YouTube Marketing Agency 101: Everything Your Agency Should Be Doing

Trying to manage YouTube advertising on your own is frustrating and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. You’re a business owner, not a marketing expert — you have more important tasks to handle. By partnering with a marketing agency specializing in YouTube, rest assured you’re advertising effectively on one of the world’s biggest websites.

But what does it mean to partner with an advertising agency, and what should they do for you? With over 2 billion users each month, it’s vital that your YouTube marketing services connect to your customers and don’t waste your ad spend. Here’s what to expect from YouTube ads and how an agency can help you reach your goals.

What You Need to Know About Advertising on YouTube

Facebook and Instagram are well known for social media advertising, but if you focus on just those, you’re missing out on YouTube. The platform’s 2 billion users view nearly five billion videos daily as they search for solutions to their problems, entertainment, and so much more. These numbers have only increased over the past year due to the Coronavirus pandemic, as people entertain themselves at home rather than going out. According to Statista, users watch nearly 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day with more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.

But YouTube doesn’t just have users; it also has results. In the United States alone, YouTube advertising made almost $5 billion in net advertising revenues in 2019. Based on increased usage in 2020, it’s not unrealistic to estimate revenues were nearly $500 million higher last year — reaching almost $5.5 billion.

YouTube marketing offers several cost-effective advertising formats, including skippable ads, overlay ads, and bumper ads. These features are excellent for smaller businesses looking to maximize their marketing budgets, essentially guaranteeing a return on their investment. Because 78.8% of marketers say YouTube is the most effective video marketing platform, it’s worth going beyond Facebook to take advantage of the benefits of video marketing.

When considering YouTube, remember this — a user must watch 30 seconds of a video for one view count. This differs from Facebook and Instagram, which only require viewers to watch a video for three seconds to consider it one view count. Though not necessarily a negative, keep this in mind when exploring the best options for video ad buying. Consider how long your target audience will watch a video ad—Youtube actively advises against including ads on shorter videos.

Benefits of Advertising on YouTube

There are tons of benefits of advertising on YouTube that can get your brand out there and reach your target demographic. Whether you’re hyper-targeting a specific audience or trying to go viral, the platform offers versatility and is a reliable way to engage target customers.

When our agency provides YouTube marketing services, here are a few of the benefits we highlight to clients:

YouTube video advertisements are engaging, memorable, and effective: Video advertisements are often more attention-grabbing than typical image advertisements. By utilizing captivating images and sound, people are more likely to pay attention and have higher brand recall after seeing your video advertisements—users tend to remember 95% of a message when they see it on video, compared to 10% when it’s only read.
YouTube offers effective and detailed targeting measures so your content reaches the right people: Some of the targeting mechanisms you can use on YouTube include demographic targeting, affinity targeting, life event targeting, retargeting, keyword targeting, topic targeting, and placement targeting. With all these options, your content can more easily reach your target customers to meet your goals (such as conversions).
YouTube advertisements are easy to measure and track throughout the campaign: Your agency should never set a campaign and forget about it. If they’re looking to maximize your investment, they’ll monitor and tweak your campaign along the way to ensure it’s performing as intended. YouTube’s wide assortment of data and insights show how your campaign is faring, and your agency should make adjustments in real-time.
YouTube offers various advertisement formats to choose from: YouTube offers several different advertising formats to choose from based on your budget and advertising goals.
YouTube advertising is cost-effective and accessible: Many people assume advertising on a giant platform like YouTube isn’t possible for smaller, newer firms—that isn’t the case. YouTube offers pricing options that make it a great advertising platform for firms looking to maximize their marketing budgets.

The average cost-per-click or cost-per-view for YouTube ads is between $0.10 and $0.30, according to WebFX. YouTube also allows you to set a concrete campaign budget to avoid overspending. The average daily budget for a YouTube advertising campaign is only $10.

