YouTube is the latest up-and-coming social media platform for marketing after Facebook and Instagram. The CPM (Cost-per-mile or cost per thousand impressions) is relatively affordable when compared to TV. According to Pew Research, as much as 81% of Americans use Youtube.

YouTube can sometimes be referred to as a web 2.0

A Web 2.0 is the second stage of development of the internet, characterized especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media.

YouTube falls somewhere between an entertainment platform akin to TV and a social media platform like Facebook.

One could say that it is the best of both worlds.

But the fact is that this behemoth has surpassed Facebook in Viewers.

And people are spending more time daily on the internet than on TV.

This makes YouTube an untapped source of traffic for your website.

Where does YouTube fit into the Marketing process?

When looking at the buyer’s journey pyramid you will see that there are 4 levels here.

Typically Buying Now is your hottest prospect who knows the best solution to their problem and wants to buy immediately. Usually to get these prospects you would use branded keywords on Google search, improving your Branded SEO, email your prospect list or retarget your prospect list on Social media.

The advantage of this stage is that you get prospects that are very willing to buy, but this stage is also the smallest in the market and will very quickly reach its full potential.

Information Gathering is the stage where you get medium-hot prospects who are actively researching for solutions to their problem. You reach these prospects with non-branded keywords on Google search, Improving your non-branded SEO or retargeting website visitors on Social Media

Problem Aware is the stage where you get medium prospects who know they have a problem but haven’t started researching for solutions to their problems. You can reach these prospects by creating lookalike audiences on Facebook and targeting interests.

Not Problem Aware is the stage where you get cold prospects who are not aware of a problem that they might have. You can reach these by broad targeting on Social media or Youtube.

This is the stage where YouTube thrives, the reason being that the cost per impression for YouTube is lower than TV and social media making it the ideal platform for broad reach.

It might sound daunting to target cold prospects, but the idea behind it is to target them and move them up the buyer’s decision pyramid.

The advantage of this stage is the biggest in the market and has the most potential. The only drawback of this stage is that this stage has fewer active buyers.

But this is not a problem since the cost per impression for YouTube is so low that having a broad reach and finding those active buyers won’t break the bank

What results has YouTube produced?

Optimized-Marketing ran a YouTube campaign for CulliganWaterPros.com

We started with Youtube ads at the start of March and by the end of 14 September, we reached 1,317,564 people.

The Softener Ad received the most impressions, reaching 989,017 people.

This is a chart of the retention rate of a YouTube video. This particular video’s retention rate was 15%

This video’s retention rate was 24%

What both of these retention rate charts have in common is that the drop in users slows down as time goes on and in both videos, the biggest portion of the drop ends at around 15 seconds. What this means is that if you can hold a user’s attention for only 15 seconds they are likely to watch your entire video.

My hypothesis is that it takes 15 seconds for a user to decide if they are going to commit to watching a video.

I’ve divided the video chart into 3 sections

Section 1: The 15-second mark… Prevent drop-offs by getting the user’s attention by introducing them to a relevant problem to get them to commit.

Section 2: the 15- 45 second mark. Capture their interest by introducing them to a possible solution to their problem.

Section 3: The 45-60 second mark. Create a call to action that will move them to the information-gathering phase when they decide to call or give their details and become a lead.

The good thing about YouTube is that you can use video to move them all the way from not problem aware to the information-gathering phase.

Which metrics are important?

• View rate. As it shows how captivating the video is. This is the first level and the first thing we need to get right as it shows how well we can get someone’s attention and introduce them to the problem.
• Click-through rate is the second level and the second thing that we need to consider as this shows if we can get a user to understand the problem (Sometimes this metric can be misleading because the YouTube algorithm can send it to people who click on things often)
• Conversion rate is level 3 and the third metric to look at and it shows how likely we are to get a user to go to the information gathering level.
• ROAS (Return on Ads spend) is the ultimate metric as it shows how many users we could get to the Buy now stage, but this metric is difficult to measure.

View-through rate and conversion rate are the most important metrics to keep in mind and the most reliable to track

How does YouTube compare to TV?

The average cost per mile for YouTube is only $ 7.18 that is lower than TV’s $ 36 and Facebook’s $ 20 in the US.

YouTube ads on TV screens also have a very high view-through rate of over 56% that is almost 3 times that of computers and mobile that sit at around 20%

The average CPM for TV is also lower than that of Desktop and Mobile at around $ 5.

The $ 5 CPM for YouTube on TV is half that cable TV’s $10 CPM

How can YouTube help your business?

If your business is at a point where you’ve reached your full potential on Facebook and Google ads, YouTube would be your obvious next choice to try out.

If you also want to take advantage of the low CPM and you’re willing to try out a couple of videos to find one that converts, YouTube might even be better than Facebook and Google for your business.