YouTube is big and growing fast

YouTube is massive. With more than 1 billion users visiting the site every month and 400 hours of video content uploaded every minute, YouTube is more massive than you may at first think, especially when you consider that both those numbers are increasing. YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world, after, of course, its big brother Google.

People watch videos on YouTube on their computers at home, their tablets during dinner, on their mobile phones, with friends on a TV screen in the living room, and even on gaming consoles. YouTube is everywhere, and it’s set to be (if it isn’t already) the most watched format in the United States, beating out TV for time spent viewing.

The benefits of YouTube’s big data

You may have read a lot of articles about the benefits of big data for marketers, but sometimes the term big data is used without it being really clear what it means. Big data can mean a few different things:

• Volume of data: A massive volume of data reveals things like audience content consumption habits and confirms them with the sheer volume. Think of YouTube as a giant survey where people are voting for the content they like every day. That’s a powerful tool to have access to!
• Velocity of data: Velocity in big data means that enough data over a set period, often a short period, of time reveals when something is trending or emerging. For example, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) uses data from Google’s search engine to help track flu outbreaks in the United States. The YouTube equivalent would be the trending videos pages, which uses data to float to the top the videos with the most velocity of views.
• Variety of data: Big data can simply mean variety. If YouTube is a survey tool, it’s asking millions of questions every day about everything; what people want to watch, how and where they watch it, what makes it shareable, which devices they use, and more.

YouTube is so big, it has some of the biggest big data around. It has volume, velocity, and variety of data and uses learnings from its data to deliver advantages to marketers.

YouTube’s big data helps deliver cost savings to marketers; you have the choice to reach specific audiences who will convert into a click or purchase best, ultimately benefitting from cost savings as you’ll only be buying the media that works best for you. It is no longer the case that any part of your marketing campaign’s performance is unknown.

You’ll find efficiencies in the time it takes to create and execute marketing campaigns, tools, and features that do the thinking for you, such as where media should run, how much money should be spent to give the best return, and analyses of which creative works best and why. These features and options are born from deep research based on YouTube’s big data repository. YouTube develops things like advanced audience targeting methods that are so sophisticated and yet easy to action, making your marketing budget work harder and more efficiently.

You also get access to constantly evolving tools that help you uncover insights about your audience, giving you a deeper understanding than in the past. YouTube comes with incredibly sophisticated analytics tools, developed from millions of experiments and tons of feedback, to learn what you can do to deliver more results. YouTube has used its big data to create the simplest solutions for marketers to get the maximum results.

YouTube’s place in your marketing mix

Whether you’re an established marketer or just starting out, it’s important to regularly review all the channels available to you, decide whether they can help deliver to your goals, and choose how you’ll spend your time, efforts, and budget.

Many marketers, especially small businesses and independents, may start with digital channels like Facebook and Instagram. These channels provide easy, self-serve solutions to get started and typically require only simple creative, such as an image, text, and link. This simplicity is great, but sometimes YouTube is left until last to be explored and exploited by marketers, primarily because creating video takes a bit more work. As evidenced by the fact that Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels are increasingly turning to video as part of their offering, it’s rapidly becoming clear that video is a required component of any marketer’s plan. Given that video is becoming an essential in all marketing plans and YouTube is the most powerful video platform available, YouTube needs to be a part of your mix.

Sure, you have to make a lot of choices. You need to make decisions about your media spending and production budget, work through your resources, and decide what video you can make. Fortunately, throughout this book, I break out everything you need to consider into easy-to-manage steps so that you can easily make YouTube a part of your marketing mix.

Advertising versus content marketing

YouTube offers both an advertising platform, a place to run ads in paid media, and a content platform, a place to post your video content for people to discover and watch.

Think of advertising as a classic ad served up when you’re watching another video; it may be a short ad, running in paid media, that tells you about a product or service and encourages you to buy or act. You may like the ad; you may not. Part 2 details everything you’ll need to know about advertising on YouTube.

Think of content as something you may choose to watch, such as a recipe video or a comedy skit. You’re probably watching the video because you want to, not because a marketer paid to make you watch it. Part 3 covers content strategy development.

