Hey everyone, we'll get over one just a minute or two to roll through here. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Um, while we're waiting, we're going to be covering, uh, all the details of, uh, YouTube, um, page strategies, yeah, Melinda specifically page strategies.
Yeah. I think that's probably a good way to focus it. Yeah. And the format is going, cause I haven't been deploying YouTube ads in years.
And so the format is really going to be, I'm going to be interviewing Melinda. He's been running that. He's been learning from other people that have been doing it across a lot of different companies. And my objective is to extract all the knowledge and insights for myself and also for all of us to be able to learn from the expertise when it comes to YouTube, as a channel, I'm going to let Melinda weigh in a lot on this one.
But when it comes to YouTube as a channel, pay attention to what's going on. There's a company called Data Rails and data rails is crushing tick tock paid vertical video and the company is growing really fast. They're putting a lot of pressure on incumbent companies. They have a great product and they have a great innovative marketing strategy, specific to video content on tick tock paid.
The same thing is possible within YouTube connected TV, other types of available channels outside of the common traditional media mix of companies, which is display ads, Google paid search and LinkedIn ads. And so that is to set the table here. A lot of companies are reaching significant extreme diminishing returns within Google and LinkedIn paid and need to find new avenues and channels to be able to reach their customers and drive higher or higher marketing investments. So with all of that context, Melinda, why don't you just give us a background one or two minutes about who you are, what you've been working on, what interests you and then we'll get into the details right away.
Yeah, thanks. Hi, everyone. I'm a language in I am a senior performance marketing manager here at Fine Labs. I've been with the team for about three years now, but my career in paid media spans across about 10 years.
So I'm happy to join Chris here today to give you all a tactical look into YouTube advertising B2B. As far as things that interest me, YouTube definitely is a platform that interests me. I use it quite frequently, actually. And I've also been on the advertising side of things on YouTube.
So it's very interesting to see how other brands successfully deploy YouTube. And I'm curious to kind of pop with Chris, I explained to you all how these companies have gone so successful at scaling YouTube. Yeah, I will say when we do our go to market investment analysis, which includes a deep analysis of inside the marketing budget and many established companies, more than a hundred now in the past 12 months, we find that almost zero companies are investing in YouTube at all unless it's like a throw away experiment expense for three months that they stop doing. And so what do you think is the reason why, like a majority of companies do not put any effort or investment in this channel?
I think primarily because it's due to the fact that YouTube to really do it successfully and do it well, it is quite a big investment, right? It's investment that companies don't see any ROI on. So it's hard for them to justify these expenditures on YouTube. Because not only are you investing in the actual budget to run a YouTube program, right, on the platform and spend money daily, monthly quarterly, we also have to invest a lot of money up front to develop the creative.
And I think that's where a lot of companies are hung up on is actually going out and investing into the actual creation of real commercials, right? We're talking about commercials that play out in front of YouTube videos. And as a result of that, companies tear away too much of an investment from them up front and due to the measurement aspect of things, YouTube is definitely not a platform where you're going to get immediate attribution from. So you're not going to see people seeing a video out or clicking a video out to immediate conversions and pipeline.
And because there's not that immediate impact, companies also straightaway or shut down their experiments on YouTube. So I say those two things primarily the reason why companies are reluctant to invest in YouTube advertising even in 2024. Yeah, just a quick recap on that because I think that spot on number one, companies don't think about creative and the investment in creative appropriately to be able to run channels outside of like LinkedIn or static image ads plus Google paid search ads that on YouTube, it's very difficult to target by specific account. I think that is another factor that plays into it, the targeting capabilities.
You have the trackable measurement and I'm going to be discussing this in a lot more detail in my event coming up in one hour. So anyone's on this one that wants to learn more, please do when you are investing in things like YouTube or non anything non conversion based in your marketing mix, anything that you would consider awareness brand, non direct response to show the impact of those investments. You must be measuring on the blended ROI of all of your marketing expenditures and the marketing investments there will blend down the cost of acquisition and improve the ROI. If you are looking for attribution, you will always lose in these places, which is why most companies don't invest here.
So on that note, let's talk about the targeting, right? Because a lot of companies will push back and say, oh, we would rather run $15,000 a month on six cents because we know that it goes to specific accounts, even if they never see the display ads and they never get shown. So, you know, on the targeting, what have you found has been a effective way to reach the right audience within YouTube? So before I get into it, most effectively, I'll just highlight each of the four main categories of targeting.
