One of the most promising trends in digital marketing is remarketing. The ability to place a cookie on a user’s computer and subsequently advertise to them on other websites is ideally a win-win for everyone involved. Users get to see ads that are more relevant to them, while brands get to focus on potential leads.
And the stats are promising. Reportedly, Loews HOTELGroup earned $60,000 in revenue from an $800 remarketing campaign.
It’s no wonder then that Google quickly adopted remarketing applications for its most prized possession, YouTube. As anyone who’s ever surfed the web knows, video is huge. And by huge, I mean that 100 million online users view a video every day. Whether you’re watching an informational How To, catching up on cat vids, or viewing a TV show or movie, we’re addicted to motion pictures.
When it comes to content marketing, YouTube can be a potential goldmine for certain brands – which is why remarketing can also be successful. Using your AdWords account, you can choose which users that you want to target.
YouTube remarketing is a great way to address users who:
- Viewed one of your videos
- Interacted with your channel (including likes, comments, etc.)
- Subscribed or unsubscribed to your channel
Once they leave your site, you can continue to video-advertise to them on other websites. If this sounds promising for your business, check out some of these YouTube remarketing benefits.
Stay on viewers’ radars
To say that the internet is crowded is understatement. At the risk of writing the obvious, you have to fight for viewers’ attentions. The pressure on brands to make a great video is huge. If they want their video to be seen, it has to be compelling, entertaining, well-shot, or all of the above. Even if they do a respectable job, it still may not stick with an internet audience overwhelmed by choice.
However, with remarketing, you can continue to stay on people’s radars as they go about their business elsewhere online. It’ll further your brand awareness campaign, while also reminding people of what they watched. Few people actually buy a product or service as soon as they’re introduced to it. But increased exposure can build on the interest that they already demonstrated.
Generate new leads
Going viral is the holy grail among video MARKETERS. It turbo charges views, likes and shares, all of which dramatically increase awareness of your brand and ideally help bring it big success. But in addition to a viral video’s amazing potential for next-level sales, it also presents a sweet remarketing opportunity.
Thanks to the enhanced features of AdWords’ remarketing capabilities, you can customize your campaigns to be very viral-friendly. When users share your video, you can then remarket to them too.
Even if your video doesn’t become the next Dollar Shave Club, the sharing feature can still benefit you. As any digital MARKETER knows, just getting simple shares and likes, even on a small scale, is good for business. Now you can also advertise to those users who demonstrated interest.
You’ll never come on too strong
Nobody likes aggressive MARKETING, especially on the internet when the general rule of thumb among brands is to advertise via valuable content. Fortunately, you can control your remarketing efforts so that you never annoy your targeted users.
YouTube remarketing allows you determine how often your video will be shown. Whether you want to stick to a soft sell at once a day, or go with a weekly strategy that displays your video 10 times over 7 days. You get to decide based on your research and intuition about your leads’ behavior.
You’ll also want to account for the possible outcome of your campaign. That is, let’s say you’ve remarketed your video to a user, and he liked what he saw, and decide to make a purchase (score!). You could potentially continue to show him the video if it worked as an upsell to another product or service. However, in the spirit of not coming on too strong, best practices states that you might consider automatically removing them from your remarketing list (AdWords lets you customize your YouTube remarketing and conversion codes).
Greater ROI
Video remarketing works great as a brand awareness campaign. It reminds users of a product or service they checked out once, and hopefully gets them to check it out again. However, if you want to focus more on conversions, or if you’re not on an unlimited budget, you can optimize it for CPV (cost per view).
As opposed to using impressions, or the number of times your video displays, paying per view can potentially yield greater ROI because you’re focused more on the people who are more likely to buy. With YouTube’s TrueView feature, the emphasis is on engagement. You only pay when someone views your video. This way, you can spend your MONEY on a more targeted, interested audience.
Now that we’ve covered the benefits, here are some tips to help you get started with YouTube remarketing.
Create a unique video
Yes, all of your videos should be unique. Boring, uninspired videos, or videos that shamelessly rip off other brands are a waste of time for everyone involved. This is a given.
For remarketing purposes, your video should be unique in that it differs from the video that the viewer watched in the first place. It might be tempting to just re-use what worked the first time (it would save time after all), but remarketing occurs at a different point in the sales cycle. Users have already shown interest; you need to address their current mindset.
Just make sure the second video provides continuity, with a similar look and tone to the first.
Include a CTA overlay
Now that you’ve moved past the initial stage of the sales cycle, you can advertise a little more directly. It’s a good idea at this point to include a call-to-action overlay on your video. Make very clear what your intention is (“visit our website”; “get the form”, etc.). You have their attention; now move them towards the next step.
Optimize your bidding
Like other kinds of AdWords, YouTube remarketing and TrueView operate on a bidding system. In-display formatsare slightly more expensive to bid on, but a good choice if you’re looking to increase user engagement. Your video will play at the start of another video anywhere across the Google display network, and can be skipped after 5 seconds. However, brand awareness campaigns might do well on the in-stream format, as the video will play on designated YouTube watch pages.
Once you’ve set up your bids, track which ones are performing well and which ones are duds. Accordingly, increase or decrease your spend to improve your performance.
Refine your reach
The analytics within YouTube remarketing provide a great way to drill your reach down to its most specific, targeted users. You can hit nuanced demographics or display only to people located in a specific area. However, don’t over-do it. Too much laser-focus can actually backfire on you, particularly if you’re running a campaign based on impressions.
With excessive specificity, you can start to radically limit the number of times your video plays. While this is a good idea in theory (it should only play to people who might be interested in interacting with your brand again), a tiny amount of impressions won’t do you any good. Focus your options, but don’t make them too narrow. Allow some room for exploiting potential surprises as well.
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