Every year, hundreds of millions of marketing and advertising dollars are pumped into traditional methods like Facebook ads, Google Adwords, or print media. With the rise of social media, a natural evolution was to leverage popular and trusted social media personalities as a more effective way to reach customers.
Youtube specifically has become extremely popular, with “sponsored” and “dedicated” videos becoming the norm. Successful Youtube creators often have a large following – consisting of motivated individuals interested in a very specific niche or topic. Furthermore, these individuals typically place a large amount of trust in the creators they follow, and together this makes for the perfect marketing combination.
However, a lot of marketers simply do not leverage the power of Youtube creators to the full potential. Is it laziness? A lack of understanding? Naivete? Whatever it is, it’s costing them a lot of money and missed opportunity.
We’ve seen evidence of this on many occasions. A significant number of marketing departments outsource their Youtube marketing to “influencer agencies”. While generally easier and more cost-effective than doing it in-house, this can also be a mistake as they’re at the mercy of someone else’s profit margin. And boy, have we seen some fat margins from some agencies.
Agencies will often severely underpay creators, but charge exorbitant rates to their client – pocketing the rest. In one situation an agency charged the client $2500 USD for a single 90 second integration, but only paid the creator $300 USD.
Some agencies will also focus on a “scorched earth” strategy. This consists of simply selecting any creator, regardless of if they’re a good fit or not, just so they can collect their agency fee. This is the more heinous act in my opinion, because it is a complete waste of money. We see this all the time – and a very basic example is an agency trying to advertise Windows software on a channel dedicated to Apple computers. The software wasn’t even compatible (yes, this actually has happened to us).
But the most common problem we see from both in-house marketing departments and agencies alike, is that even if they do select the right creators, they don’t stick with them.
Now I’m not talking a full-on sports sponsorship where David Beckham for example has to wear Nike shoes wherever he goes – something a little more subtle is preferable.
For example – once you’ve vetted a high-quality creator with a motivated, trusting audience, and have possibly done 1 or 2 “test” integrations, consider taking it to the next level. Here are some techniques we’ve used:
- Sponsored giveaways: If you have some kind of $50 SaaS software, or a $30 phone case, don’t bother giving away your own product. No one will care. They WILL care however if you provide an in-demand item worth at least several hundred dollars, like an iPhone, a laptop, or quality pair of headphones. Tell the creator to say the words “This giveaway was made possible by [insert your brand here]” during the announcement, and slap your logo and link to your website on it. Bonus points if you also have a simultaneous giveaway to people signing up to your mailing list.
- Regular brand mentions: there is nothing more powerful than a viewer’s favorite creator consistently mentioning your brand or using your products in their videos. It’s so easy to make this part natural too.
- Don’t be afraid of “over-saturation”: for creators in the technology niche specifically, a surprisingly large proportion of their views come from people who are not subscribed and have never heard of the creator. Technology videos are extremely searchable, and every day millions of people search for reviews of a certain product, or how to use a certain software. Other niches such as vlogging, gaming or lifestyle for example often do not have this traffic, so over-saturation is indeed possible for them. So, by consistently working with the same creator, you’re not only building trust with their current fans with each additional video, you’re also exposing your product or brand to new viewers every single day, regardless of how long ago the video was posted.