So there's one called audience segments. So this is where you're able to target three types of audiences that follow the user and the audience across all the videos that they watch on YouTube. So there's three types, right? So there's Google provided audiences.
So this is happening to Google's database of what's called affinity and in market segments. So affinity are people who throughout the whole year, they are interested in a certain topic or theme in market is when they've shown more recent signals into a specific product or service. So these are Google created audiences that are kind of broader buckets of audiences. Then there's also user provided audiences.
So these include your remarketing lists or any customer uploaded lists that you have from your CRM. So this is where you're providing to Google information about people you want to target. And especially on YouTube advertising, there's ways for you to target people who may be searching for particular brands, such as your competitors or your own brand or visiting specific website URLs. So there's a way for you to create a custom segment of people who may be in market.
And then lastly, is a third party audience source. So this is where you connect third party tools to the sixth sense or metadata to integrate and upload lists of accounts or contacts that these other third party databases have. That's all bundled in with called audience segments. And that's, I would say, the primary or the best method about reaching or targeting your audiences on YouTube.
Now, there's a second option that is related to kind of the Google provided audiences called topics. So rather than targeting specific audiences and following them around, you're targeting people who are interested in specific topics that are defined by Google. So examples of this could be a topic in accounting software or advertising and marketing or sales jobs. These are bucketed topics that Google has available in their platform that you could target.
So obviously these are a little bit more broad, I'd say, compared to more custom tailored audiences that you want to create. But nonetheless, I would say this is the second best option because they give you a lot more breadth of coverage across the YouTube ecosystem while still being tied to a very specific topic in this case. A third option for targeting is keyword targeting. So this is where your ads will appear on videos or channels or even the results pages on your search for a specific topic on YouTube next to these specific keywords.
So if a video contains a specific keyword in the title or the description, the actual topic that's being spoken about, let's say on a video is related to a specific keyword, you're actually able to get in front of that video with an ad. So example of this is if you're searching for something like YouTube ads tutorial on YouTube, you can definitely target that keyword and have your ad pop up either in the feed or on an actual tutorial video that you're watching. So that's the third option. I would say this option is less favorable than the other two that I mentioned topics in audience segments because the coverage is very small.
It's very, I've seen in the past on the time of attention, this type of ad targeting. I've noticed that the reach is just very small and you don't actually spend your budget with keyword targeting. Less for targeting very broad keywords, you know, football, football, football, football, football, football, football, and other kinds of searches. And the last and final targeting option placements.
This is another unique option for targeting. So placements targeting is where you can actually specify which videos and channels you want your ad to appear on. Similar to keyword targeting, I find this approach to be a lot lower reach. We don't actually spend your budget as often because you're limiting where your ad's been shown.
And then especially limited videos that don't have a lot of use and a lot of engagement, they're, I won't be seeing this much. So specific examples of this use case could be targeting your competitors. Do you have a competitor who is producing a lot of YouTube content? Well, you can make your ad run before any of their videos play at all times.
We could also target bot leaders or influencers who might be in your space. One particular example is if you're in K Media with my own experience earlier on in my career, I went to YouTube to find a lot of tutorials and how to run meta ads, how to run Google ads. And so you could target those tutorial videos, right? To pay media marketers with your content as well.
So you could specify specific videos or channels. But again, I would caution you on that because they're not typically have lower reach than audience targeting does. Yeah. Lots of targeting options in there, clearly, especially when we're in B2B and then even when we get even more niche into like financial planning software or like some type of network security software, when you get into keyword targeting or video targeting, the audience has become very small because the views on the videos and the search volumes are very small when we think about high intent niche, SaaS type of stuff.
And so those are really important to be aware of. And then looking more into custom lists or third party integrations that can help improve the quality of the targeting within specific accounts you care about is definitely advantageous. When we move into sort of the next component, I find in a lot of different advertising scenarios that the objective of the media is one of the core issues of the core flaws and the strategy. A lot of companies, when they think about like a LinkedIn ad, for instance, I did one yesterday when I was going through with a CMO, it was 95% spent on lead generation, 5% spent on awareness.
The reason that the mix is like that is not because that's the right strategy. It's because the first such attribution model forces you to run your advertising like that. And so with that, I would just like to talk through the objectives that you can have within a YouTube advertisement and what you found to be advantageous. And then we'll get into measurement from there.
