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Video marketing is not an option in today’s digital marketing strategy, rather, it’s a must. In this blog, we are specifically addressing the incredible strength of YouTube advertising. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube and the digital marketing community is forever thankful. Since that year, Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) offers YouTube campaigns in addition to search and display. Your brand will benefit greatly from YouTube ads.

YouTube is a win-win scenario for both creators and advertisers. Here are four reasons why creators choose YouTube:

• Freedom (e.g. freedom of expression and opportunity)
• Reach
• Infrastructure
• Income 

What are some benefits for advertisers?

• Audience attention/engagement
• Google data and tools
• Proven results

What could be a surprising fact is that YouTube is the 2nd largest search network after Google. Another important factor to consider for brands is that YouTube ads have a significantly higher viewers’ attention percentage compared to linear TV. 

YouTube marketing offers a variety of audience targeting solutions ranging from demographics to certain life events. Some examples of detailed demographic audience targeting are:

• Parenting stages
• Parental status
• Household income
• Marital status
• Education
• Employment

Life events are when consumers are at important transition points in their lives such as:

• Graduation
• Marriage
• Moving
• Home renovation
• Purchasing a home
• Retirement

There are more targeting solutions we can explore like affinity targeting for example. YouTube marketing based on affinity targeting reaches people based on their lifestyle, interests, and consumption habits. It is recommended to A/B test targeting, which entails running two+ different targeting solutions simultaneously and see which one performs best. YouTube is also a powerful platform for remarketing. To learn more about how remarketing can help your brand, check out our blog “The Power Of Remarketing”.

Depending on your overall marketing strategy, YouTube offers various ad formats and bidding strategies. Awareness can have a different ad format compared to intent or action. If an awareness push tactic with high reach and high frequency is part of your video internet marketing, we can explore bumper ads. They are six seconds ads, non-skippable in-stream, and with low CPMs (cost per thousands, i.e. you pay an amount for every 1000 ad impressions). Bumper ads are predominantly served on mobile. Here are the key benefits with bumpers:

• Maximum reach
• Brand impact
• High attention

If your main goal is to drive consideration/intent, you might want to explore skippable videos up to 3 minutes in length, but that are skippable after 5 seconds based on CPV (cost per view). A CPV bidding strategy allows you to only pay when viewers choose to engage with your ad. This strategy can deliver valuable results leveraging the consideration/intent of the viewers. Also, you can impact your audience by telling your brand’s story. 

YouTube video marketing has many great brand benefits. Too many to cover in one blog. One great benefit is YouTube analytics, which can help answer questions about the effectiveness of your ads among viewers. Every brand should have a video asset for today’s online marketing goals. It’s too important to miss out on. If you’d like to learn more how YouTube can help your brand contact us at info@4elementsdigitalglobal.com. For now, stay safe out there and practice social distancing. Cheers!