YouTube is an incredible tool to build brand awareness and find new customers. I’m talking about the YouTube pre-roll ads that show for six seconds until viewers can skip the ad. These video ads are one of the best brand awareness campaigns your business can run.
The main reason it’s so effective is the targeting capability. As you might know, Google owns YouTube. Google also tracks what every person searches for in Google. Because Google and YouTube are the same company, that means you can target people for YouTube ads based on searches they’ve done on Google.
This is very powerful because someone going to Google and performing a search means they are in shopping mode. They are further down the sales funnel and closer to making a purchase, which is the perfect time for them to see your YouTube ad showcasing your company and your unique position within the market. This type of targeting is called custom intent and it involves uploading keyword phrases that your potential customers would search on Google.
A mistake I often see is when people want to test out YouTube and they use an old video they have from a TV ad five years ago as their test ad. It’s a 32-second spot and they upload it to YouTube and then guess what? It doesn’t work.
Let me save you the trouble – any old videos you have from past TV spots are never going to work on YouTube. If you want to run YouTube ads, you have to make a video specific to YouTube format, which is those six-second pre-roll bumper ads.
For effective YouTube ads, you need to front-load a lot of your information into the very beginning of the video. You only get six seconds to make sure your brand and your value proposition is heard and understood by the viewer.
YouTube ads can be the most cost-effective brand awareness campaigns you will ever run because of their incredible targeting ability to serve ads only to active shoppers and researchers of your products and services. But you need to have a video designed to work for YouTube if you want YouTube to work for you.