Sure. I think it's important to understand that YouTube should be primarily used as an awareness channel, especially in B2B. In B2C, you could rely on it a little bit more to be more of a demand capture because in B2C, you know, there's a lot more impulse purchases, right? In B2B, we're dealing with much longer sales cycles.
People are not quite ready to just buy a piece of software after seeing one video ad. That's just not going to happen. So you need to really frame yourself to understand that this is primarily going to be a YouTube, sorry, an awareness channel where the goal is not necessarily to directly drive demos or form conclusions, but instead for people to consume your content, are people actually remembering your brand as a result of a YouTube video? But I think framing your mindset to be more focused on consumption and brand recall would be the way I would frame your approach to YouTube.
And certainly there are metrics that you'd want to track along that process. Have you ever had like experiences or tasks around direct response YouTube? I'd be really interested to hear what you've learned there. I wonder, I like to think if there are actually plays in B2B to use a direct response advertisement, especially if you have a really compelling offer.
I think the best use case for direct response would be a free trial ad on YouTube. I think those type of ads perform the best because there's very little friction for the user to actually, you know, try your product. It's free. Might as well give this a go, right?
Especially if it's related to your job or what you do day to day. I have had experiences with clients who were adamant on trying booking a demo, direct response ads on YouTube. And over the years of running those ads, they've never converted, especially directly. So you might see a lift later on through conversions.
So you are able to see if a person saw your ad and then later came to your site directly and converted. That does happen, especially even on LinkedIn. You can see that conversion metric as well. But on YouTube, I have never seen direct attributable conversions from clicks or a demo.
I've never seen that. Yeah, I will say. And it's interesting because most of the companies that you see run a heavy amount of YouTube or companies that offer a free trial, a very low ACV product and a very like a horizontal large market SaaS. I think Monday.com, think people like that.
I want to talk about this and I wasn't planning on it, but I have to because I know that companies that do that for free trials, a majority of the people that are free trial conversions are actually spam conversions. It's total garbage, especially when you use certain bidding objectives within YouTube and you can get the same in Google search or Google display network. You really have to be, especially if it's high volume, you know, Monday.com is probably getting hundreds of thousands of trials. You know what I mean?
It's a massive volume. So you actually have to sort through and see the people, the job titles, the emails to actually see this issue. And what's been your experience regarding spam within the Google platform generally or YouTube specifically? Yeah, that's a good point.
I do think that free trial has to be doing a track to a lot of spam as well. But obviously there are hidden gems in that spam file. I'd say a really useful method to drill down on spam would be to integrate your CRM with the platform. So Google ads actually allows you to integrate with Salesforce, the HubSpot, in which you can actually import more lower funnel conversion actions that you can optimize towards.
So people here may be familiar with maximize conversions bidding on Google ads, in which case you're telling Google to automate your bids to try to drive as much conversions as possible. So what if that conversion that you're optimizing towards is a much lower funnel conversion action, such as an MQL or an SAL or even opportunity? That will help the algorithm decide which audience members that tries to prioritize or tries to prioritize and try to maximize those type of deeper conversion actions, which I think pay a lot more dividends in the search land. I haven't quite seen it used in YouTube myself.
I would love to explore that option. But again, we are then relying on direct conversions on YouTube, which is what I kind of stare at my clients away from. I see it more towards content consumption and awareness rather than a direct reaction. Amazing.
Everyone is in the audience. We're going to be getting into questions after a couple more topics. If you have specific questions or want to talk to a scenario related to YouTube, feel free to queue that up in the chat. Stephanie, you'll get it ready for now.
Let's transition to measurement. I heard you mentioned view through conversions, but maybe just broad strokes how you can get out of the environment related to the YouTube channel. I'll throw in my two cents from my perspective as well, but would love to hear sort of how you think about it right now. At the platform level, there's three main buckets that I would look at measurement.
I would look at the creative itself, which ad is performing better on the other performance could be a slew of different things. Creative performance is one aspect. Another aspect is audience. You might be testing out a variety of different audiences, right?
Custom uploaded lists, remarketing audiences, affinity segments, which audience is actually performing better. And again, performance includes a lot of different metrics that I'll get into. And then at the last level is ad format. So ad format is different than creative because on YouTube there's actually a couple of ad formats that you can run.
