Chapter 2
Using YouTube for Your Business
IN THIS CHAPTER
Breaking out your business challenges
Choosing a campaign type
Setting your budget
Creating a campaign brief
As a marketer, a common mistake is deciding that you need a YouTube strategy, but forgetting to target a business goal it should help deliver against. In this chapter, I walk you through mapping your business challenges, deciding a campaign type, and assigning your budget.
I also explain how to create a brief, a guiding document that ensures everyone is aligned on the task at hand, breaks out all the key components that the marketing campaign must address, and ultimately helps to ensure marketing success.
Capturing All Your Business Challenges
Every marketing campaign has one thing in common: the goal of delivering to a business challenge. That goal may mean creating an awareness of a new product, getting signups for a new service, or something else altogether.
YouTube has the potential to solve any number of these business challenges, so the first step is to capture all your challenges and pick the most important challenge you’d like to solve for.
It’s often helpful to use sticky notes to externalize everything you have swirling in your marketer’s brain so that you can step back and make a choice about where to start. It’s especially smart to start with this kind of approach so that you don’t fall into the trap of thinking the challenge you need to solve for is “create YouTube strategy.” That’s never the thing you need to do. YouTube is a tool that can deliver to your business and marketing needs; you don’t need to deliver a YouTube strategy if it doesn’t help your business.
If you haven’t thought through all your business challenges or you aren’t sure which one YouTube should help with, grab a pad of sticky notes and a felt marker pen and work through this simple exercise:
Write one business challenge per sticky-note, generating as many challenges as you possibly can.
Examples of challenges may be
- Launch a new product
- Create a new customer service tool to handle inquiries
- Deliver a brand campaign using our new logo
The idea is to capture as many challenges as possible
Post all of these sticky-notes onto a surface where you can look at them all at once.
Figure 2-1 shows you what my setup looks like whenever I do this step.
- Move the sticky notes around so that the biggest projects are higher up on the wall.
- Put the easy projects and to-do list items lower on the surface and your marketing initiatives in the middle.
Take a step back and decide which marketing initiative you think YouTube may be a fit for.
YouTube is great for everything from brand campaigns and sales-focused performance marketing campaigns to customer service and beyond. Pick something manageable and meaningful.
FIGURE 2-1: Grab your sticky notes and generate all your business challenges. Pick one that you’d like.
After you identify your challenge, you’ll be able to set about building your brief, starting with defining what success looks like.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need a YouTube strategy. You need a YouTube strategy only in service of a business or marketing need.
Defining Your Campaign Type
It’s important to think of what type of campaign you need in order to deliver to your business goals. A classic approach to marketing campaigns is to break them into different types connected to a well-known, somewhat traditional, and linear view of the consumer journey. Figure 2-2 explores a typical consumer journey used by marketers to think about the various stages a consumer might move through in relation to your product or service.
FIGURE 2-2: A traditional marketing funnel showing the consumer journey, commonly used by marketers.
If you Google search (especially Google image search) things like consumer journey or marketing funnel, you can find lots of great articles that provide different ways of thinking about consumers and how you can move them with your marketing from “I don’t know your product” to “I’m a fan who tells everyone they should buy your product.”
While you can think about the marketing funnel in many different ways, I use a fairly traditional approach because it’s an easy, clear, and commonly used way to break out the different kinds of marketing campaigns you can run on YouTube.
Whether you want people to know about your brand or product (awareness) or buy more of your product (conversion), YouTube can deliver. Just remember that these consumer stages aren’t the only ways to think about or frame your campaign efforts. However, the funnel approach is the most commonly used method. I break down each stage of the funnel and outline some common matching YouTube Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
KPIs refer to the handful of measures of success you and your organization agree to use to evaluate whether your marketing campaign has delivered successfully. For example, your KPIs may be sales volume, number of people who saw your advertising message, and repeat purchases.
The stages of the consumer journey funnel are
- Brand awareness and reach
- Brand and product consideration
- Engagement
- Conversion
- Loyalty & advocacy
Brand awareness and reach
Simply put, brand awareness is the extent to which a consumer can recognize and recall your brand. Reach refers to the number of people who are aware of, know about, have seen and recognize, and are able to recall the brand communicated by the campaign.
Every few years, an industry magazine or blog will publish a list of the world’s most recognizable brands. These brands use marketing to maximize their awareness. The idea behind awareness is that if you know my brand and can recall it better than others, you’ll be more likely to purchase it. For example, Coca-Cola is arguably the most recognized brand in the world, with its iconic red and white color and script logo. Indeed, if you were asked to name a soda, chances are you’ll say Coca-Cola first. (See Chapter 7 to discover how to set up a brand awareness and reach campaign.)
