advertising

The Timeline of a High Converting YouTube In-Stream Ad

April 19, 2017 by Jake Larsen

The sequence and formula of your In-Stream ad are critical to the success of your YouTube ad campaign. If you get this wrong, you’re going to be wasting your time and money. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on ads, or how accurate your targeting is. If you’re promoting a bad video, it will fail every time.

It’s kind of like the saying: “You can polish a turd all you want, but in the end, it’s still a turd.” We don’t want you advertising a turd video.

If your video follows the correct sequence and formula, it will be able to accomplish 3 things:

Capture the attention of a complete stranger… stop them dead in their tracks.
Change the relationship of a stranger into a warm acquaintance.
Get them to take action by clicking on the video.

We’ve launched hundreds of video ad campaigns in all sorts of industries; Real Estate, eCommerce, Auto, Life Coaching, Business Development, Beauty, Health & Wellness, Electronics, Investing, etc. Although the message changes across industries, the video structure and sequence stay the same.

After years of consulting, we’ve seen people make the same mistakes made over and over. Finally, we created a simple graph so you can clearly see the timeline of the perfect YouTube in-stream ad.

In-Stream Ad Timeline

Capture Attention

The very first thing your video needs to do is capture the attention of the viewer. We’ve all experienced “the longest 5 seconds on the internet”. You’re about to watch a YouTube video that you’re really excited about, but when you click on it, an ad starts playing! You hover your mouse over to where you know the “Skip Ad” button is about to appear and start your countdown. “Five, four, three, two, one…”*click*.

As an advertiser, those 5 seconds are absolutely critical to maximize in order to capture your viewers attention. If you’re wasting time showing your logo or rolling a fancy intro you will lose them. However, if you address your target audience directly, they might pause for just enough time to allow you to hook them in.

Build The Problem

Now that you have their attention, you need to build the problem. They’re giving you their time, what are you going to do for them? What problem are they having that you are going to solve for them? If you just jump right into your sale here, you’ll probably lose them. This will probably take another 5-10 seconds.

Make A Connection

At this point you’ve basically said to your audience “Hey! Are you a [kind of person] looking to [solve X kind of problem]?”. In order to make a connection with your viewer, you basically want to let them know that you know how they feel. Relate to them. Tell them what makes you a credible source to solve their problem. This should usually take about 10-15 seconds.

Offer The Solution

Here you go. This is what you wanted to do right from the beginning. Now that your viewer knows that you understand their problem, they’re ready to hear the solution. Tell them. This is where you can talk about your product or service and all of its benefits.

Don’t drag this part on too long though. It should take about 15-20 seconds. Remember, they still have a video that they’re waiting to watch. The second you start boring them, they’ll be gone at the click of a button. Literally.

Give A Call To Action

The call to action is the goal of the whole video. Without a call to action, your video loses SO much value. We always say that if you don’t tell people what you want them to do at the end of the video, then that’s exactly what they’re going to do…nothing.

Most of the time you should use YouTube End Screens for your call to action. You can only put these in the last :20 of your video but they are clickable on both mobile and desktop.

Things to Remember

There are some key elements that you need to understand that lay the foundation of a great in-stream ad:

You only get charged per view. A view is counted when a viewer watches the ad for at least 30 seconds or to the end of the video (whichever is shorter) or clicks on a card or other elements of your in-stream creative.
The whole purpose of the video ad, is to get people to click. Period. You need to build the whole video around the click. The “click” could be a Card, CTA overlay, or End Screen.

Ninja Tactics & More

TELL PEOPLE TO SKIP YOUR AD: Invite the viewer to skip the ad if they’re not your target audience looking for specific guidance. This way you won’t waste your ad spend on people who aren’t interested.

SHOW & TELL: Make sure to give a verbal call to action as well as point to where you want your viewers to click. This will drastically improve your click through rates.

When you follow these guidelines on your video ad, it will have a bigger impact on the viewer. If you have a bigger impact on your viewers, you’ll be able to generate more leads and sales at a lower cost. And if you don’t want that, you probably shouldn’t be in business.