The best way to maximize YouTube as a marketing channel is to tackle both advertising and content. You can simply run ads, or you can make great content, or you can do both. If you do both, they can work in tandem and deliver a marketing channel essentially unlike any other.

With the proliferation of digital channels and the increasing demands from consumers for smart, compelling, targeted ads, the best marketing messages manifest increasingly as formats and creative that feel more like content than ads. Essentially, great ads are more like content. The best advertisers make ads that are so good they don’t feel like an ad,; they feel like content, and people choose to watch them

To keep things simple, I break down how to run advertising on YouTube in Part 2 and how to make content for YouTube in Part 3. I treat these topics as two separate things altogether. Just know that the best marketers make ads that are as good as content.

Picking a lane

You may think the first step in getting started on YouTube is setting up a YouTube channel, but planning how you want to use YouTube can save you time, money, and effort, and should be your first task.

Before you get started, you need to pick a lane. Are you

• An advertiser: The simplest lane a marketer can choose is to be an advertiser on YouTube, meaning that you make ads that run in paid media on YouTube. Advertising is a great place to start, especially if you’re a marketer with existing video ad creative who wants to test how YouTube can work for you.

  Choose this approach if you have some video ads you’d like to run on YouTube or, want to create some video ads to test. (Refer to Chapter 7 to get your campaign started.)

• A sponsor: If you’re an advanced marketer who wants to run your ads against specific content, then choose this lane. Some marketers want their ads to be appear in specific placements — for example, only against sports video content or premium content from the top YouTubers. You’re still running ads, but you’re more selective with your placements because association is important to you. (See Chapter 7 to find out about the extensive placement options available to you.)
• A content creator: An even more advanced lane to choose is to be a content creator. As a content creator, you make and run your ads, but you also create content for your YouTube channel. Creating video content takes more time and budget and is often used by marketers to deliver a fuller YouTube strategy. Using YouTube to run ads and deliver content is a sophisticated strategy. (Chapter 8 covers different video content formats. Chapter 9 breaks out how to develop a content strategy.)
• A publisher: The most advanced lane to choose is to be a publisher. Think of Red Bull, GoPro, and any brand that has turned content creation into the core strategy of their marketing initiatives. Content has become the focus of almost everything they do in marketing. These marketers have mastered the art of great content, leveraging many of the content fundamentals described in Chapter 10.

Creating a brief to reach the right people

Don’t even think about making an ad or a video until you’ve written a brief. A brief is a guiding document that marketers use to collect all the necessary information to create a successful ad or piece of content.

In the brief, you answer questions about what you want to achieve, how you’d like to go about executing your marketing program, and who you want to target — which is perhaps the most important part of a brief,. As you create your brief, you’ll uncover deep insights about your target audience to inform your marketing. (Chapters 2 and 3 cover everything you need to know about creating a brief.)

When you know who you want to reach and what you want to communicate to them, you’ll be able to use the targeting options YouTube makes available to speak to exactly the people you want to reach. You won’t have to waste your media spend reaching people you don’t want to talk to.

After your campaign or first video is live, something magical happens: Every day you’ll be able to learn something new about your audience by looking at the rich analytics available and you’ll be able to talk to the people watching your ads and videos, hearing directly from them. (For more on how to use analytics, see Part 6) This information helps you make choices that make your work on YouTube and all your marketing efforts better every day. You can use the gems you uncover in your reports to develop new briefs for your marketing campaigns and content strategies.

Harnessing the power of video ads

It’s a competitive time for marketers. With the proliferation of digital channels, the bar has been raised for the quality of ads and content, and because there’s so much noise, you need to work harder than ever to stand out. Marketers have many opportunities throughout the course of an average day to reach their audience, but it takes quality work to truly stand out in a sea of messages bombarding people every day.

Decent ads aren’t good enough anymore; they have to be great ads. Marketers must work hard to deliver a compelling ad that catches your attention, stands out, has a clear message, and makes some kind of connection with the viewer so that they’ll think or feel or do something afterwards. The good news is that video is the best medium to make truly great ads with. Sure, video takes a bit more work than a static image and some text, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then video must be virtually priceless.

The Google Ads solution, described in Chapter 7, is possibly the most powerful advertising platform on the planet and is your gateway to uncovering what works best in your video ads.

