.

It’s a neverending cycle that you can use to work in your favor.

Write, test, rinse, repeat

Ultimately, trial and error is the best way to figure out what content works best for your business on social media and in your emails.

Don’t be afraid of trying something new. You might fail.

But you’ll learn from the failure and try something else that they’ll like. That’s the beauty of email marketing and social media. It’s like your own personal research lab!

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that you need to be creating content, but you don’t have to constantly worry about creating The Most Perfect Content on the internet. Test new stuff. Embrace the failure and learn from it.

Try merging your social media and email marketing efforts to build up both channels.

And if you need help creating a digital marketing strategy that is customized to your business’ needs, give Digital Strike a holler. Our consultations are free.