Keep this In-Stream Ad Timeline in mind when you create your next YouTube ad.

If you want to take your YouTube ads to the next level, download our “Video Ad Formula”. This free resource includes more useful tips, tools, and examples of how to make effective YouTube ads. You can download it for free by clicking the link below.

Writing A YouTube Ad Script

April 6, 2017 by Jake Larsen

If you’re a savvy marketer who’s way ahead of the curve, then you’ve already dabbled in advertising on YouTube. You probably also know the feeling of getting your video shoot set up, hitting record, and having no idea what to say.

When Video Power first started, we hated recording new ads for ourselves because they were so disjointed and rambling. It took us forever to shoot an ad and get it to a polished final product.

Finally, we came up with a YouTube ad script outline that would help us avoid being in that spot ever again. We’re going to teach you this outline so that you can write an awesome YouTube ad script every time.

Using our YouTube Ad Script Template, you’ll be able to pump out ad scripts in minutes. These ads will not only be easy to create, but will be setup in a way that will grab and keep your viewers attention and get them to act on your offer at the end of your video.

Know Your Audience

First, you need to know who your audience is. The more you know the better. Basic demographics are a must, but if you know what they love, hate, do, think, etc. you’ll really be able to catch their attention.

Next, think about what your call to action is going to be. What do you want your audience to do? If you don’t ask, chances are they won’t do anything at all.

Finally, think about your audiences challenges and desires. What are they trying to accomplish? What’s standing in their way? What frustrations have they experienced in trying to reach their goals?

Grab Attention

Once you know your audience, you can use our YouTube Ad Script Template to help you structure your answers into a script.

Start by grabbing people’s attention! We like to do this by calling out our exact audience. “Hey are you {insert your target audience here} looking for {insert one of their desires/goals}?”.

This serves a double purpose. Not only does it catch the attention of your target audience, but it turns away people who aren’t. Because YouTube charges advertisers based on views (if they watch 30 seconds or half of the ad), you aren’t charged for people who skip early.

Build Emotion

Once you’ve caught the attention of your audience, you’ll start to build emotion. Talk to your viewers about the pains and/or desires that they’re experiencing.

The pain is what your customers experience without your product or service. The desire is accomplishing their goal in an easier/faster/better way.

Emotional Connection

Imagine you were struggling to learn how to golf. Two people approached you and offered to help. The first had read every book in the library on how to golf, but he hadn’t actually picked up a club for himself. The other was a pro who had never read a book about golf, but had been playing for years.

There should be little question in your mind as to which one you would rather get advice from. The pro had been in your shoes at some point and had overcome the difficulties that you were experiencing. The other guy might know a lot about golf, but he couldn’t say “I know how you feel. I’ve been there.”

It’s much more effective to be able to relate to your audience than it is to tell them how much you know. One tool that we like to use to help us do this is called the feel, felt, found technique. We actually used this in the opening of this blog post.

Feel, Felt, Found

Feel – Explain to your audience how you think they feel about their situation (Ex: “You probably know the feeling of getting your video shoot set up, hitting record, and having no idea what to say”)

Felt – Relate to your audience so that they know you felt the same way that they do at some point (Ex: ”When Video Power first started, we hated recording new ads for ourselves because they were so disjointed and rambling. It took us forever to shoot an ad and get it to a polished final product.”)

Found – Tell your listeners how you found a solution to the problem that you both experienced (Ex: “Finally, we came up with a YouTube ad script outline that would help us avoid being in that spot ever again.”)

Solution

If you follow all of the previous steps, you’ve created a perfect bridge to present your viewers with the solution to their problem. If this solution isn’t your product or service, then you have lead the audience the wrong direction.

This is where you can talk about product features, service benefits, etc. Show your audience how the solution that works for you (or your other customers) can work for them.

Timeout

Before we get to the most important part of writing a script for an ad, here are a few quick pointers:

When writing your script make it conversational. When you’re talking to the camera visualize that you’re talking with someone. You don’t want to look like you’re reading a script or come off robotic.

