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YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine and boasts over 2 billion MAUs(monthly active users) – a common but one of the most important metrics which sometimes stumbles companies’ stock prices as well. With its amazing creators who are the backbone for YouTube, it offers amazing reach for marketers. But before you jump into spending thousands of dollars, it’s important to understand some of the basics.
First things first, don’t ever say my product or service is for anyone and everyone aka shotgun approach. To drive results, you first need to understand who your user is. Target your audience demographics, interests, and behaviour. You can make it generic first, but try to nail down exactly who your ideal persona is. With that in mind, deep dive into their YouTube habits: what channels do they watch, what videos do they engage with. Engagement can be from liking or disliking a video, subscribing to the channel, commenting and sharing a particular video etc.
For instance, let’s consider Whatsapp. Let’s say Whatsapp is releasing a feature about introducing bots to their platform and are planning to advertise about it. Would they think “Hey, everyone is a Whatsapp user, it doesn’t matter who we advertise to, everyone uses Whatsapp” or dig really deep into their user personas. One of the ways to think about is:
Whatsapp bots are used by user segments like businesses. Let’s split that into small, medium and large businesses. If these businesses are communicating with their users over whatsapp they likely have at least one B2C component. Employees of these businesses must be watching videos about communication APIs like Twilio, Hubspot, or channels related to Whatsapp marketing or communication.
User Persona:
This approach is called creating a User Persona. Here are some great examples of user personas:
Steps to making user persona:
Step 1: Gather your data
This data can come from various sources such as:
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Website analytics
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Surveys
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Interviews
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Customer Support
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Product plan
Step 2: Define your target audience
Once you’ve gathered all the data, you need to start to define your target audience. This means identifying groups of people most interested in reaching with your product or service.
Step 3: Create your persona profile
The profile should contain following information:
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Demographics
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Psychographics
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Goals
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Needs
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Challenges
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Behaviours
Step 4: Give it a name and a face
It’s important to give your persona a name and a face to make it more relatable. Use a stock photo or drawing
Step 5: Use your persona to make decisions
There are various use cases for persona like:
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Developing product features
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Creating marketing materials
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Improving website
In YouTube advertising context,
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Creating relevant video ad for the persona
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Reaching out using relevant behaviour on YouTube
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Watching and engaging with certain types of content
Some of these can be strong signals for this persona to show intent of being interested in a certain product or service due to their behaviour in engaging with certain types of content.
There you have it. First and most important step in many decisions, including YouTube advertising, is Know your user.
Pro tip: Once you nail the user persona, prepare some key phrases they might be searching on YouTube. Use these keyphrases in Adzaps and get relevant placement data. Use this data in Google ads content section to target your user personas.
