Let us introduce you to Emily Faith: singer, songwriter, actress, future star.

Although Emily’s story is fascinating, what we really want to concentrate on is how she used YouTube video advertising to garner almost 77,000 views on one of her videos in just a week-and-a-half.

And the reason we want to concentrate on this is because you can do it, too (even if you don’t sing catchy pop songs).

The goals with YouTube in-stream video advertising (those skippable video ads that pop up before a video you’re trying to watch or even during longer videos) are three-fold:

• Get people to watch your own YouTube videos (or at least your ad)
• Get more views on your channel (or visitors to your site)
• Build a targeted remarketing list

Seeing as how YouTube has over a billion users and over 300 hours worth of video uploaded every minute, chances are the people you’re trying to reach are on there watching something.

The true beauty about in-stream ads is their affordability. You only pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your ad or the duration of it if it is under 30 seconds, or if they engage with your video.

You can also use these video ads to direct people to various places like another YouTube video, a YouTube channel or even take them off YouTube to your own landing page.

And, maybe even better than their affordability, they can be highly targeted to minimize the chance of people skipping them. You can choose which videos your ads will run in front of, as long as those videos are monetized and allow ads.

How Do You Do It?

There are four simple steps to follow to accomplish your goal of getting people to watch and engage with your ad:

• Define your target audience.
• Collect video placements.
• Choose or create your video discerningly.
• Direct potential customers to the place you want to send them.

Defining Your Audience

The number one mistake most people make when using YouTube ads is they don’t target their ads properly. What’s the use of showing an ad in front of a video that is completely unrelated to your product or service?

In Emily’s case, it was quite easy to identify other artists whose fan bases would likely also appreciate her music. One of the other artists whose fan base she targeted was Matty B (think Justin Bieber’s younger brother), whose channel has over 7.5 million subscribers.  

In your case, you would want to target videos that you think your potential customers would be watching. The videos don’t necessarily have to be related to your product or service, but obviously it helps because as you can probably attest to, it’s super annoying to watch a video and have an ad pop up that has nothing to do with the actual content of the video.

Collecting Your Video Placements

Once you have a target audience defined, you need to arrange for your video ad to show up in front of videos you think they would be interested in watching.  

When you create a YouTube video ad campaign inside AdWords, the trick is to use managed placements, which means you manually choose the videos to place your ad in front of.

For each campaign you run, you can target a maximum of 2,400 unique video placements.

However, that means having to manually copy and paste 2,400 different URLs into your campaign, which isn’t something anyone has time or inclination to do.

Fortunately, there are tools you can use to grab those URLs for you. In Emily’s case, the campaign managers used Veeroll, which allows you to enter a keyword and snag 10 target lists of 240 placements for your ad.

Choosing or Creating Your Video

Now, this is where Emily had a real advantage over a company that sells a product or service because as a singer, she had plenty of videos ready and waiting and those videos were already aimed squarely at the audience she was targeting.

As a business, it may be a bit more difficult to create engaging video ads that will prompt people to watch them, but with a bit of creativity and good targeting, it shouldn’t be too much trouble.

Animation works well, so we’ve heard.

Whatever type of video you make, be sure to include a clear call to action, whether that be getting people to subscribe to your channel or to visit a landing page or whatever.

In Emily’s case, her team used a Rihanna cover song video so the song would be familiar to people and then prompted viewers to subscribe to Emily’s channel to hear more of her music.

Directing People to the Destination of Your Choice

As mentioned previously, you can choose where you want to send people when they engage with your ad.

If you are trying to build a following on YouTube, send them to your channel.  If you want to build a following on another social media platform, send them there or simply direct them to your site or landing page to get more information or take further action.

Using this strategy, Emily’s ad campaign managers got almost 77,000 views on a single video in 10 days and they ended up only paying two cents per view.

Even better is that her team built a remarketing Pixel list of over 300,000 YouTube contacts inside Adwords to promote new content to.

Emily’s profile on YouTube skyrocketed, with her channel gaining thousands of subscribers and her videos reaching scores of people who they weren’t reaching before.

Best of all, Matty B’s manager saw one of her targeted videos when he went to watch one of his client’s videos and approached her to open a show for him.

Now, a burgeoning pop star and a retail company are two very different things, but what you can take away from this post is that you need to:

• … create a great video that will engage people.
• … target your audience with laser like precision.
• … collect placements for your video.
• … decide where you want your new traffic to go and make sure it correlates your video ad.
• … build up a YouTube remarketing list for future content.

Highly targeted YouTube video advertising worked for Emily and it can work for you, too. The first step is to create highly engaging video content. Fortunately for you, you’re already at the right place to do just that.

Click here to make an appointment today to find out how to create an engaging explainer video for your company.