Leonel Tapia June 9, 2021 It’s a well-known fact that influencers can boost your brands’ visibility, as well as drive sales and leads with the right strategy, but have you tried combining both, YouTube Ads and YouTube Influencers?
Typically, when you create a YouTube ad campaign, a popular strategy is to target channels where your target audience is, but what if you also work directly with some of these influencers whose channels you are targeting through the use of YouTube ads?
The answer to that is simple, your campaigns are likely to be more successful. However, they will also be more expensive if you weren’t planning on running two different types of marketing campaigns, such as if you were running video ads but not influencer marketing.
Things to Consider Before Using This Strategy
Both YouTube video ads and influencer marketing are important digital marketing strategies to use when you want to build a strong brand name that will be around for many years to come.
However, there are also some things to keep in mind before diving too far into the strategy.
For example, if you’ve never really ran YouTube video ads or worked with an influencer, you’ll first want to get familiar with both approaches as they are quite different.
Also, if you do not have sufficient budget to do both things at once, you may consider just focusing on what is likely to have the biggest impact on your company, which could be either YouTube Ads, YouTube Influencers, or even something else altogether.
Understanding the Importance of Both Types of Campaigns
Before we dive deeper into what goes into executing this strategy – it’s important that you understand the value of both, YouTube ad campaigns, as well as influencer marketing.
YouTube video ads are an excellent way to create brand awareness and drive traffic to your landing pages – where you may be able to capture leads such as their email addresses or drive product sales.
Influencers work in a similar fashion, they can vouch for your brand to people who follow and listen to them; likely making this audience more likely to consider you when making a purchase decision or when the need for your services arises.
Getting Started with YouTube Ads and Influencers
I will not cover the steps of setting up each one of these two campaigns as that would go beyond the main topic of this article but I will outline general guidelines that you can find useful in order to be successful in executing this strategy.
- Make sure that you know who your target audience is which you can do by looking at your analytics data or gathering data from publicly available resources.
- Make sure that a large number of your target audience is actually on YouTube in order to effectively make use of this strategy.
- Do your search to figure out some of the channels or specific videos you want to target when running your YouTube ad campaigns.
- Select one or two micro-influencers from those channels whom you think you could work with to promote your brand.
You can work with a potential partner (or influencer) to set up a one-time video review or a recommendation for something you are selling, or you can request a series of videos where they may promote you for a number of videos.
Because you will want your message to get across more effectively, you may want to make it so that your influencer mentions you in a few videos and not just one.
It doesn’t have to be every single one of their subsequent videos, but do keep in mind that they get new followers all the time.
Additionally, something else to keep in mind is that people need multiple reminders or interactions with your brand before they may even consider buying from you.
Tracking & Measuring Results
The goal of this strategy may result in short-term wins if you offer a relatively affordable product but it can also offer slower but steady long-term growth if you have a more expensive product or service, as well as if one of your goals is brand awareness and consideration as a long-term marketing strategy.
Ideally, if you’ve never run YouTube ads before, you can first get started with a simple video ad campaign for a few weeks to see how they perform, then select some of the best performing channels for your influencer endeavors and reach out to them with your collaboration pitch.
The approach should ideally result in better engagement levels for your YouTube Ads campaigns, as well as your YouTube influencer marketing initiatives.
Note that many YouTube users watch and follow multiple influencers in the same niche or industry, so you can continue to advertise your videos in other channels as well and not be limited to the channel of the influencer(s) you are working with. It’s really about finding a way to combine both approaches so that they can each benefit from the other long-term.
Some of the metrics you could be tracking include no other than your traffic, conversions and leads from YouTube traffic in particular. You’ll even want to track your brand awareness to see if it’s moving at a better pace by looking at things such as your branded search.
Finally, If you are working with multiple influencers, consider using UTM parameters and URL shorteners if they link to your website from the video description so you can track specific campaigns more effectively from the influencer side of things. If you want to use influencers to generate sales, you can also check out this article I published on my blog.
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