Today I had the opportunity to attend “How to do B2C Youtube Marketing” workshop organized by HelloMeets at Social Beat office, Chennai. Here is a summary of the learnings from there.
This is a very broad topic and it’s impossible to cover everything required to create a successful Youtube marketing strategy within such a short time. However, the speakers for the day made sure that the audience got a good overview of the process they use at Social Beat to create video marketing campaigns – both paid and unpaid ones.
While it is obvious that we learn by doing and making mistakes, it’s equally important to learn what has worked and not worked for others so that we get a good direction of what/how to do things for ourselves.
That’s exactly what this event facilitated for us participants.
Kanthi Sripathy, who is a lead designer at Social Beat, told us about the importance of creating content/ads for Youtube and how to follow the storytelling structure.
Youtube has become the second biggest search engine after Google! People don’t just go to Youtube to consume entertainment content, but they use it for learning, research and increasingly, to make buying decisions.
She told us about the importance of creating engaging video content, especially in the storytelling format. People want to listen to stories – not just information, features and benefits.
How did a product/service, for example, change the life of the user for better? As a buyer I would want to listen to such stories, right?
Going one step ahead, she also told us how we could use a structure/outline to tell stories that create maximum engagement. This storytelling principle is borrowed from the fiction/screenwriting industry and marketers/Youtube content creators could also use the formula because – it works!
A good story should follow the following structure – A “hook”, “oh shit moment”, “tease”, “all is lost”, “saviour”, “tension/anticipation”, “happily ever after”. The presenter represented as a graph with curves for positive and negative emotions.
Ayesha Rafeeq, a Content Marketing Manager at Social Beat, focused on the importance of creating and ranking videos organically on Youtube.
It’s important to understand your customer’s persona and what types of content they want to view before creating any video. That’s where keyword, competitor and trends research tools like vidIQ, Ahrefs and keywordtool.io help.
Once you’ve researched the keywords with high-volume traffic and low competition in your niche, it’s time to start creating video content related to those keywords.
There are various types of videos one can make – talking head, animation, live action, slideshows, etc. If you are unable to invest in professional gear, use a decent camera/cell phone, mic, background, etc. and try to make the video as professional as possible.
Five to Seven Minute videos work best to give good reach organically. Also, try to use up to 10 tags, and use the most important/relevant tags upfront.
A customer buying journey can be broadly divided into three phases – Awareness, Consideration & Conversion. Organic Youtube videos help with engaging the viewers in the first two stages – mostly.
Not understanding the customer journey process, and not targeting them with the right content at the right phase of their journey is the reason why many Youtube campaigns don’t perform well. Now do you understand why showing customers a single video designed for conversion doesn’t end up converting well?
Natasha Daruwala, Digital Marketing Manager at Social Beat, spoke about Paid Advertising on Youtube.
Gaining traction for videos 100% organically is becoming more and more difficult. So it may be a good idea to boost your Youtube videos initially so that they get some views and engagement, and that should translate to better organic reach eventually.
While organic Youtube growth is a long-term strategy, marketers who want reach, visibility, results, and conversions sooner would want to invest in Youtube ads.
The speaker mentioned the different types of ads available on Youtube. Here are the different types of Youtube video ads available via Google Adwords.
I also came to know about the mother-of-all-youtube-ad-formats, the “Masthead”. This very expensive Youtube ad will be shown to everyone logging into Youtube from a certain country/city on a particular day!
The speaker mentioned a few good resources to follow to get deeper insights and data on Google Advertising. They are – ThinkWithGoogle, Ad Age, Social Samosa.
One good way to increase your Youtube Ad conversions is to use Remarketing. This is basically showing different types of creatives/content to people who have already shown interest in your products/services.
It is also important to create custom audiences that are most likely to convert/engage with your brand. Once you’ve done that, you can ask Google Ads to create a lookalike audience with the large pool of data available with it. These things can be done from within the Google Ads dashboard.
Overall, this event was informative and useful. Time for me to step into the Youtube Marketing game more confidently 🙂