Why You Should Advertise on YouTube

A lot of businesses rather believe video advertising is more effective with Television and cable station ads, but with the advent to internet and YouTube, the huge benefits of YouTube Advertisement seems to be on the rise daily and it should not be left to only Big Corporations and Brands, YouTube Advert might be the push you need for your business because You can actually drive conversions with YouTube

There are a lot of reasons to advertise on YouTube, ranging from its enormous reach to influencing purchase, not excluding advanced targeting, easy to track statistics and huge Returns on Investment when compared with placing television adverts.

Let’s cover the basics of what you need to know in order to run a successful advert on YouTube.

How does YouTube work?

A concise knowledge and understanding of how YouTube works in order to effectively run adverts on it

According to statistics, an average YouTube user spends about forty Minutes per session during which he will be exposed to multiple YouTube advertisements.

Videos on YouTube are in Adobe Flash Video format with a file extension designation of .flv; this format is better than other formats because of its high compression ratio and the fact that it only needs a flash player applet instead of a stand-alone video player.

Videos can be uploaded on to YouTube in several formats such as Windows Media Video (.wmv), Moving Pictures Expert Group (.mgp), QuickTime (mov) and Audio Visual Interleave (.avi) after which it is converted by YouTube into Adobe Flash Video (.flv) format. The period between the uploading and conversion of video files is referred to as processing time and varies depending on file size.

Macromedia Flash Player 7.0 or higher is required in order to watch YouTube videos and it has the volume control, pause/play, rewind and zoom function which allows users to control several aspects of the video.

The YouTube homepage has a wide array of functions which might be confusing for a first time user; it shows thumbnails of videos currently being watched by other users, a featured video window and list, list containing promoted videos and a search tab. There are also tabs which are linked to other sections of YouTube such as the Videos, Categories, channels and Community and they all function as a search function.

Why are brands more likely to advertise on YouTube?

According to Google, about six billion hours are spent by more than one billion people watching YouTube videos. With such a large number of audience, it’s not surprising that it’s fast becoming a choice place for advert placement by both large and small corporations alike.

This four reasons are our opinion of why brands are more likely to advertise on YouTube:

Enormous Reach: because it’s a crossbreed between a social media network and a search engine, it is unequaled in the wide array of internet users it can reach. It is regarded  as the third largest social media network and the second most popular search engine and gives more search results than Ask, Yahoo, Bing and AOL combined. It is therefore capable of reaching both categories of internet users –information seekers and social interaction seekers as classified by Forbes. YouTube is therefore the platform to reach the widest possible range of customers by any brand.

Advert statistics are trackable: Google recognizes the need for up-to-date metrics in evaluating advertisement technique and makes statistics such as clicks, views, engagements, costs and budget details for YouTube adverts available through AdWords. It is also possible to know what number of viewers watch 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of total video ad length. This statistics will let you know how well your ads are performing and when to restructure advert technique in order to meet your goal.

Ability to influence purchasing behavior.

A study by Entrepreneur has shown that YouTube is capable of positively influencing purchase choice of viewers. A YouTube Insights report    shows that a high number of auto-vehicle, beauty product and smartphone buyers are influenced by YouTube in the purchasing decision. Therefore, any business in this category can be assured of having purchasing decision of buyers impacted to positively favor them.

Audience targeting: it’s a virtual waste of precious resources including time and money to advertise to those who are not interested in the product. YouTube allows you to target audience based on a number of factors such as age, interests, gender, parental status etc.. You are also allowed to focus your ads on specific channels or videos which are relevant to your target audience. This goes a long way to ensure your brand message reaches where it is needed. 

What factors affect your advertisement on YouTube?

A lot of factors will affect how well your YouTube ads perform. Some of them are:

• Ad Format: since there are various ad formats which can be used on YouTube, it is expected that they do not give the same result. When choosing from the YouTube ad formats available, you should chose the one which will give you the desired result. You can check out influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtube-ads-costto know more about YouTube ad formats and prices.
• Influencertypes: the type of influencer you feature in your YouTube ads will go a long way in determining the outcome especially if your product is targeted at a particular audience generation. Using the right influencer could go as far as ensuring 3times as much views and 2times as much actions.
• How the influencer introduce your product: after choosing the right influencer for your product, it is also essential that the influencer introduce your product right. Ensuring the influencer uses the right words, tenses and phrases will go a long way in giving your YouTube ad an edge over competitors’. It is therefore a good idea to have a good knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• CPM/CPT: when and how you choose your ad to be displayed can also not be overemphasized. CPM means Cost per Mille which is Latin term for 1,000 and refers to YouTube ads charged at a rate of 1000 views of more than 30 seconds and it’s used for ads placed at the start of a video.

CPC means Cost per Click is a charging rate for ads imbedded in a video. The most effective add type are the embedded ads.

Final thoughts

The benefits accrued in YouTube Ads marketing for brands, both small businesses and huge corporations are immense. However, before you take that bold step, it is important that you cross all I’s and dot all T’s.