Digital Marketing Insider (I.A.N.6): 2-9-24

🎉 🎊 Greetings, Marketers! 🎉 🎊

Welcome back to the heart of our "Internal Author Newsletters" (I.A.N.), your Friday beacon of marketing insights, released faithfully at 5 am ET. Your warm feedback continues to fuel our excitement! 🙌

Today's spotlight? "When and How to Use YouTube Advertising for Lead Generation" 🌐✨

Our guide on this YouTube journey is written by our Associate Marketing Director of Paid Search Julia Berry!

This iteration is packed with actionable tips and strategies to harness the power of YouTube advertising for lead generation.

So, buckle up and get ready to dive into the world of YouTube ads! 🚀

Stay engaged, stay inspired.

When and How to Use YouTube Advertising for Lead Generation 

It is true that YouTube advertising is a great medium to get your brand’s message out there, but YouTube’s capabilities go so much farther than brand awareness alone. Most lead gen advertisers don’t think about YouTube when they think about where they should spend their finite ad dollars each month — Google search, Facebook, and LinkedIn usually dominate the media mix and if YouTube gets a sliver of the budget, it’s often an afterthought intended for brand awareness. 

But…

YouTube can absolutely stand on its own as a direct response lead generation channel. 

As a lead generation advertiser, you might already meet the requirements to deploy YouTube Ads today. Or, you could be a short 30-second video away from introducing YouTube advertising into your paid strategy. 

If you want to use Youtube for lead gen, you just need to know which prerequisites need to be met for the two primary YouTube targeting strategies: prospecting and retargeting.

When and How to Use YouTube Retargeting

We’re starting with YouTube retargeting as it’s a great way to get your feet wet on YouTube Ads, and has fewer requirements than prospecting, making it a more accessible choice for more advertisers.

To start retargeting on YouTube for lead gen, you’re going to need:

• At least one video of decent quality.

• A retargeting audience large enough to serve—your GA4 website visitors audience is probably your largest audience in your Google Ads account right now.

• At least $500 - $1,000 in additional ad spend per month.

Retargeting Video Creative Is a “Brand Reintroduction”

The most basic requirement to run any YouTube campaign is, of course, a video to run as an ad. This is where a lot of advertisers abandon the idea of running ads on YouTube altogether. 

If you’re like most companies, video ad creative is probably going to be the biggest barrier to entry for both YouTube retargeting and prospecting. Compared to display ads or text ad copy, video production is much more time-consuming and costly. Even a UGC (user-generated content) ad takes time and can be expensive to produce when creator fees are factored in. 

However, the good thing about YouTube retargeting is that it’s a lot easier to use what you have at hand.

Ask yourself: Do you have any video assets in your creative library that could have been produced for another channel, or for your website?

Short videos made for PR purposes can work well too. Or, check out your company or clients’ YouTube channel for existing organic YouTube video content. At WebMechanix, we reuse a lot of our content in newsletters, podcasts, and in our YouTube videos. 

What you’re looking for is branded, evergreen video content, ideally between 15 seconds and two minutes in length (although you can go longer—YouTube Ads charges a video view at the 30-second mark or at the end of the video, whichever comes first!). 

Ideally the video would also give a direct call-to-action for the contact form or demo request lead you want to receive. If not, that’s alright, as you will be able to designate the CTA you want to appear as a CTA button on the ad itself.

The Biggest Difference Between YouTube Prospecting & Retargeting is Creative

YouTube retargeting differs from YouTube prospecting most when it comes to f creative. Since you will be retargeting an audience of people who are at least somewhat familiar with your brand (be they website visitors or high-intent previous converters from a CRM customer list), your video can be more of a brand re-introduction. 

The viewer should already have a general idea of who you are and what you do. The re-introduction might be the reminder they need to click into your website and convert, whereas in prospecting, you’ll need to craft a video that introduces a viewer to your brand, your product/services, and the explicit action they need to take to take you up on your offer via a submitted lead.

The Larger the YouTube Retargeting Audience the Better

If you have a Google Ads account and it is already integrated with your Google Analytics account, you probably already have an “All Users” audience of website visitors piping into Google Ads from GA4. 

This audience will usually be your best bet for YouTube retargeting, as you will struggle to spend on YouTube with audiences of 5,000 members or less.

However, feel free to layer on additional audiences of customer lists pulled from your CRM, if you have them! When promoting a bottom-funnel offer like a demo request, you can add audiences of mid-funnel converters on gated content pieces, too. 

You Can Spend Less on YouTube Retargeting

YouTube retargeting for lead gen is much more accessible to most advertisers (compared to YouTube prospecting) because with retargeting, you can get up and running with a much lower monthly investment in ad spend. 

But why does YouTube retargeting cost less? It’s because your retargeting audience is limited by nature. Even when retargeting to all website visitors, you can still reach a large percentage of that audience with only $500 - $1,000 spent on YouTube ads per month.

When and How to Use YouTube Prospecting

We draw such a line of distinction between YouTube retargeting and prospecting because between net-new video creative and adspend YouTube prospecting is altogether a more expensive endeavor. 