Metrics refers to the data you measure. A key concept of awareness marketing is the idea of reach and frequency, two simple metrics that mean “How many people did you reach with your ad?” and “How often did they see your ad during the marketing campaign?” These traditional metrics for awareness marketing assume that if you see an ad, say, five times, you’re likely to be aware of the brand, product, or service.
YouTube is pretty stellar when it comes to driving awareness and reach because it offers an easy way to reach an enormous number of people on several occasions over the course of your marketing campaign.
Brand and product consideration
People may be aware of your brand (see preceding section), but consideration is the next phase in their journey toward purchase. Consideration means that your campaign has switched something in their mind that makes them think “Yeah, this may be something for me.”
Perhaps you need a marketing campaign that encourages more of your target audience to consider your product. People may know that your product exists and what it is, but it may not be on their consideration list.
Imagine this example: You’re in the grocery store. You remember that you need soap, so you head over to the health and beauty aisle. Tens of different soap brands are on the shelf (I bet you can name at least five right now off the top of your head), but the brain has the capacity to process only so many choices. You may be fully aware of almost all the soap brands on the shelf — that’s known as your awareness set —but your brain doesn’t want to have to stand there and decide about each one in turn. Either consciously or subconsciously, you quickly narrow your choices down to the brands in your consideration set, which probably include the soap you’ve been using, the soap your partner likes, and maybe the soap that you recently saw on sale in a flyer.
Marketers are often concerned with how they can ensure their product is in your consideration set because if it isn’t, it won’t have a chance of being chosen.
YouTube published research in March 2016 that demonstrated how online video can drive consideration. YouTube already knew that its video ad offerings can drive awareness of a brand, product, or service, but the research found that the longer people watched a video, the more likely their consideration of the product would be positively impacted. In the study, YouTube looked at people who chose to watch 30 seconds or more of an ad. This group of viewers had 45 percent higher consideration than the control group that skipped after 5 seconds. The conclusion was that if you want to see your consideration metrics increase, brands should find creative ways to encourage viewers to watch more of the ad.
Chapter 7 details how to create your brand and product consideration campaign.
Engagement
In engagement, you create opportunities in which you involve your consumer, inviting them to be a more active participant in your marketing programs rather than a passive recipient of your advertising.
A traditional type of engagement marketing may be a special event, such as a mobile phone company creating an annual music festival, or street marketing, where people hand you fliers on the street or ask questions to get you to sign up for a service, such as a monthly charitable donation. Engagement on YouTube is best served through brands creating content that viewers want to watch.
YouTube has tons of options to deliver engagement-focused marketing campaigns. Even though you may think YouTube is a place to post a video to be watched at any time, it’s also a social media channel and community space. The only limit to how you engage your audience in more direct and one-to-one moments is your imagination.
For example, you can start a weekly video blog (vlog) where you respond to consumer and viewer comments, questions, and suggestions. You can engage in text-based discussion with your audience on your Discussion or Community tab on your YouTube channel. You can stream a live video, such as an interview with someone from your company talking about a new product feature, and then post that video later to be viewed anytime. The idea here is that you’re using YouTube to deliver directly engaging experiences with your audience, measuring that success by how many people watch, comment, like, and participate.
See Chapter 9 for more on developing your content strategy.
Conversion
If you’re looking to drive sales of your product or service, your campaign goal may be conversion. Conversion is the idea that your target audience saw your video ad or piece of content and then took an action to convert — for example, to make a purchase, sign up for a test drive, or open an account online.
Conversion-focused campaigns are the focus of performance marketers — those marketers who are evaluating all their marketing activities based on how well they convert to a sale. You can measure the success of your conversion-focused campaign simply by the KPIs of the number of sales or conversion actions delivered by your YouTube efforts.
Chapter 7 walks through the steps to create a campaign that delivers conversions, such as website traffic and leads.
Loyalty and advocacy
While marketers are always looking to reach new audiences, they also stay mindful of existing customers who are loyal to their product or service.
Loyal customers come back to you time and again, repeatedly buying from you regardless of what competitors may be saying or doing. They’re often your highest value customer.
An advocate is someone who will tell other people about your product or service, suggesting to them that they check it out or purchase it. Typically, advocates are telling a friend or family member, so their opinion holds weight and meaning. Just think about the last time you asked your friend for a recommendation on a place to eat or a store to buy something; you probably followed the advice.
Although loyal customers and advocates often don’t require additional marketing dollars to be spent to acquire them, finding ways to keep and reaffirm their loyalty and encourage their advocacy with your marketing activities is a good idea.