But you know that there's an actual ad called in feed ad where it's not actual video that plays before another video. It's just an ad that shows up on the recommended section on the side of YouTube or on the search bar. That's a new ad format that you can try out if you're targeting specific keywords, for example, people who might be searching for specific topic. So comparing those different ad formats, right?
Seeing what that entails. I would say primarily as I said before, consumption is what I really steer towards on YouTube. So looking at view rate, completion rates of videos, video plays to 50 to 75%. Those are metrics that I look at.
Frequency is another very important metric I look at. You have higher frequencies. It tends to be much better recall. People remembering your brand, remembering your offering.
So aiming for different frequencies. Look at my click-through rates. It doesn't add actually entice people enough to click through and go to your website and leave the YouTube video there watching. And then just looking at impressions as well as other specific metrics with the subscribers gained and likes gained.
So does your YouTube ad actually encourage people and driving people to subscribe to your channel to like your videos? Those are other metrics I've tracked at the creative level, at the audience level and at the ad format level. When you're running these experiments, what's been your take on the effectiveness of self-report attribution to at least give you a flicker on what's happening on this channel related to CRM conversion? Very important actually.
I think self-reported attribution is improving success on YouTube actually because the more you see people that heard about you on YouTube, bushing very strong signals that your YouTube advertising is staying off. Even if you don't see it directly attributed to the platform, I've seen in many cases in experiments that I've ran for my clients. We definitely saw lifts in SRA mentioning YouTube as the source of how they heard about it. So I think you had a good point there using SRA for measurement as well.
Amazing. When you think about the scale, like the advertising mix, where does YouTube fall in like the priority lists? Most companies are going to take Google and LinkedIn as their tier one platform and they might explore and do tier two right at YouTube, connected TV, things like that. They might have a tier three throwaway content syndication and other things like that.
How big of a budget does a company need to even start considering YouTube? Not that they put all that money on YouTube, but that it becomes one of the important channels for them. It's hard for me to think that a company that the only channel they should be running is YouTube, I find that hard to believe. How does it fall into the priority list?
Yeah. I think considering targeting options, budgets, ad formats available, not only with money but investment in time to produce content. I think, P company should obviously prioritize Google and LinkedIn as a bread and butter, right? But as far as the tier two goes, I think YouTube really is a very powerful tier two option that companies should explore before they even explore something like Reddit or even Twitter.
Of course, it does come with a lot more investment as I said. You need to be able to produce real content. It's a platform that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. So all you're putting in is video content that you may have from a podcast or webinars that you ran, I just kind of reconfigure it to be a YouTube commercial.
It's not going to work. You need to actually invest the time and money to actually develop a real commercial to really promote your product and brand. So that does require a lot more budget. It's hard to give you an exact number as far as budget goes, right?
There's a lot of other factors to consider, expenses for are you hiring an external media agency or production agency to make that video for you? Or are you relying on AI or stock footage editing apps to be able to create something a lot more affordable? So those costs come into play, but then you also need to consider how big of an audience you're willing to go after and how long your experiment is going to run. I do think companies, they fall where they run YouTube for a month and I think it's not working anymore, they stop.
I think that's going to fall to these companies. I think they need to be able to afford to run YouTube for a longer period of time to really see the impact on their business. So being able to fund YouTube of upwards of $5,000 to $10,000 a month for at least a quarter to begin with, make sure you're able to do that. I think that's where conversations should head.
Yeah. So let's think about the company that's 50 million in revenue. They probably spend $10, $12 million a year on marketing if they're VC or PE funded. That's about a million dollars a month in total marketing expenses.
So you can take what is it? 1% of that, which is $10,000 or maybe that's even $1,000, $10,000 a month. Put that on YouTube media and it's such an insignificant part of the total budget that it shouldn't need to be scrutinized like it's the last $10,000 a month that you have. And that allows you to be able to run it for six months or 12 months and not have this big pressure of what is the payoff of YouTube coming down because it's such an insignificant investment.
Then wait for the UTMs, the sales conversations where prospects bring it up, the SRA mentions, and even if you only get one, two, five of those a month, it ends up paying off for the entire investment and making it worth it. And I think the big issue, the company is that open up new channels, as I think it's like Google press a button, let's drop 100k a month. The spend gets inflated, the results have some level of a lag or the media is ineffective. And in month one, 30 days later, the CFO, the CMO, whoever is in charge of that budget is saying where the fuck are the results?
