Increase brand awareness and get your marketing message across effectively with YouTube Ads.
The beauty of YouTube advertising is that you only pay when your audience watches or searches for your video on YouTube. You can conveniently connect with people who are interested in your offering, and are searching for your product, service or brand. Video should be on the top of your list when it comes to communicating your message to your target market – it has become a requirement, and is no longer simply a recommendation.
There are several benefits to advertising on YouTube; the main one is being able to connect with your audience in an interactive, visual way. Your video can explain how your product or service can benefit your audience, communicate a special offer or connect with viewers in a memorable way – With the objective of further enhancing brand awareness and encouraging engagement with your brand.
You are able to target your audience through topics, keywords or demographics; ensuring that your video ad reaches your target market. Your ad can even be customised to where your potential client currently is in their purchase journey. Once you’ve set-up your campaign via Google Ads platform, you can tweak it to ensure that it’s getting you the best results, as well as measure its success.
YouTube Ad Formats
There are several video ad formats you can use on YouTube, which will differ depending on the goal of your video campaign:
- Skippable in-stream video ads are displayed before or during a video. Viewers are able to skip after the first 5 seconds. You’ll only pay if a viewer watches past the first 5 seconds and finishes watching the video or interacts with your ad, whichever comes first.
- Non-skippable in stream video ads are as they sound; the viewer is unable to skip the ad. Only run this ad if you are sure your creative is strong enough to hold your audience’s attention for the full 15 seconds.
- Bumper ads are 6 seconds long and are best used for reach and awareness campaigns.
- Video discovery ads are similar to those that you see on Google’s search results page. They show up along side the organic results and viewers can choose to watch the video or not. This type of ad includes 3 lines of text with a thumbnail.
- Non-video ads are for advertisers who would prefer to use display or in-video overlay ads. These display either on the right-hand sidebar with an image and text or float on top of the video.
Final Tips for Advertising on YouTube
According to YouTube recommendations, awareness ads should include your brand/ logo in the first 5 seconds of the video, as well as throughout the ad. These would be targeted at your Top of Funnel audience. For those ads further down the sales funnel (closer to closing the deal), you would ideally display your brand later on in your video, to allow viewers to engage first and perhaps allow them to figure out which brand the ad is about.
No video, videographer or animator? That’s no problem at all, as Digital Briefcase can assist you with the video creation, as well as setting up and running of your YouTube ad campaign!