Feel free to add little notes or indicators within the script to help with editing. Do you need to point to a link for people to click on? Will you be adding a lower-third? Or will b-roll be covering you up? These notes will help you when shooting the video so you know how to adjust your video while recording.

Finally, make sure you add plenty of keywords into your script. For instance, the video for this post is teaching you how to write a YouTube ad script. When we transcribe the video the keywords in the metadata will match up with the title, description, and tags.

Call To Action

Back to the script now. To finish things off, end the script by writing a call to action that states an offer and benefit. You should ALWAYS have some sort of call to action in any video you make, whether it’s an ad, a how-to, or just a fun shareable video.

Here’s our call to action: If you want access to our easy YouTube Ad Script Template, you can click the button below to download it for free.

This resource will help you craft the script for a successful video ad that converts in just minutes.

How To Buy YouTube Views The Google Approved Way

March 10, 2017 by Jake Larsen

Do you want to start a YouTube Channel but are overwhelmed by the thought of starting from ground zero? You know how to make videos but growing an audience from rock bottom is such a daunting task. That’s how I felt when I decided to start our family vlog Channel. However, after years of placing ads on YouTube for businesses, I found the quickest, easiest, and only Google approved way to buy YouTube views & get tons of real subscribers.

How cool would it be to be able to generate thousands of real, engaged subscribers for your YouTube channel at the click of a button? Let’s get one thing straight right away, I’m not talking about buying fake, robot YouTube subscribers. I’m talking about using YouTube ads to accelerate building real, authentic relationships.

I’m going to break down a real life case study of how I used YouTube Ads to go from 0 to 4,000+ subscribers in 6 weeks with no previous following, and how you can too.

Misconceptions

Before we go further, we need to resolve some misconceptions you may have about YouTube Ads…

Pfffff, YouTube Ads, those are so annoying. Nobody even watches them. That’s what our clients thought too until they saw the kinds of results our video ad campaigns generated. Last month alone we were able to get more than 1.5 million views and 12,000 conversions across our clients campaigns. The truth is, 95% of the YouTube ads out there aren’t even set up correctly AND don’t know how to target the right audience.
I can’t create YouTube Ads, because I’m not a big company. YouTube is not TV. You don’t have to be a big brand or company to run YouTube Ads. We’ve been able to setup campaigns for brands that have reached millions of people. I’ve also created campaigns for myself with as little as $10 a day. And I’ve been able to reach viewers worldwide from from the comfort of my own home..
Isn’t buying YouTube views sketchy? Yes, it can be sketchy to buy YouTube views (and you can get your Channel in a lot of trouble for doing it), but what you’re really paying for here is distribution. The views, subscribers, and leads that you will acquire are just a byproduct of the distribution. If you want to buy some bread or milk, you go to the grocery store. If you want to buy online distribution, you go to Google Adwords. We’re not buying fake views and subscribers like other sketchy people offer. These are real people who are choosing to watch your video, choosing to click and choosing to subscribe to your channel.
Why would I want to pay for views when I can get them for free? At the end of the day, you have to weigh your costs. You’re investing valuable time and energy making videos. How frustrating is it when they get no views? Your videos are worthless if nobody sees them. It only costs a couple cents per view so it’s worth the investment.

Case Study: Larsen Family Soul

My family and I decided that we wanted to start a family YouTube Channel. In talking to some friends who are currently on YouTube, we heard that it can take a long time of consistently creating videos before you even start to build your subscriber base. Even with a solid video SEO strategy combined with creating daily videos it could take you 3-6 months before you’re starting to get some good engagement.

Everyone I talked to said “Jake, if you want to take YouTube seriously, you’ve got to upload daily.” For me, it felt awkward to think about uploading videos daily that would have zero views and zero comments for the first few weeks or months. Plus, I didn’t have the time to be creating daily videos and I didn’t want to wait 3-6 months to get a subscriber base.

