How to Market a Business from Scratch - Why YouTube Ads are Better than TV Commercials

Today’s topic is how to generate insane results using YouTube. 

Just a quick reminder, if this is the first one that you're tuning in, and hopefully you've been tuning in for quite some time, and we're already about 15-plus episodes in this continuation of how do you actually market a business from scratch. What are the step by step strategies that you can use to go from having absolutely no business and really just a concept to starting to have revenue before you even open a childcare center, which we have been using as an example for the last two weeks? And I like to just use an example so that it's really taught more in practice, I guess, rather than theory, so to speak. 

The reason that I'm such a huge fan of YouTube is that it's the second-largest search engine in the world right after Google, and it just so happens that Google also owns YouTube. So anything that has a relationship to Google, I want to be in their good graces. There are a few different strategies that you can look at deploying with YouTube. 

The first strategy is if you're able to commit to doing content on a regular basis, and when I say a regular basis, I'm referring to at minimum a few times a month. Ideally, you're doing it one to two times a week. Then we'll talk a little little bit more about kind of building a channel, subscribers and things like that. 

If I were opening up a new business, however, I would want to leverage YouTube as an awareness platform. In particular, I'd like to see you focusing on YouTube ads. I can give you lots of information about building your following in your channel, but this content that I've been producing for the last six months is all around helping local businesses and I want you to be famous and well known in your local community. Unless you're looking to grow a nationwide brand, it doesn't make a ton of sense to try and get thousands of followers or subscribers on your channel. I would much rather make sure that the content that I'm putting out there is getting seen by my potential prospects—that's what I'm more concerned with. 

FIVE SECONDS IS ALL YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR VIEWERS HOOK ON YOUR CONTENT

When you're looking at creating and thinking about YouTube ads, here's the most important tip. You've got five seconds to hook the viewer to watch more. For example, the background that you're shooting on whether using a green screen or some kind of background needs to be intense. It needs to not just be you on a plain white wall. You want to have something that really grabs their attention. If you're sitting at a desk with a plain background, it's not nearly going to be watched as much. 

You want to make sure that even if you're doing content videos, even if they're not ads, you should treat them with that hook. You've got to hook the viewer in with visuals and a couple of really good opening lines. You can also do that by keeping them a little bit entertained. You can do some fun things with annotations, which we'll talk about, but initially, it's we've got to make sure that we are hooking them in. 

So, what do you do from a content standpoint? If I were marketing this new child care center, I would want to create essentially the version of a well-done commercial. What I love about YouTube, after the fact that I mentioned earlier that it's the second largest search engine is that you can treat this as a TV platform. So I've had a lot of people asking me, “Michael, is TV advertising dead? Should I do it?” And if you're a local business more often than not my answer, is a no, based on your budgets and things like that and the production value. You can get much more attention and thousands and thousands of more targeted eyeballs just by leveraging YouTube. 

I want you to create a compelling video that hooks them in very quickly. And then what it'll do is it'll give that content and then it's going to have some kind of call to action. You've got the hook that you're bringing them in and you're going to give some good content—you're going to keep them engaged and then you're going to give them a call to action. 

Now the great thing is it's so inexpensive. You can test out lots of different videos or different special offers. For example, you can test out different videos, creatives, or hooks. I mean, you can throw $100 at each of these videos and start to look at the engagement and how many people are either calling or visiting a website, depending on what that trackable call to action is. 

There are a couple of different types of ads on YouTube, I'm going to tell you the one that I really want you to focus on initially. 

• In-stream Ads
• Discovery Ads

The one that I want you to focus on initially is called in-stream ads which play before someone watches a video that they've selected on YouTube. 

Now sometimes they have the option to skip the ad after they've watched it for five seconds. However, what I like is you can have different calls to action with kind of overlay text. You can do a variety of different things. So I'm sure that you'll start to think that you have seen these videos and these are almost like commercials. But you don't want to be running a full 60-second commercial again, you want to keep it fun and engaging. You've got to give your audience a reason to keep watching the video. That's why that hook is so important—tell a story in the video. 

You can test out some of those “why” videos that I talked about. Why would you be starting this childcare center so you can be getting all of these online, all of this traffic and awareness and you can laser target the right people that you're looking for? You're able to tap into the Google AdWords platform and pick age, demographics, or location—you're able to pick all of that stuff to make sure that you're serving these ads, these little video commercials to the right people. 

So, I like to start with these ads that appear at the beginning of different YouTube videos, because they're just so versatile and quick to use, or maybe it's a real quick walkthrough of the childcare center. It can be testimonials or anything like that works extremely well with a clear call to action right from the beginning of the videos. 

Here's the beautiful piece—if they do not play the video for 30 seconds or longer, you do not pay. Which basically means that if they're only watching Five seconds, you're not paying. And these ads can be streamed not only across YouTube, but you can leverage the Google Display Network and really have these all over the place. Now the ideal time frame is typically about 30 seconds—you really have to be careful about the timeframe. 

The second set of ads that you can consider, they're called discovery ads. That is if someone were to go to YouTube, and they type in something like childcare or daycare preschool now, YouTube is typically not the first place that someone's going to go, they're going to typically ask for a recommendation from friends. They're going to go to Google and do some research there. I mean, there's a lot of different tactics and strategies that they're going to use to find information. 

Here's the key, however. Put yourself in the shoes of the parents and think about what they would be searching for and you can discover there are lots of different tools, and really the simplest way is just to go on YouTube and start looking around. 

But what are some of the popular parenting videos? And what are the people searching for—healthy meal options, summer activities, craft activities, at-home activities, all those different kinds of things? You can shoot a short little video around that, that gives some content but also can be an ad for your upcoming and newly opened childcare center. There's no limit on length and people can choose to navigate them, view them, or not. But they can show up for any particular keyword that you would like. 

Those are really really nice ads—they're able to be associated with the different phrases. I really would like to see you focusing intensely on this in-stream kind of pre-roll videos that show up. That to me is essentially the equivalent of TV commercials and things like that for pennies on the dollar. You literally could throw $100 at this and for a month, start to get hundreds, if not thousands of views to your video. Like I mentioned in the tracking content, you want to make sure you're driving them to a targeted landing page, a targeted phone number, or some kind of promo code that they would be using so you can track that back. And there are ways to use pixels and all that good stuff, as well. 

In conclusion, YouTube ads are an insane way to get to me almost the exact same attention, if not better attention than you could with TV commercials, for next to nothing. You can't throw $100 at a TV commercial, which just doesn't play. I hope you enjoyed today's episode on YouTube ads. tune back in here tomorrow. For the next continuation, we're starting to wind down on getting closer and closer to launching this new business.

Get out there, make a change, and take some action.