YouTube Ads, Technical SEO & Data Driven Influencer Marketing (Review)

Week 9 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing

Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through three courses in Module 5: YouTube Ads, Technical SEO & Data Driven Influencer Marketing.

This week, I’ll mostly be focusing on the third course I took, Data Driven Influencer Marketing, mainly since it’s my business’ niche & personal interest.

YouTube Ads

This course was all about how to optimize your ads for YouTube. A few interesting stats about YouTube:

• YouTube is the second most visited and second largest search engine in the world.
• Each user session lasts about 40 minutes.
• There are over 2 billion monthly active users. WOW.
• You use YouTube for 2 things: (1) for entertainment and (2) as a search engine.
• 75% of users prefer creators who are: genuine, authentic or relatable.

What Makes A Good YouTube Ad?
YouTube‘s production quality is more like TV than other platforms (like Facebook) so here are a few top tips for producing high-quality video ads for YouTube:

• Write a script, or loosely plan what you will say, practice beforehand.
• Know your overall objective or your user’s “aim”, so that you can shape your content around the main intent. YouTube runs ads based on intent, whereas FB advertises based on interests.
• You don’t have to worry about “performing” perfectly; putting your personality into it will pay off because people want to see authenticity.
• When it comes to video editing — it is good to have a team to do it or outsource it to experts.

“It’s worth really spending good money on an editor because they’ll make it look amazing.It’s amazing what editors can do with average footage.They can make a really, really good video out of average footage. And they can use things like b-roll, so you can have lots of different things happening in the video that really just jazzes it up. .. they can make magic with a good editor.”

Technical SEO

Your site can rank higher if you are (1) performing technical SEO audits as well as (2) optimizing your site with the best keywords and structures.

Technical SEO is about addressing all of the issues and problems that lead users astray on your site that in turn hurt search performance. He does recommend that if you are a business with a smaller site (less than 20 pages), technical SEO may not be important yet.

A few technical things we can “optimize” (even smaller businesses!):

• URL structures
• Internal linking
• Headings
• & SEO experimentation

Data Driven Influencer Marketing

I loved this course because it’s deeply in my niche, and I love learning about the people I get to work with every day. Influencers on social media working directly with brands is a relatively new market within the last 10 years, one of the top focuses being on how brands find and engage with an influencer to create a meaningful, synergistic partnership.

Who are influencers? Influencers are creative storytellers who are published. Let’s start with the top 5 frustrations influencers face when collaborating with brands:

1. Creative freedom. Only a 29% of influencers are asked for their opinion on content direction.
2. Late payments.
3. Short deadlines.
4. Last minute changes in campaign requirements.
5. Brands who don’t have a clear brief.

It’s not surprising that the top two things in influencer looks for in working with a brand are:

1. Creative freedom
2. Competitive compensation

This means that two of the biggest frustrations influencers have are directly connected to the two most lucrative qualities that they look for when engaging with a brand.

“One very important fact about being an influencer, by some accounts 80% of their income is coming from sponsored content. So running Google Adwords or any other monetization is an additional income stream, but by no accounts the main source. Keep this is mind when you engage influencers for your next campaign and try to avoid these common frustrations. Also, it is worth to know that for many influencers, campaigns like yours are their livelihood.”

So what should we look for in a great partnership with an influencer? There are many sites that can help with sourcing influencers, but there’s much more to it than just stats.

The Six Factors of Influence:

• Consistency: they post on a regular basis
• Social proof: do they have real engagement?
• Liking: are they are likable & authentic?
• Authority: do they have knowledge in their niche?
• Kindness: leaders are kind!
• Entertainment value: are they funny, opinionated, entertaining?

And the fundamentals of brand marketing are still the same:
1. to drive demand,
2. to build brand distinction,
3. to tell a story.

But the aim is to tell an authentic story through the influencer, so you must know the value of your message but consider letting the influencer take more of the creative control, because ultimately they know their audience best. 55% of brands admit that by the time they engage with the influencer, the campaign direction is already set. Dear Brands: Try to avoid this!! If you engage correctly, influencers can help you find the voice of your message. Think of them like your extended creative team.

How does a brand choose an influencer?
These are the 5 questions to ask to get a qualitative assessment on if the influencer is the right fit for your brand:

1. What’s my brand’s role in social?
2. How creative is the influencer?
3. Has the influencer worked with competitors?
4. How is the influencer’s tone of style/voice?
5. What is the influencers platform focus?

“Marketers tend to get sucked into the vanity of the scale of an influencer’s community as a measure of their value or potential impact on their brand/campaign. But looking at engagement numbers is more important as it’s ultimately a more effective measure of how connected that creator’s community is to the content and therefore any activation with your brand/campaign”.

Rita Drucker, Head of Brand Integration at Snap, Inc

Another important note when working with influencers: Non-compliance is rampant! Compliance falls on the brand, although a staggering 86% of influencer’s posts are not compliant. Not properly disclosing the fact that a brand is working with an influencer will come back to bite. Aim for clarity when disclosing who you’re working with. Contracts (using an MSA) can help avoid a lot of problems, but they don’t ensure deception and problems won’t arise. Finally, fair contracts are two-way. Two common types of agreements used in influencer marketing are Master Service Agreement (MSA) and the Scope of Work (SOW). With longer term

Task List for Creating an Influencer Program for Your Brand:

1. Reserve a budget for legal fees
2. Inform yourself of the risks and liabilities of marketers
3. Hold a briefing session with influencers (make sure to discuss compliance!)
4. Prepare and sign relevant contracts with your chosen influencers (MSA and SOW)
5. Monitor the campaigns for compliance
6. Good measurement enables you to build benchmarks, and look to engagement rates and click-through rates to inform future influencer campaigns