Many brands looking to expand their reach online use YouTube videos and ads to promote their business. This method is a highly popular and effective marketing strategy to diversify your traffic sources. In this article, we’ll guide you through the steps of creating effective YouTube ads from the creation of the videos to optimizing important elements to further enhance them. We’ll then cover SEO tips to improve your ranking on search engine results pages to increase your ad’s visibility.
Why Should you Use YouTube to Market your Brand?
YouTube is home to more than 1.7 billion online users monthly worldwide, which is considerably higher traffic than many other platforms out there. Even if you don’t create YouTube videos or have the intention to grow your channel, you can still reach a large audience by advertising on other videos. Videos tend to appear more often than other forms of content in Google’s search results, so you can take advantage of this by having higher visibility on Google. Using YouTube ads can also help with increasing your online authority and the more authoritative you are on Google, the higher your page will rank in search results.
If you’ve decided that you want to explore the YouTube landscape to broaden your online reach, where should you start? Well, let’s go through the steps of setting up your ads for success.
Advertising on YouTube
The first step in creating any YouTube ad is creating an account on Google Ads, which is home to all the running campaigns. Once you have opened an account, then you can create a campaign where you can set goals, an overall budget and specify the audience you want to target using ad groups, demographics and keywords.
You’ll also want to ensure you have a YouTube account to upload the video ad to your channel. At this stage, having a large subscriber base and channel traffic isn’t as important if your goal is to use that video to advertise on other videos.
59% of executives prefer watching video to reading text.
Optimizing Your Video for Engaging Ads
The most important part of your video is the first five seconds. It needs to capture the audience’s interest from the start, be engaging and give a clear idea of what the ad is about. Users may have the ability to skip the ad after five seconds, so you want to be sure the most important part of your ad shows up at the beginning. Professionalism is also an important aspect of your ad. Make sure your videos are high-quality, with good sound quality. Outsourcing the video production of your ads may be a good idea. Although the cost may be higher than producing in-house videos, higher-quality videos will return better results in the long run.
Being authentic is another important aspect for engaging your audience. Avoid using clickbait titles and thumbnails or any deceptive practices to avoid a negative brand reputation. Although clickbait titles may improve clickthrough rates and impressions, they likely won’t improve your conversion rates. Once a user feels like they have been scammed, it is hard to regain their trust and that may tarnish your brand image.
Providing a call to action is essential for any ad you create. These indicators make it clear to users what the next step should be, whether that’s signing up for a service, entering their email for more information, etc.
Improving Your Video Through SEO
It’s great to have an engaging, high-quality video, but without SEO elements, that video may not get the attention it deserves.
Firstly, the title of the video should be clear and compelling. It’s a good idea to do some keyword research for the audience you are targeting and include the most relevant ones at the beginning of the title. This will ensure your video appeals to your target audience and grasps their interest from the start.
The description of the video should include any important links and CTAs at the beginning to drive engagement and views. Users tend to glance at the description of a video for any relevant links or information that’s why we recommend they show up before users need to click the “show more” tab to see the full description. It’s worth considering including your video transcript as it is full of keywords.
Including tags in your video helps associate it with similar videos and can help users find your videos, which broadens its reach. It is best to have at least one or two tags in your videos to help Youtube understand who to recommend your video to.
The thumbnail of your video is just as important as the title. It’s often the very first thing people notice when scrolling on YouTube before reading the title. YouTube auto generates a thumbnail for you based on the clips in your video, but it’s highly recommended to create a custom thumbnail. YouTube reports that “90% of the best performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails".
Key Takeaways
Advertising on YouTube has many advantages for your brand. One of the main ones is that it can help increase its reach by targeting new audiences on a large platform. By using these mentioned tactics for your video ads, you’re on your way to putting out some great and engaging content to grow your brand’s reach!