Different Ways to Advertise on YouTube

There are several different advertising formats on YouTube to choose from:

Skippable in-stream video advertisements: These are the YouTube advertisements you’re probably most familiar with. According to Sprout Social, they are also widely considered the most effective, with 29% of marketers choosing this type of ad as the most effective. These either play before or during the selected video and viewers can skip them after five seconds. If the viewer skips the advertisement, you don’t pay for it. Your agency should always create interesting content that hooks viewers so they watch the entire ad.
Non-skippable in-stream video advertisements: Viewers cannot skip these and they are usually between 10 to 15 seconds long, meaning you pay for each one. Content quality is critical with these ads; a non-skippable ad that doesn’t interest your audience is annoying to anyone forced to sit through it. When your agency creates engaging content targeting the right people, the advertisement will come across as useful, entertaining, or hopefully both.
Display advertisements: If you want a more basic image advertisement, then display advertisements are a solid option. These ads show up in the right-hand side-bar while a video is playing.
Discovery advertisements: Discovery advertisements show your brand’s content on the YouTube search page based on specific keywords. These ads place your brand at the top of the list to attract more viewers engaged with searches and topics relevant to your products.
In-video overlay advertisements: This pop-up advertisement includes an image or text that takes up the lower 20% of the video while it’s playing. Like a regular pop-up ad, the viewer can exit out of it — so you only pay when a viewer clicks on the advertisement through to your website.

Do You Need a YouTube Advertising Agency?

As a business owner, you’re dealing with everything from product development to sales to client acquisition and more. If you don’t have the time, energy, or resources to add “YouTube marketing expert” to the list, an agency partnership is what you need.

A strong YouTube advertising agency will deliver powerful results in branding and conversions while allowing you to focus on your strengths. They can troubleshoot issues so you don’t have to manage your YouTube ads by yourself. Owning a business can be isolating and lonely — but it doesn’t have to be when you have people on your team pushing for your success. The right YouTube ad agency will make sure you feel that way.

What Your YouTube Advertising Agency Should Do for You

All of these abstract principles of partnership and teamwork are nice and heartwarming, but what should your YouTube agency do for you? When we provide YouTube ad services for our clients, we focus on performance and transparency. Those principles have helped us generate over $250 million in revenue for our clients. Here’s a quick checklist of what your ad agency should provide to help your brand conquer YouTube:

Analyze: Figure out who you want to target with your content and determine what that audience wants to see in terms of YouTube advertisements. Set specific goals for your company overall and marketing that we can help you reach. Learn more about your brand vision and mission to create the right content for the right people.
Target: Effectively target these people using YouTube’s in-depth mechanisms with nuanced targeting beyond basic information like age and gender. A competent agency will dig deeper to reach people interested and excited about your products and engaging with your brand.
To start, create a customer persona. A detailed customer persona goes above and beyond the basics of a “target customer.” It involves creating a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer with in-depth information, including motivations, likes, dislikes, desires, and goals.
Content Production: What good is knowing your audience if they aren’t seeing content they’ll respond to? Video advertising isn’t easy, and you need to do it properly with rampant creative testing for the best return on your investment. To connect with and impress your viewers, you need a team experienced in creating engaging and memorable content.
You don’t have to spend a fortune to produce quality video content. By using an agency with the experience and skills to develop this content economically, you’ll create top-notch video content that looks Hollywood-worthy without spending a considerable amount.
Influencers: Influencers reign supreme on YouTube, and your brand can use this dynamic to your advantage by identifying and partnering with influencers who best represent the brand to your target audience.
An ad agency can help you vet potential partners to ensure they’re a good fit for your brand values. Further, an ad agency can initiate contact with influencers using their network and connections. Once you foster a partnership, an ad agency can maintain that relationship and ensure all parties are in agreement as your company grows and goals change.
Monitor: Interpreting the mountains of data YouTube provides, identifying potential issues, and coming up with solutions to keep your campaign on track should come standard with any agency partnership. The right agency knows the journey isn’t over once the ad goes live—it’s just begun. It’s essential to monitor the campaign and ensure you’re getting your money’s worth. An agency that doesn’t know how to discern and read the data from your YouTube ads will struggle to help your brand reach its goals and will cost you money in the long run.

Conclusion

Your YouTube agency should do a lot for you. You’re a business owner, not a marketing expert — you have more important business to take care of. Our clients receive nothing less from us.

Our process always starts with a free consultation to learn how our agency can best provide YouTube marketing services for your brand. Contact us to schedule a chat, and our experts are happy to show you how YouTube ads will transform your business.