Developing your content strategy

Just like ads, there’s a lot of competition for content viewership. Think of all the moments during the day where you reach for your phone to read the news, watch a video, check a social channel, post a photo, comment on something, or message a friend. Hundreds of content moments occur throughout the course of a day, and people have become experts at sifting the wheat from the chaff. Their thumbs and eyes work in perfect partnership to merciless scroll past hundreds of pieces of content, slowing to dwell on only the best. The writing of headlines has become an expert skill close to a form of art, designed to catch your eye and maximize the chances of a click and more time spent.

Time spent is the currency of attention, the very thing marketers are trading in. Chapter 9 can help you develop a content strategy that makes sense for your organization.

Making great videos

It’s no surprise that making video is crucially important to success with YouTube! Chapter 11 details how you can get started making videos, avoid pitfalls, and produce something that delivers. Making videos has never been easier as most people have the necessary equipment right in their pockets. Today’s smartphones have such capable cameras that you can make movies with them.

If you’re not familiar with creating video, head to Chapter 12, which gives you options for how you can get help from others to create content for your channel.

Mastering YouTube management

Marketers are handling more channels than ever, with the added challenge that digital channels are giving daily feedback, while constantly changing and evolving. Magazines are, for the most part, the same as they’ve always been, with the basic rules of how print marketing works remaining the same for decades. The only way to succeed with digital channels, especially the most powerful and advanced digital channels like YouTube, is to actively manage them. That process requires understanding them, experimenting with them, and regularly reevaluating and maximizing your usage of all the tools they offer.

I’ve seen clients, time and again, who think that a small burst of effort to kick-start their YouTube channel will be sufficient. They then move on to other projects, revisiting YouTube a year later. Succeeding on YouTube just doesn’t work like that. (What does?)

An even worse crime is a common misconception by even the biggest clients that a good strategy for YouTube is to use it as a repository for their TV ads. Sure, you can post your TV ads to YouTube, but it won’t do a lot without a media spend behind them. Even then, creative made for YouTube will always perform better than creative made for TV.

These misconceptions about YouTube mean that many marketers leave a ton of opportunity to effectively reach their audience on the table. Don’t neglect YouTube and let it become a wasteland. If you have the time, you can be doing something every day to make your YouTube efforts even better than the previous day. Chapter 15 walks through the key considerations for active channel and community management.

Measuring success

Knowing what success looks like is crucial. Because YouTube offers so many options to marketers, you can easily be overwhelmed and to think you must do everything. Knowing what success looks like helps you make smart choices and get started without biting off more than you can chew.

The idea here is not to do everything possible on YouTube. The point is to make choices based on what you want to achieve for your business and use YouTube to achieve just that. I’ve had clients who assume that they need to make lots of videos about everything they do at their company, create playlists, work with YouTubers, come up with content series ideas. In reality, all they needed was to make some simple, effective ads to help promote a new product they were releasing that quarter.

It’s easy to want to tackle everything, but instead start by asking “What does success look like?” Success may be

• Generating leads for your business
• Driving more clicks to your website
• Growing your brand and product consideration
• Growing your brand awareness and reach

Knowing what success looks like avoids the mistake that measurement is often forgotten. You’ve made a video, worked hard, posted it, and then you moved on to something else on your list. A few weeks go by, and you think maybe you should check to see how things are going. The best marketers make looking at the data a daily task, but more than that, they think about how they can turn that data into meaningful actions and how things like video views and subscriber rates correspond to their marketing and business goals.

A common mistake big brands make is thinking that the important metric they should measure is how many times their video was viewed. Sure, that metric may be helpful for success, but did it drive business results? Marketers should have only one goal: drive business results. How many YouTube video views you have doesn’t matter. What matters is that you drove leads or delivered to customer needs. Spending time in measurement is the key for all marketers to be truly successful at delivering results.

You should spend at least half of your time on YouTube Analytics and tools like Google Ads. Think of these tools as a mine, and every day you have the chance to uncover golden nuggets of information that can change the way you market and deliver amazing results. If you know what business success looks like and if you look every day at the data and results, you’ll be able to connect these two and become a master of making YouTube work for you. Every day is an opportunity to uncover gold.