What is the tracking? What is this doing? We need to think about when we have new channels and new experiments allocated an insignificant level of the budget, which allows the channel to run for the appropriate amount of time to get the positive signals. So love that perspective.
I think $10,000 of $5,000 a month is totally appropriate to be able to see and get an impact of that. It also forces you to get really tight on the targeting, really tight on the keywords, not just broad, blow money and hope you get some results. So love that entire sentiment. Before we close out, we're going to get into questions here and I love that part so we can get really tactical.
I think that is really important stuff that you wanted to mention that we didn't cover so far. I'd say I think the content creation side of YouTube is the biggest challenge for companies. I think it's easy to dump money into campaigns on the platform a little bit to actually produce content. I think it's the biggest hurdle for companies.
And as I mentioned, a lot of companies typically provide a reconfigure video content that already have and slap it on YouTube. And I think that's just a big mistake. You really need to storyboard your YouTube ad, beta script, right? Maybe you do live footage, maybe you do animation.
Having that flexibility really helps you enforce the better YouTube ad on your audience and the better perception of your brand. So if you want to just put something scrappy together, I think you're just making a big mistake. While it's cheap and effective for you, it might not be actually what your audience is interested in. So I think being able to find budget in your marketing budget to actually support content creation for YouTube specifically will pay a lot in the long run.
So if you're able to create video at scale, you could then repurpose that not only for YouTube, but also for other platforms as well. So I think the content creation piece gets overlooked. I think that's something that people should really pay attention to, especially now that we're living in our AI world. There's tons of useful AI tools that you could use to produce YouTube videos at a low budget.
Some names that come to my mind are like pencil AI. There's a HubSpot, clip creator, creative, and individual. These are for reading AI platforms, so developing specifically YouTube video ads that I think people should check out if they're struggling to create content. Amazing.
Thanks for that overview. Now to the great part for anyone that has questions, they can be general questions, something that we didn't cover a topic or a specific situation that you have when trying YouTube or if you have a question that's outside of YouTube, this media related would be happy to answer that as well. So with all that stuff, I'm sure you got some cute uploads to get into it. Thanks everyone for being here.
And thanks for sharing all the expertise. Yeah. So to get us started, Maya wants to hear a little bit more on audience performance metrics. Do you have more details to share on how you measure audience performance?
Yeah. So the first and most important metric I look at is what's called unique users. So which audience is able to capture and drive as many unique users as possible? This is where you can really measure your remarketing list and see how many unique people are on your list you're actually able to get in front of.
Or in your cold targeting, if you were to utilize some of the different options, keyword, placement, or audience targeting, which ads height is helping you reach the most amount of unique users. From there, I'd look at view rate. So which of your audiences are consuming your content better than others? So a view is when a person either watches 30 seconds of your video if it's longer than that, or your full video if it's less than 30 seconds, as well as anyone who clicks on your video at any point.
So if they click on the CTA, they click on your company page banner, any click is also counted as what's called a view. So which audience has a better view rate? Why is that? I would expect remarketing typically has a higher view rate because people tend to pay attention to brands that they're already familiar with.
They'll stick around more. You'll see that on a remarketing audience having a higher view rate. But as far as prospecting goes, which targeting which audience is providing you a better view rate? And then I'd also look at frequency.
Frequency is very important because it comes down to basic principles of marketing. Repetition is what helps people remember your brand when it comes to the time they actually need your product. So if you have a higher frequency, you'll typically see people being able to recall your brand much better. So what is that frequency?
Are certain audiences getting too high of your frequency? Are you fatiguing your audience? That could be an area that you look at as well. And then just looking at cost per's, your cost per click, your cost per view, seeing which audience might be cheaper for whatever reason, those are all metrics I would prioritize.
And you'll notice that I've been really mentioned conversions because you're not going to see a lot of direct conversions from YouTube. So I wouldn't even really try to prioritize that. And I would more rely on a consumption engagement metrics. Love that.
I just have to. It's been like brought up a couple of times now and I just have to go on this rant real quick. So a lot of people, whether it's display ads or YouTube ads and sometimes social ads will use view through conversions as one of the main metrics to show success specifically display ads do this that run through ABM platforms and GDN, but it can be applied to other platforms. And most of it is related to people that have already been to your website.
