Ahhh, YouTube. The one place we can spend countless hours watching videos we wouldn’t even realize we wanted to watch.

In the middle of all this great content, though, you have ads after ads, after more ads, sometimes two at once. But given the amount of video content we consume, is this necessarily a bad thing? Here we explore the opportunities YouTube can bring to your business' marketing strategy.

Fun facts:

YouTube now has over two billion users, over five billion videos watched per day and 500 hours of content uploaded per minute. That’s 720,000 hours per day. Long story short, there’s a lot of people feeding and eating up video content, which to us digital marketers, means a huge audience to reach out to or cherry pick from.

A lot of you may already be doing ads on the search network and you may even achieve click through rates of around 2-10%. Assuming you had a 10% CTR and 100 users were served by your ad, that’s only ten people that came to your site, with a potential 90 others who could be on other channels such as YouTube.

One of the biggest barriers stopping some brands from promoting on YouTube is the video content itself (ironically). No one needs a million pound movie budget to create good content, you have devices such as a smartphone which can do the job just as well, and for vastly less money. But video content isn’t the only thing, you need to identify your audience and what the goal of your video is, with that in mind let’s take a brief step by step guide.

1) The goal:

Every good video has a purpose behind it. Here you should determine what it is you want to achieve. Some examples include:

• Brand awareness
• Sales
• Customer acquisition
• Customer retention
• Telling a story
• Creating viral content

The goal will dictate the type of video and its length: whether it's promotional, educational, customer testimonials or maybe a video about your business works in the background. The stage of the marketing funnel you want to target, top, mid or bottom will determine the appropriate length it should be.

2: Stages of creation:

Any good video, large budget or not follows a similar process to creating good content - as outlined below:

Concept ideas and create a storyboard

It’s here you’ll draft and throw away most of your ideas until you really narrow it down. The storyboard shows the flow of your idea and the general direction you want the video to take. Don’t forget, if people will speak and feature in it, it’s good to draft script copies and consider who is speaking depending on the type of video.

For example, if it’s introducing the brand, cast the owner; if it’s a how to guide, use one of the more technical staff members (the owner could still work if they’re just as knowledgeable), and customer testimonials are self explanatory.

Shoot the video

First things first, consider the location you will film in; whether it will be outdoors or in a studio. Think about what role factors like lighting and background noise will play in the quality of the final shot and the purpose of the overall video; this will dictate where you film.

Don’t be afraid to take plenty of retakes. Rome wasn’t made in a day after all! But if you’re filming on your smartphone, you may find taking that retakes don’t take that long to do.

Editing

No matter how good your shot is, editing will always need to be done to eliminate other bothersome factors within your video. This includes adding audio in, cutting out certain portions, even snipping the video down to a shorter segments to use for different ads styles such as 6 second bumper ads. YouTube's bumper ad is a six-second, unskippable video ad that plays before a YouTube video. Due to their short length, bumper ads are best for creating brand awareness and reach

Remember, those first impressions are everything, we’re all familiar with the infamous skip button, so your video does need to make a good impression to break that barrier.

3: Targeting your audience:

Remember when I said there were over two billion people on YouTube? You could imagine finding the right audience for you is like a needle in a haystack, and trying to target all of them is just impractical. Luckily that’s not a problem as there are various easy ways to target the people you, let’s explore a few.

Keywords: The bread and butter of PPC, remember YouTube is still a search engine at the end of the day, which means people still type in words, and thus one way to capture people’s intent.

In-Market Audiences: Videos are a great way for users to do some research on products/services, with many of them ready to buy, these patterns and signals can be picked up by YouTube and compiled into pre-made “in-market” audiences, giving you a pre made audience for you to target.

Affinity: Maybe you're looking to raise awareness or interest for your product/service, in which case you can also target people via their interests. Affinity audiences are great for these, like in-markets, their pre-compiled lists of users interested in certain topics, Games, Sports, Food, Movies, there’s a whole range of interests to target, and at the rate videos are uploaded, plenty of content to feed these lists.

Conclusion:

This articles outlines all the initial steps to make your first YouTube ad and put it out into the world. YouTube is still a cheap place to advertise on with massive reach and even more potential.

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