YouTube Ads: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you want to diversify your social media advertising? Wondering how to make YouTube ads work for your business?

To explore how to reach more customers with YouTube ads, I interview Tom Breeze.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Tom Breeze, YouTube ads expert and founder of YouTube ad agency Viewbility. His book is titled Viewability: Harness the Power of YouTube Ads and Be There for Your Customer When It Really Counts and his course is YouTube Ads Workshop.

Tom explains how user intent on Facebook and YouTube differs and why intent matters to advertisers.

You'll also discover a seven-step framework to create YouTube ads that sell.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
YouTube Ads
Tom's Story
Tom's journey with YouTube was heavily impacted by his university studies. He graduated with a master's degree in psychology, and at around age 23, he began working with businesspeople who had anxiety about public speaking.

In 2008, he started doing workshops on the subject and used Google ads to grow the business by driving traffic to his site.

Then, at a 2-day presentation workshop, a few people asked for help using video to present their businesses. Oddly, Tom had just created his own video and was already seeing results; conversions on the site had increased from 7% to 22% almost instantly.

As more people requested the video training rather than the public speaking training, Tom rapidly transitioned into YouTube video.

He wanted to help his clients get more views, and by extension, more business. He learned how to optimize video titles, tags, and descriptions, and dove into learning more about SEO strategies.

When Tom teamed up with a business partner to learn how videos could rank well in all search engines—not just YouTube—they established an entire agency around SEO. But as SEO evolved and got more complicated, Tom noticed their results started to drop.

To better serve his clients, Tom decided to use his experience with Google AdWords to test ads for YouTube video.

He chose a video that had been created for SEO purposes and plugged it into Google AdWords. He targeted a few simple keywords and ran the video as a YouTube ad. The results were incredible.

From there, the SEO business evolved into an agency that focuses exclusively on YouTube ads.

Listen to the show to learn what kind of results Tom saw from his first YouTube ad.
Why YouTube Ads Matter
Next, I ask Tom why marketers should consider advertising on YouTube. First, Tom says, YouTube has a lot of ad inventory available so it's easier for marketers and businesses to get placements.

Second, YouTube users are highly engaged on the platform. In 2015, users in the 18-49 age range spent 4% less time watching TV than the year before, while time watching YouTube video rose by 74%. This year, YouTube reported its 1.9 million active users are collectively watching more than one billion minutes of video daily.

These people are actively using YouTube as a search engine, the average viewing session is clocking in at 40 minutes, and the potential to connect with the right audience is very high. Imagine an engaged user is looking for help and finds your YouTube content. You immediately have an opportunity to create a great first brand experience.

Finally, despite all these positives, only 1 in 10 brands has actually used YouTube ads. So while the ad inventory is a lot bigger, the competition is a little lower.

Listen to the show to find out why many brands haven't tried YouTube ads.
How YouTube Viewers Differ From Facebook Viewers
When I ask Tom why advertising on YouTube is different than advertising on Facebook,