So you're taking a predisposed audience showing them one ad and then inversely saying that the ad is what drove the conversion, but they had already been to your website. So it's more like the ad being shown to take credit for something that was going to happen anyway, which is why display ads are unlikely to drive any incremental lift. And it's also very concerning on YouTube. So just like Melin said, I highly suggest against view through conversions as one of the main KPIs of success.
It's a great signal that the ads are reaching people that are filling out your forms. And so it's not to say that it's not important, but extreme caution when using it as the primary metric, especially with retargeting or intent audiences. All right. So we have a question from Jennifer that is kind of piggybacking off of getting those results and positive signals, but flipping over to LinkedIn.
So Jennifer, if you want to come on. Hi, I'm so happy to have me. I'm a big fan. So we follow a lot of what Refine Labs does at our company.
We recently started doing LinkedIn ads in a brand new vertical. So it's an area that we haven't been pursuing for the last couple of years, but now we're switching over and pursuing this new vertical. But I'm just wondering how long is the typical length before we would see some positive signals on like LinkedIn ads for this vertical? But what's like the typical timeline that we should be anticipating ads taking to do anything great?
Yeah, it's hard to give you just like an exact time because a lot of things, it depends a lot on your business model, right? So if you have an expensive product that has a very long sales cycle that takes a lot of thinking for the teams that are buying those signals decisions, it could take a while for LinkedIn to really show you impact on your funnel. There are other measures to track that could show you more immediate impacts, such as website traffic, right? Lifts in searches for your brand name.
So if you were to go and Google Analytics after running, let's say your LinkedIn program for a quarter, let's see if your website traffic is improved. Are people coming to your website more as a result of having these LinkedIn ads running from all sources, right? Organic paid direct traffic. Are people visiting your demo page more often now?
So tracking those things, I would say would have more immediate impact, right? So you could see those things more immediately. I'd say within a quarter or quarterly, it's those bottom of funnel metrics that you might not see the direct impact of LinkedIn until much later on, depending on how long your sales cycle is. And I'll just add a couple of other directions here.
This is one of the main reasons that I love using LinkedIn ads for named account targeting. Like you have a list of this industry, you likely know these are the hundred or thousand or 5,000 companies, the exact names that domains you likely have those. Those can also then be tagged in the CRM as they're in this vertical, right? It's almost matching up.
You have 5,000 accounts on CRM, you have 5,000 accounts on your targeting. You can go back in time in the CRM and say, how much pipeline did we get from these 5,000 accounts in Q1 of last year and Q2 of last year and Q3? What is the trend of that? Is it going up or down?
Then you can start putting LinkedIn ads to all of those exact accounts and then track the go forward performance against those 5,000 accounts when it comes to not only pipeline creation, which is likely to have a lag depending on the deal dynamics. But if you're sophisticated, you can measure account engagement, the engagement on your website or other owned properties of those 5,000 accounts and be able to look at that as one of the leading indicators. It's not to say that it's a perfect measure, right? Just because an account clicks on your ad and goes to your website doesn't mean that they're going to buy from you necessarily, but it's a great sort of leading indicator.
If you haven't been doing that before, then you'd see low engagement from accounts basically through the end of time. Just organic whenever one of those 5,000 finds you are here about your other way and then you go out and exactly target them, then you should see a pretty quick lift on account engagement from those 5,000 as a leading indicator. Thank you so much. Okay.
All right. I got another question in. When you had mentioned that getting started with the content itself is sometimes the hardest part and you listed a couple AI tools that could help, but this person wants to know what types of content do you see performing well? So is it rapid cut style, a more narrative approach?
What are the positive ad formats that you're seeing? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think there's different ways to capture someone's attention, right? So I'd say for all YouTube ads, your first 5 to 10 seconds of your video should really hook the person.
So how do you do that? It could be rapid cuts that really just capture your attention or it could be just a very bold statement or something simple that just calls your attention, right? Just calling out how maybe the industry that you're operating in just kind of the solutions there is just calling it all out in the first 5 seconds and saying these tools suck here is a lot better. That could hook you as well compared to just something with video editing.
And Stephanie has shared a list that I put together of very effective video commercial editing on YouTube from some of our leading fast companies here, upspot, somewhere around Monday.com. And so you can see some of the common denominators there, right? They are fast cutting. They have music involved, there's live action, there's acting, there's humor involved.
