Shop visits during lockdown decreased at an alarming rate and consequently, the demand for online inspiration and casual browsing is changing dramatically. It is more important than ever to be creative in the ways in which you gain your customer’s attention.
That is why in the coming months and key seasonal months, YouTube is going to be huge. Using YouTube will provide benefits such as brand building, reaching new customers, gaining market share all on one channel.
YouTube isn’t just for the high spending and high-quality video making brands, Google has now made this platform more accessible for everyone. Discovery ads have recently been rolled out to all accounts & are a new and easy cost-effective way to get your brand onto YouTube.
Video Builder – Great For Small Business
Video Builder is currently in beta, but Google has created this new easy to use, fast and most importantly, free tool, which allows you to re-use previous assets from other creatives.
Given the current crisis for most small businesses struggling with costs, this can be great to use as you don’t need to have access to high-end video makers.
This tool allows you to use your current static images, logos & text and use Video Builder to animate them – making them seem like a video, not an image. You can turn your images into high end looking & impacting video ads to use across the Google Network and reach more customers.
When creating your video, you will first need to select one of the layout options which Google have provided and you can then add in your specific brand colour and logo.
To begin constructing your video, you can drag & drop your images into the ‘storyboard’ layout and this will start populating your video.
Then when writing your text to go alongside your video, similar to Google Ads, Google tells you the optimum length of characters to include to ensure you make the most of the space and call out as much key information as you can.
You can also select the music you want to play from Google’s gallery to target customers who watch ads with their sound on.
Potential Of YouTube
Buying media space on YouTube can be an efficient way of utilising your marketing budget. With having over 2 billion subscribed users on the platform the potential of finding new customers is massive. (Source, Google.)
During lockdown, for a lot of users during lockdown YouTube has become the new streaming platform and is becoming peoples new TV; it could soon be one of the highest viewing broadcasters. If you think of how impactful TV advertisements can be, now start thinking of using YouTube in the same way to increase and gain brand awareness. This can be done at almost half of the price of TV ads!
Look Beyond Just YouTube
It is important when running video campaigns to monitor and take notice of the impact on other channels. Looking at assisted conversions & top conversion paths can be really beneficial in justifying the usage of video campaigns because of the knock-on effect it has on paid search, SEO etc.
The impact video can have on a brand can be huge, it can show your customers or potential new customers an inspirational & creative side of your brand and will increase their engagement.
You also need to be patient when comparing performance to the likes of paid search or social campaigns. The conversion window can be a lot longer so taking into account view-through conversions can help understand the customer journey and show why you shouldn’t be solely reliant on first or last click attribution for videos.
YouTube has more impact on driving the consideration and then this will then ultimately lead to an increase in conversions via other channels.
Why Use It For The Key Seasonal Months
The peak seasons are going to be more digital-centric than ever before – yes, it may seem that this is said every year but with the unfortunate circumstances of COVID 19, this really is more true than ever before. By using YouTube you can capture consumers in their ever-increasing convoluted sales journey and begin to learn and gather data on their behaviour early on.
YouTube can be an extremely effective channel by giving you great reach and share but at a fairly low cost. Overall, YouTube is a flexible channel so you can be pretty precise with how much you are wanting to spend.
This channel is going to be a key part in the consumer funnel considering how many subscribers YouTube now has. People go on to YouTube to watch what they love and want to learn more about it, so if you grab the attention of your customers at an early stage, your brand is going to be in their mind from the very start of their sales cycle.
Following on from the changes we have seen from lockdown and the uncertainty of if we are going to go through a recession, it is quite uncertain as to when customers will buy for the peak season. Will they buy earlier and ensure they don’t miss out if retailers struggle with stock, or will they hold out for the Boxing Day sales? Therefore, for all marketers, it is going to be important to be as visible as possible across multiple touchpoints and platforms so that your brand is always in the back of their minds and you can then have plenty of potential if running remarketing campaigns.
Why Miss Out
Why not capitalise on peoples changing behavioural needs and start marketing to people from different sectors and interests? There are only 2 billion logged-in monthly users after all…