But should you meet the given criteria, the investment in YouTube prospecting can open up a brand new channel for consistent lead generation. 

To start prospecting on YouTube for lead gen, you’re going to need:

• At least 4 video ads deliberately crafted for YouTube lead gen.

• Sufficient conversion volume to inform the algorithm: at minimum, you’ll want 30 conversions in 30 days from YouTube alone.

• A qualified conversion event to bid towards.

• Between $5,000 and $10,000 minimum to spend on YouTube per month.

Prospecting Video Creative Should Be Net-New and Carefully Designed

To give your YouTube prospecting program the greatest opportunity to directly generate leads, net-new, carefully designed video creative is necessary. Unlike retargeting, where you have the flexibility to use what you already have, we strongly recommend only pursuing YouTube prospecting if you have the means to produce at least 4 individual videos to start.

Not every YouTube prospecting ad will be a winner— we often see just a 25-33% win rate on new YouTube video creative. That’s why we recommend starting out with at least 4 videos ready to test.

We don’t use a strict script for every single YouTube prospecting video ad, but when starting out with a new YouTube client, we like to follow this formula for initial creatives:

The two most important parts of this formula are the hook and the demonstration of the call-to-action (CTA). 

The hook, or the first ~5 seconds of the video  should be designed to be eye-catching. You want it to hold the viewer’s attention to prevent them from skipping the YouTube ad so the full message is delivered — that’s where the true impact lies. Oftentimes the same base video will perform very differently across variations using unique hooks.

The demonstration of the CTA is also essential when prospecting on YouTube for the explicit purpose of generating leads. YouTube pre-roll skippable ads (unlike Facebook ads seen when scrolling through the Facebook feed) play before the organic YouTube video content the viewer actually wanted to watch in the first place, so we have to give them a very good reason to leave that organic video and visit our ad’s landing page. 

Not only should you be clear about why they should click on your YouTube ad and submit a lead, but you should also demonstrate exactly how to do that: even something as simple as screen-recording the submission of a test lead works well. 

Conversion Volume & A Quality Conversion Signals

The key to YouTube prospecting, and the reason why so much conversion volume is listed as one of our prerequisites, is that you want Google’s algorithm to do the work of seeking out prospects likely to convert for you. Google’s algorithm is one of (if not the) best, and one of the great things about YouTube advertising is that Google owns YouTube (and YouTube campaigns run within the Google Ads platform), so you can take advantage of Google’s premium machine learning for YouTube, too. 

YouTube’s video action campaign (VAC) format is the best campaign type for direct response lead gen, since this campaign type only bids with conversion-based automated bid strategies, like Maximize Conversions or Target CPA. For best results, Google themselves recommend running these types of bid strategies when you are able to generate at least 30 conversions in 30 days to feed the algorithm.

If you’ve read the last few I.A.N.s, you might have noticed that qualified conversion signals have been a consistent topic of conversation—here at WebMechanix, we’re a bit obsessed with sending quality conversion data into ad platforms to train the algorithm! 

The basic idea is to fire conversion events only for leads that have self-identified themselves as an ideal customer by selecting a qualifying answer on your lead form. That way, you train an ad platform’s algorithm to seek out people who are not only likely to convert, but likely to identify themselves as an ideal customer in some way, too.

While you can launch a YouTube prospecting pilot optimizing towards a basic lead conversion event only, our best recommendation would be to take the time and set up a qualified lead conversion event first to train Google’s algorithm on the best-quality leads.

Recommended Adspend for YouTube Prospecting Campaigns

Beyond the expense of tailored creative, the minimum monthly adspend of $5,000 - $10,000 is another major barrier to entry for most advertisers. It’s a major reason why we would recommend YouTube retargeting over YouTube prospecting in most cases.

Why do we recommend such a high budget? 

First, in order to meet the minimum 30 conversions in 30 days YouTube requirement, you’ll need to calculate your estimated YouTube CPL x 30 to achieve that volume in a month. And again, 30 conversions is the absolute minimum volume you’ll want to successfully propel a conversion-based smart bidding strategy. 

You can estimate your YouTube CPL by looking at your current paid channel CPLs: YouTube CPLs will usually fall somewhere between your Google search CPL (more expensive) and your Facebook CPL.

In addition to the CPL estimate x 30 conversions calculation, you’ll want to add on a couple thousand dollars more budget to your starting monthly YouTube prospecting adspend. This is particularly important at the inception of a YouTube prospecting pilot because you’ll need ample budget for testing device (desktop and mobile) targeting, prospecting audience targeting, and your various video creative with each device & audience. A higher overall CPL is to be expected early in a YouTube prospecting pilot as you test across audiences and creatives to find the optimum pairings.

Oh, and don’t forget—if you meet the lofty requirements to run YouTube prospecting, it’s probably worth your while to peel off another $1k in ad spend to launch YouTube retargeting, too! That way you can stay in front of those prospects until they’re ready to convert.

Ready to launch YouTube advertising for lead gen?

Stay tuned for more YouTube advertising content from WebMechanix—or respond to this email right now with “YouTube Advertising!” to chat more about how YouTube could be your next lead generation channel.

Let’s talk.

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