Traditionally, marketers may have used incentive techniques, such as discounts, referral bonuses when a friend also purchases, or reward points programs. These programs can work very well at both keeping people loyal and giving them reasons to tell their friends about you.
YouTube can also play a role in encouraging and maintaining the loyalty of your company’s biggest fans. In fact, YouTube is natively built with loyalty in mind with features like channel subscriptions.
If loyalty is your key campaign goal, a metric for success may be how many visitors to your channel have turned into subscribers. When people subscribe to your channel, they may see your newly uploaded videos in places like on their YouTube home page. A bell icon, when clicked, notifies your audience through email with a link to each new video you post. Imagine that! The moment marketers post a new video, their audience is alerted, for free, and encouraged to go watch it.
If you’re a marketer with customers who may be advocates, a campaign goal may be to create video content for YouTube that those advocates can then share with their friends, family and beyond. Chapter 9 outlines how to develop a content strategy.
Determining Your Budget for Media and Production
When you know the challenge your marketing brief is aiming to solve and you have a sense of what success would look like, you’ll be able to set the total budget you want to assign to this campaign.
You can determine this number by looking at your total marketing budget for the year or period, such as the quarter, and deciding where else you may like to spend your money.
After you determine your budget, you need to split it into two parts: media and production.
Breaking down your annual budget
When you’re planning out your marketing initiatives for the year, you’ll set your total budget. For example, if you have $400,000 to spend on marketing for the year, you may break this first into quarters, assigning $100,000 per quarter.
You can then break down your budget further by geographic region, such as national versus local marketing, or by channel, assigning budgets to traditional media channels, digital channels, and other marketing initiatives like PR and events.
Taking the 70/20/10 approach
A popular approach with marketers when trying to determine the amount of money to assign to channels is the 70/20/10 approach. This model suggests that you use
- Seventy percent of your marketing budget for your most reliable and proven marketing channels
- Twenty percent of your budget for the channels you feel somewhat confident about but are still learning and experimenting with
- Ten percent of your budget for testing entirely new approaches to marketing
If you’re starting to use YouTube as part of your marketing for the first time, consider setting a small budget aside to experiment.
Calculating your production budget
Making video for YouTube can cost more money than making assets for other media channels. For example, Facebook and Instagram offer advertising options where all you need is an image, such as a photograph of your product, and some text with a link. Google search is even simpler, requiring just a few lines of text and a link.
YouTube, however, does require video creative. Don’t worry! You don’t need to make a TV-quality commercial costing millions of dollars or hire a crew of people in an exotic location. Often making video for YouTube advertising is as simple as filming using your phone’s camera.
You should, however, consider whether you need to factor in the following for your production budget:
- Hardware: You may need to purchase or rent a camera. Ask yourself first whether you can get away with using your mobile phone. You may also need things like lighting and microphones.
- People and places: You may want to feature a person in your commercial who wants to get paid for their work. You also may need to pay rent to a location, such as a restaurant or hotel, depending on where you want to shoot your commercial.
- Editing and post-production: You need to edit your video for content and length and ensure that it looks good. You can edit yourself using a laptop and freely available software, or you can find help from a professional editor. Post-production includes things like tweaking the color of the video footage and adding music.
A classic rule amongst marketers is the 80/20 rule. The idea is that your production budget should be 20 percent of your total budget. For example, if you’ve assigned a total budget of $20,000 to your YouTube efforts, 20 percent of this budget, or $4,000, would be set aside for the costs associated with making your video creative. The remaining 80 percent would be assigned to your media spend (see the next section).
Chapter 11 talks about how to create video, delving into topics like hardware, shooting, editing, and more in detail.
Setting your media budget
Your media budget is the amount of money you’ll assign to buying advertising space on YouTube. If you’re following the 80/20 rule (see preceding section), you’d set aside $16,000 to spend on paid advertising media.
A common mistake with advertisers is thinking that you can upload your video to YouTube and somehow people will magically find it without any need for media spend. Unfortunately, this thinking isn’t true. YouTube is a fantastic place to put your video to be found, but it’s an even better place to put your video to be lost. With so many videos being uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day, videos need a media budget to ensure that the people you want to target see them.
The Google Ads solution (see Chapter 7) lets you set up your media budget and gives you an exceptional amount of control about how you spend your dollar. You can regularly check to ensure that your budget is delivering to your needs and turn your spend on or off as needed. For example:
- You’ll be able to set a maximum budget for each day, week, and month and make adjustments to the marketing spend any time.
- You’ll pay only when someone chooses to view your TrueView ad for at least 30 seconds or when they engage with your ad — like clicking on a call to action overlay, a card, or a companion banner.
- You can set your account to bill automatically or manually; the manual option ensures you don’t spend anything without confirming each time.
