Need Help? Talk to Our Experts
When you think of YouTube as an advertising platform, I bet you first think of B2C marketing. But YouTube is a powerful, untapped gold mine for B2B that not a lot of advertisers utilize. When you search for B2B Advertising on YouTube, you get a lot of information about content, what you should be posting on your YouTube channel, to couple with your ads, and how your content should differ from B2C. But there isn’t much on how to plan a B2B top-of-funnel (TOF) targeting strategy and audience options for B2B advertising.
I’ll start with the obvious – you cannot plan a B2B advertising strategy the same as you would plan a B2C advertising strategy.
B2C TOF focuses on brand awareness, casting your brand’s net out into the world, and seeing what sticks. You’re planning audiences at a large-scale market, trying to grab the attention of those who are potential customers by appealing to their emotions.
B2B TOF is so different (and in my opinion, a lot harder to target) because you’re usually focusing on a niche, small market and trying to convince audiences to purchase based on rationale, not emotion. The main goal of B2B is typically lead generation, which could then move through the sales cycle and turn into a completed purchase.
With B2C, you’re trying to get someone to do the exact end result you want (an exception being expensive consumer products, which often have a lead gen component).
Long story short – it’s really, really difficult to try to fit a B2C YouTube strategy to a B2B brand. That’s why I’m here to help! YouTube is an extremely smart option to test, especially with the holiday season coming up and businesses planning next year. A lot of us have been working from home for quite some time, driving an increase in content consumption across the board, including on YouTube. It’s more than likely you’re going to find more B2B decision makers on Youtube than you would have before the pandemic.
So let’s get into some ideas on how to plan your B2B YouTube Audiences. This works for any type of B2B business, but for the purposes of this post I’ll use an example so we can walk through the thought process behind the options.
Let’s say you’re a fitness equipment retailer, but your target audience is “decision makers at gyms and clubs” and you want them to submit a sales form showing their interest in purchasing multiple pieces of commercial fitness equipment.
First things first, what kind of audiences are available for YouTube, and what are the differences?
Well, your audience options for B2B are the exact same for B2C, it just requires a little more time and planning to determine what makes sense for your target audience.
If you’re new to B2B advertising on YouTube, I would recommend testing all three audiences, segmented by ad group. That way you can see which audiences are resonating with your ads, make optimizations to your audiences based on performance, and pause any that aren’t performing well. For YouTube, I recommend testing audiences for no less than one month, that way you really get a good idea of who your audience truly is, what their behaviors are, and how to adjust your media plan accordingly.
Age targeting is something that I see those who are new to B2B forget to implement or not consider, with both YouTube and Search in general. With B2C, you keep your age ranges super wide so you can hit as many consumers as possible without limiting your reach. With B2B, you typically want to hit decision makers or people who we are under assumption to have a few years of working experience. This is why I strongly encourage you to take a look at your search campaigns if you don’t already have age restrictions in place and figure out which age range works best for your company goals and paid media KPIs.
To see what these would look like built out, an example audience targeting plan for a commercial fitness retailer would look something like this:
And there you have it! B2B targeting is fun because it gives you the opportunity to put yourself further into your target market’s role, piecing together how a B2C platform can work for a B2B target audience. Just make sure you really do the research to execute these audiences, and have the time to test to refine your targeting. Happy planning!
[ad_2] Source link
Digital Strategy Consultants (DSC) © 2019 - 2024 All Rights Reserved|About Us|Privacy Policy
Refund Policy|Terms & Condition|Blog|Sitemap