Here is a broad YouTube strategy that works really well and has proven to be successful for many different companies.

  1. Create a good YouTube video that entertains, educates and asks the audience to take action. (brands like Dollarshave Club, Purple, and Chatbooks)
  2. Build out a YouTube Ad campaign that will target the right consumers.
  3. Nurture the audience with 8 to 12 touches

Video views on YouTube and Facebook are a lot cheaper than clicks on Google Search Ads. But it’s still a risky investment. That’s because there is a lag between someone seeing an ad and the actual purchase.

Few people will see the ad on YouTube and buy a right away. You have to Nurture the audience.

The hardest part of a YouTube ad campaign is the attribution (Tracking buyers directly).

A YouTube campaign may look like a failure the first 30 days but actually isn’t over a 60 to 90 day period.

This is what Purple mattress was running into when they ran their YouTube marketing campaign.

Luckily for Purple, things were pretty simple when they started out.

Back then, they were only running video ads, so any lift in sales was 100% attributable to those early campaigns. Comparing dollars in vs dollars out gave them the confidence that this was the right strategy to pursue.

Purple Matress saw a direct ROAS of 1.5 on the YouTube campaigns, they knew that the actual ROAS would climb to 4 by looking at a 30-60 days period.

Besides watching sales come in, they also had other indicators that looked promising.

Google has a research survey called Brand Lift which is an experiment that divides the audience you want to target into two. One half will see your ads while the other half doesn’t. Then afterward, they look at the difference in branded search queries between the two groups.

Here are the results Purple found when they ran such a campaign:

  • People that watched >30 seconds (what Google counts as a view): 30x increase in branded searches.
  • People that skipped the ad: 6x increase in branded search queries.

These numbers are pretty huge. And the group that skipped the ads still showed a considerable increase, which Purple got for free, because you don’t pay for skipped ads on YouTube.

Here are the best 5 ways to target your audience with YouTube Ads.

1. In-Market

2. Remarketing

3. Placements

4. Brand Search (Keywords)

5. Custom Intent Audience (People who search for our keywords)

Keep it simple and make sure you are tracking results.

Keep Marketing