- You can start with as little as $10 per day for locally focused campaigns, making YouTube a very cost-effective place to start to advertise.
Visit Chapter 7 for a detailed breakdown of how you buy and optimize paid advertising on YouTube.
The Necessary Nature of the Brief
A brief is very simply a document of a few pages or more, and it’s where you set the challenge that your marketing campaign must solve. It delves into what is the purpose of the initiative, what success looks like, what must be delivered, budget, timelines and more.
Your brief is the single most important part of a campaign because it contains all the information that lays the foundation and framework of what you’ll create and deliver. If you miss something or even make a mistake in your brief, it’ll affect the results of your campaign. Use the brief to
- Capture all the relevant information needed to make decisions about your campaign.
- Align any team members or service providers on what’s required.
- Clearly capture the mandate of your brief so that you can reflect on it and ensure that you’re doing what you need and want to do.
- Make you think thoroughly through the details and nuances and reflect back on your decisions before you start doing anything.
In Chapter 1, I talk about picking a lane to help you decide whether you want to use YouTube as an advertiser, as a content marketer, or as a combination of the two. You should know your lane before you create your brief. If you don’t, check out Chapter 1 and make your decision before you start writing your brief.
Developing the Key Components of a YouTube Brief
Most marketers will create their own brief template and use the same approach for each campaign they develop. A typical brief may include some or all of the following components:
- Information about the campaign
- Campaign or initiative’s needs
- Deliverables and considerations
Even though the information described in the following sections may seem comprehensive and result in several pages, a great brief is one that is brief! It gets to the point and communicates only the most important information.
About the campaign
The section about the campaign may contain all or some of the following information:
- Client name: The name of the person creating the brief, the team, and the company name
- Campaign name: The working title name for the project
- Total budget: The total budget assigned to the campaign
- Key dates: The date the brief was written and the start and end dates of the campaign
- Prepared by: The name of the person who prepared the brief
- Contact information: The contact information of the person who prepared the brief
Campaign or initiative’s needs
This section typically contains the following information regarding the campaign or initiative’s needs:
- Campaign overview
- Target audience and actionable audience insights
- Marketing messages
Campaign overview
In this section, you should provide a paragraph or two describing the campaign, providing the context as to what business challenge you’re trying to solve. Consider addressing the reasons why the campaign is needed, along with any opportunities or challenges to consider.
Target audience and actionable audience insights
In this section, describe your target audience, answering who they are and where they are. (Refer to Chapter 3 for details on creating a picture of your target audience.) Also include any unique insights you may have uncovered about them.
You can attach any research you may have uncovered that provides additional information on your target audience, including their demographic profile, habits like the content they consume, where they consume it, how they spend their time, and any information about their lifestyle that is relevant. Think about how the audience thinks, feels, and behaves. You may include information on products they currently use and a brief overview of the competitive landscape, especially if your competitor is marketing a similar product.
Marketing messages
This section is your opportunity to provide specifics about the messages you’d like communicated.
A good marketing campaign usually focuses on a single message to communicate. It’s the single most persuasive message that will deliver to your campaign’s objective — in this case, influencing people to consider the product.
You can also include reasons to believe, which are the features of your product or service that prove it does what you say it does. These can be rational reasons — in this case, the new ingredient for effective stain fighting, as well as emotional reasons, like the fact it takes the worry out of laundry.
Include a call to action, the action you want people to take after they’ve seen your ad.
Think about the goals you’d like to achieve, such as how many video views you’d like and how many people you hope will click through to purchase. Include details on how these KPIs will be tracked, such as by using YouTube Analytics.
Deliverables and considerations
You also will want to include the following information in your brief:
- Creative considerations: Call out any creative considerations that you need to address, such as any guidance as to how the ad or content should look, sound, or feel tonally. You want to give the creative a sense of the spirit.
- Creative requirements: If you’re creating an ad campaign to run on YouTube, you can list the ad formats you’ll require creative for. Often clients writing briefs for their creative agencies won’t specify the media at this stage. (Refer to Chapter 4 for an overview on the ad formats available.)
Timeline: Detail how much time is available to create the campaign, when it will go live, how long it will run for, and any special notes on media flighting. Also include when the campaign will be over.
Media flighting refers to the scheduling of your campaign’s ads. Sometimes you’ll have ads running; sometimes you will have them paused. You can specify start and end dates for your campaign, along with phases when your ads should be live in the market or paused.- Budget breakdown: Include a breakout of how much you’ll spend on producing the creative and how much on media
- Any mandatories: Include any mandatories, such as legal copy inclusion or logo usage.
- Additional information: If you need to review any other resources before starting work on this campaign or add any other information to your brief, capture it here.