So there's aspects there to make the video effective as far as the actual content you should use. I suggest for any prospecting that you do and even retargeting to other viewers of your YouTube videos should really focus on educational content. Rather than hitting more on the product and solutions you offer, you should really hit on the point points of your audience. What is the pain points of your audience that they're feeling with the current mix of solutions available?
I think that's the most important thing to do. I think that's the most important thing to do. Rather than trying to focus on your product or booking a demo or getting a free trial. And that's the top of the funnel.
Once you get into retargeting to your website traffic, people who are already familiar with your brand and what you do, I think these types of ads could be a lot more focused on the product, its features and booking a demo. Whereas as I said, the top of the funnel should really be focused on educating the audience. Awesome. We are going to bring Nancy on next.
All right. Good morning. As always, I really enjoyed this session. So my question is for BTV e-commerce, industrial automation parts company.
How much attention should you pay to your competitors Google Ads spend when your own strategy is typically based on Google Ads or based on the part specific SKUs? So you know that people buy because they're Alan Bradley machine ABC broke down and the exact part they need is Alan Bradley 123. And so they'll go on Google and search for that precise part. That's why your Google Ads are based on SKUs specific.
Of course, you also have some PMACs campaigns that Google decides what brand, what part they're going to come out, right? But that's your strategy. My question is in this business, you have some giants. Who does have more dollars to invest?
How much attention should you be paying to your bigger competitors? I think we've forgiven a lot of attention, honestly, because based on what you're describing, your industry is more so focused on demand capture, right? People have specific problems. Exclusively.
Exclusive. And that's where Google plays a big part in demand capture. It's the biggest platform for demand capture, honestly. People are not going to AI to a chat GPT to find the Bradley SKU that you just mentioned.
They're going on Google. They're searching it up and they're getting with a bunch of different app formats. It might be the shopping ads that you see, which is more common in B2CE brands, but it might be also available for B2B as well if you're able to list the SKU there. People can actually physically see an image of the product they're looking for, the price, the seller, the ratings, all that information.
And so that's where I noticed in e-commerce on the B2C side, a lot of investment goes into. The brands that I've worked with, there's a tons of investment on Google, on Google shopping specifically. There's also search ads that are below that on the SERP results. So I think looking at what your competitor's band is very important.
And that's something that you could easily access by contacting your Google Ads rep, where you're able to share your top competitors, I believe it's four to nine competitors that you must share. They're able to then give you a look at your spend relative to theirs and show you gaps there, and specifically which placements that they're spending on. Is it shopping? Is it search?
Is it display? So that will help you understand what the marketplace looks like, right? And where you need to scale your spend. Because if competitors are spending a lot on, let's say, Google shopping, for example, that means they're most likely dominating that ad space.
So how do you enter that ad space? Unfortunately, it does require you to raise your spend there. But also you could also try to optimize your campaigns to be a higher score than the other competitors to help you rank there as well. Thank you.
Nancy, is this a distributor or a manufacturer? It's a distributor. Okay. So with distribution in hardware, you're probably making 30, 40% gross margin, 50 max, right?
50 max. And then you got to pay the salesperson. And then you have the marketing dollars and then you need your profit, right? And so when it comes to Google Ads specifically for low margin products, especially if it's like not a recurring base, maybe a $1,000 part or $2,000 part, it is going to be almost impossible to make the math work there.
And a large company that has a big brand and a lot more revenue is able to justify that because they basically are able to blend all their organic sales against their wasted ad spend. That you don't have all the organic sales to blend it down. And so when you're in the situation as a up-and-comer against an incumbent, the incumbent has domination over the channel and is likely getting terrible return on investment on that channel that you do not want to just go up and play directly against their game. It's not to say that you shouldn't use Google at all, but I think you should be a lot more measured and a lot more intelligent around where you play and then try to really win in a place other than that channel where you have a competitive advantage because of your smaller size, scrap your resources, more innovation and try and play the marketing strategy to your strength.
Instead of when you're David versus Goliath, you can't play Goliath's game. But I think the challenge is they're in the demand capture business. It's very hard to ask them to add an outbound co-calling strategy to their GTM motion because who will you call? How will you know when the machine will break down and they need part one, two, three?