So here’s how I went from 0 to my first 4,000 subscribers within 6 weeks with no previous following. The secret sauce, was knowing how to use YouTube ads.

How to Buy YouTube Views (The Right Way)

Here’s the exact process I followed…

1. First, I created a fun “Channel Trailer” type video that introduced my family, showed some funny clips and asked the viewer to follow along on our adventure by subscribing to the Channel (Click here to watch it). By using our Video Ad Formula, I was able to make sure this was an engaging video that would prompt viewers to take action.
2. I researched the top 50 Channels that my target audience would be watching already. These are the channels that you’ll specifically be putting your video ad on. Since we had a family vlog, I made a list of 50-100 other family vlog channels on YouTube with the largest followings.
3. I created a YouTube Ad campaign in Google Adwords and placed my video on the Channels that I had just researched using “Placements” targeting. Once the ads started running I was able to track my costs, views, clicks and subscribers all within AdWords and paused some of the Channels that weren’t getting as good of results.
4. We started seeing immediate results and comments. When I turned the campaigns on, I almost immediately started getting more views and subscribers. People would see my video ad, subscribe to my channel, then watch more of my other videos.

We were averaging about 670 Subscribers a week without any previous following by promoting just 1 video.

It was like turning on a fire hose! It was really cool to see our subscriber count shooting up and the comments people were leaving.

Here are some of my favorite comments…

David said, “I would just liked to say that I really like your channel! I saw your advertisement and it was the best YouTube Channel ad I’ve ever seen. It was very professional too.”

Said said, “I came here from your ad which made me love the channel already!”

Then you always get those type of comments from people like 9-BBN that say, “You’re the reason people use Adblock”
I’m totally fine with comments like this because YouTube awards your videos based on watch time and viewer engagement (good or bad). All 9-BBN is doing by leaving that comment is helping more people see our video organically.

Takeaways

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to grow a personal YouTube Channel or a business. YouTube Ads offer instant results. You can use them to get more subscribers, leads, customers, etc.

Now you know how to use YouTube Ads to actually grow your Channel. The process is simple but it does require some work and a little bit of knowledge in setting up the whole process.

If you’d you like further knowledge of our Video Ad Formula, you can download it for free by clicking the button below.

Superbowl Advertising Facts | 40 Superbowls Happen Everyday on YouTube

January 31, 2014 by Jake Larsen

The Superbowl is one of the largest sporting events in the entire world. This year, it’s estimated that 100 million people will be tuning in to watch. Because of this massive number of viewers, Superbowl advertising is notorious for being an extremely aggressive and costly.

I like to say: Where attention goes, ads will show. This year advertisers are going to be paying about $3.5 million for a 30 second ad. That’s over $100,000 for each second.

You can’t always out-spend your competitors, but you can outsmart them using YouTube Advertising

One hundred million is a LOT of people. But let me put that into perspective for you for a second. Each month on YouTube there are 1 billion active users. That’s ten times the number of people who will be watching the Superbowl this year!

Now, you might be saying “You’re only spinning this to make YouTube look cool. That’s a whole month worth of users and the Superbowl is only one day of the whole year”. If that’s what you’re thinking then think about this: YouTube gets 4 billion views everyday. That’s like having 40 Superbowls happen every single day on YouTube!

But like I always say: Where attention goes, ads show and money flows. So why isn’t YouTube a bigger deal than the Superbowl as far as advertising goes? Believe me, it’s heading that direction.

Advertisers are seeing how many people are watching video online and are starting to adjust their sales. But right now YouTube advertising is cheap (especially compared to Superbowl advertising), so now is the time to take advantage of it before the majority of advertisers dollars are being spent online.

Want a better way of getting your message in front of a specific type of person? Learn how to use YouTube Advertising

Something to think about…

What happens when Google gets the advertising rights to the superbowl? What if the only way you could watch the Superbowl was on YouTube? Mark my words, YouTube’s “skip after 5 seconds ads” will become the industry standard that will replace traditional tv commercials.