Navigating Unlimited Content: YouTube
With all the different devices and content types greeting consumers at all hours of the day, people’s viewing habits are more diverse than ever. Rise CEO, Larry Fisher, predicted it best, labeling it as the era of unlimited content. Fueled by artificial intelligence, the importance of captivating creative assets cannot be overstated. Every interaction, whether through ads, website experiences, offline or out-of-home holds significance. However, brands often grapple with where to begin and how to expand.
That’s where we come in. We’re navigating the sea of unlimited content and sharing how to determine where to invest your next marketing dollar. We even partnered with Google for some pretty easy ways to get started. Why Google? Whether you’re scrolling for recipes or finding better health insurance, 80% of viewers agree that YouTube offers the largest variety of video content compared to any other platform. YouTube and Google have custom solutions tailored to support your business objectives from boosting brand awareness to generating leads or enhancing sales. Before we get to our guidelines for brands interested in branching out on YouTube, let’s figure out where to start.
Define your audience.
First, we know two things:
- Consumers are everywhere, engaging across digital platforms and omnichannel touchpoints.
- Creating content that converts is the true differentiator brands need to stay ahead.
It is no surprise that the effectiveness of ads heavily relies on the quality of the creative content used. To make high-quality content, you need to truly understand your audience – who they are, how they engage, where they interact, and why.
The next important step is understanding your audience and authentically speaking their language. Rise's connections planning can help with this. It looks at the overall experience your brand offers across all touchpoints, maps out the consumer's decision journey, and understands their intent level so we can align messaging and content with when they're most receptive. This approach creates more meaningful experiences that influence behavior.
Choose your platform.
Once you know your consumers, you’re ready to pull out your platform playbook and meet them with tailored messaging in the moments that matter most. To determine which content card to play, you need to know the experience each placement provides, relative to your audience and their point in the user journey. Rise specializes in crafting custom playbooks tailored to your brand's individual needs and unique consumer behaviors. The perfect placement aligns with your audience's interests and amplifies action.
Here are two highlights:
YouTube Video Action campaigns help connect compelling stories with a digital call-to-action and relevant products.
YouTube Shorts allows brands to embrace short-form video and reach new demographics with ease. These ads, lasting 15 to 60 seconds, are strategically placed between Shorts, providing a compact yet captivating format that quickly grabs viewer attention. They also don’t disappear over time, making it simpler for advertisers to establish enduring brand awareness with their ads. When users browse through your videos, they can view all your uploaded Shorts, gaining a comprehensive understanding of your products and services.
Why YouTube?
YouTube is more than a video-watching destination for branding and consideration, and they have the results to prove it:
70% of YouTube viewers say that they bought from a brand as a result of seeing it on YouTube.
Over 55% of people surveyed search for a product on Google, and then learn more by going to YouTube before they buy it.
Incorporating YouTube into a long-lasting paid media strategy completely transforms how ads engage viewers and widen their reach. By tapping into its diverse capabilities and precision targeting across different screens and formats, brands can seamlessly connect with their target audiences. It allows brands to more fully leverage the Google ecosystem and take advantage of its plethora of solutions from Google Ads Creative Studio to Google AI. Plus, expanding into YouTube is easier than you think and benefits more types of brands than you think, we promise.
Personalize and engage.
Rise specializes in crafting customized content and strategies to suit your brand and consumer behaviors. We use your audience insights to map and deliver the most relevant messaging to each identified persona — on the platform that best fits their media consumption with platform-specific creative best practices.
Crafting the creative itself involves making even more decisions, both significant and subtle. This image or that? Trim here or there? Vertical or horizontal? Google has shared four simple principles, the ABCDs, on how YouTube creative can meet and exceed your marketing objectives. On average, the ABCDs deliver a 30% lift in short-term sales likelihood and a 17% lift in long-term brand contribution..
So, how can brands implement the ABCDs into their advertising journey on YouTube? Well, here you go:
A = Attention: Grab the viewer's attention immediately. Use action-packed scenes, close-ups, and bold imagery. Incorporate music, voice-overs, and sound effects to create a captivating experience.
B = Branding: Integrate your brand throughout the ad using product shots, graphics, voice-overs, and music. Utilize the multisensory nature of YouTube to maximize brand impact.
C = Connection: Engage viewers by evoking emotions or sparking thoughts. Humanize your story and leverage storytelling techniques like humor or surprise, but keep the focus on your message.
D = Direction: Prompt viewers to take action with clear instructions. Use written, visual, or audio cues to guide and encourage engagement.
As cookies disappear and privacy standards evolve, it’s time to think outside the box. Our experts at Rise leverage a diverse range of targeting capabilities to help you reach your consumers efficiently and compliantly in a privacy-first world. The audience hunt starts with maximizing the right technology and data signals.
To avoid data loss, you need to use a diverse set of audiences, powered by input-ready data. That means strategically incorporating everything into your campaigns from your first-party data to interest-based audiences from the platform.
Craft and solution.
Crafting immersive YouTube videos no longer needs to be a massive lift. Google Ads offers straightforward and free solutions to craft compelling video ads, using the ABCDs, from your existing creative assets like logos, images, and headlines. Here are a few of the many capabilities the Google suite offers:
Repurposing Assets: Repurpose existing assets into YouTube-ready Video Ads, Discovery, or Display Ads.
Optimizing Assets: Resize landscape videos into vertical or square, edit existing assets with text overlays, and evaluate video assets with the ABCD framework.
Asset Picker Tool: Upload existing assets, URLs, and social pages to generate asset options including an expanded stock image library.
Text-to-Speech Voice-Overs: Add lifelike text-to-speech voice-overs to videos in multiple languages and voices.
Bumper Ad Creation: Create bumper ads from longer video assets using machine learning for automatic generation.
Make it happen.
It’s time. We know your audience, we chose a placement, and we created personalized content. Now let's take a look at a real-life YouTube example for inspiration on how to actually make it happen.
A leading hospitality brand faced the challenge of needing to increase bookings while being maxed out on Paid Search. Rise compiled audience research to identify key engagement moments that would effectively tap into potential non-searching customers. We determined that YouTube, Social, and Display ads could each play a part in exceeding their brand goals, all with refined targeting that prioritized first-party data and enhanced messaging strategies. YouTube launched first, followed by an acceleration on social media, and the launch of programmatic display.
Tip: Test into YouTube a few months before peak season. That allows time to learn and optimize so your ads are primed for when it matters most.
We analyzed and optimized real-time performance throughout the campaign on our proprietary cross-channel media platform, Connex®.
After the initial rollout, we performed correlation analyses to understand upper-funnel media's impact on lower-funnel bookings. The data proved that we effectively boosted brand awareness and reached new customers earlier in their decision-making process, resulting in significant growth in impressions and conversions across all channels. These full-funnel results led to sustained investment in upper-funnel activations and further expansion into content like YouTube.
How Rise can help.
By following the tips and strategies shared above, brands can make the most out of unlimited content like YouTube, and we are here to help along the way. Contact us today to get started!