So if you have any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear it. I think that you have playing an SEO game. You have building a community or some level of a owned group where you're able to own that audience before they're in market to buy. So that when they're in market instead of going to Google, they just say, oh, I'm going to go to that company that sells those parts.
And so there are organic, more customer-centric strategies that take less money but a lot more customer expertise and effort and time that can be really advantageous for companies that can't just outspend on Google at a very low return. So I thought about what this business may be more traditional like trade organizations, right? You have plumbers that belong or HVAC contractors who belong to certain trade organizations. These are the people who use the machines that operate that need that replacement parts.
Your thoughts about that? You give yourself in front of these tradesmen organizations to build. Yeah, whether you're building it for your own or you're leveraging a third party to access the audience, the strategy is similar. And so I think that's a potential viable place as well.
But know that most likely your competitors that are spending a lot on Google are doing the same thing. Hey, thank you. Good question, Nancy. I love when you bring the curve balls in here every once in a while.
I saved them just for you. All right, we've got another question in. And if you have any recommendations on tools or automations to help organize measurement across all of your YouTube ad formats and contents. I would lean towards Google owned tracking platforms such as Looker Studio because it is Google own.
It's able to connect with Google platforms such as YouTube a lot more seamlessly than other third party tools. I believe Supermetrics is another third party platform that you could use to visualize and sort YouTube metrics as well. Then there must be other third party tools out there. But I think those two would be where my head goes towards when trying to report on YouTube.
It's basically custom BI because there's nothing out of the box around those right? You have to actually build out what you want to see. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
All right. And then the last question I have kind of brings it full circle back to the beginning. It feels like YouTube ads are a heavy lift with very little ROI visible at the start or in general. So what is the main benefit of getting over this hump of starting with YouTube ads?
You know, speaking from a personal experience, like the ads that I typically remember from companies that I'm not familiar with are video ads. I don't really recall seeing image ads as effectively as I do with video ads. So I think if you're able to get over this world, you'll see a lot more long term success of people remembering your brand. And what that really translates to is just seeing the lifts across the board of people looking for your brand on Google, right?
So these are branded searches. People are visiting your company page on review sites like G2 and Capterra more often. You're seeing that lift and correlating it back to advertising is what I would lean towards trying to prove any ROI or prove the reason for running such an experiment. And not just searches, right?
People come into your site, seeing improvements there all the way down to it and lifts that you see with meetings, book, demos, requested and pipeline created. Yeah. And then what I'll say on that is that if you look at a company that is 50 or 100 million in revenue that have capped out Google, if they spend any more on Google, it's literally just wasting money. They've capped out LinkedIn.
They've every spent 150k a month. They've already segmented. And they need to continue to scale growth and revenue that you'll eventually need to find another channel. And you'll need to spend the effort for six months of not getting a result, just like you did on Google and just like you did on LinkedIn to build these powerhouse channels that repeatedly deliver results.
So eventually you get to a stage in your growth where you have no other choice. If you want to continue to scale your advertising and maintain growth rate, then define new channels to produce ROI. And I think YouTube becomes a really viable option when combined YouTube as the first one and then layering on connected TV once the creative is proven to be the third strategy channel within your advertising strategy, specifically when you reach 50 to 100 million a hour, I think it's a powerful weapon. I think that's really the instance, right?
You're 10 million ARR. You probably have better places to spend your money. But when you get to 100 and you've capped out of it, you've capped out Google, you've capped out LinkedIn that eventually you're going to have to find somewhere else to go. And I think YouTube becomes like we mentioned a top tier two strategy.
Yeah. YouTube is still one of the top five most visited websites in the world, right? There's Google's up there and YouTube used to be the second, they might not be the second anymore, but there's tons of people, tons of traffic every day going on this platform. So why aren't you tapping this?
Is it because you're scared of the investment? Is it because you're afraid of being able to reach your BDB audiences there? Well, there's definitely methods that we discuss today to reach your audiences and spend effectively. Right on.
Appreciate you all for being here. Appreciate the questions. Great discussion. Melinda, thanks again for sharing all the expertise.
Love catching up with you. Love the stuff that you're working on. Keep doing a great job over there. Really appreciate all that you do.
Stephanie, thanks again for hosting. We'll be back here again next month in October. So look forward to seeing you again in the future. And I hope you all have a good rest of your week.
Bye everyone. See you soon.