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Tom Breeze
In the podcast:
00:56 – Where the series is at
02:53 – Memory as velcro
05:17 – Case Study 1 – how to sell a book
08:39 – Optimizing the campaign
11:05 – Yes, you can segment
15:28 – Promoting a membership
19:57 – How the client coordination works
21:16 – From YouTube to Facebook
24:18 – How to get started
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Part 1 of the series
Part 2 of the series
Transcription:
James: James Schramko here at SuperFastBusiness.com. You’re listening to the YouTube Advertising Tips series. This is actually part three where we’re going to talk about a case study. I’ve got my friend Tom Breeze from Viewability.co.uk who is a YouTube advertising specialist. Welcome Tom.
Tom: Hey James! How are you doing?
James: Good. Thanks Tom. Now in this series, we’ve set this scene in part one, we talked about why you want to be looking at YouTube as an advertising source and how there’s plenty of eyeballs there. I don’t think you mentioned it but I did hear you say this once before that it’s kind of like Velcro. We get a very sticky audience solution here when we’re putting these videos up.
And then in part two, we really developed more into the moments framework that you gave us and talked about some of the actual technicalities of setting up your account, targeting particular sites. We talked about Peppa the Pig, from memory.
What we’re up to is we’re going to talk about some case studies in particular, sort of audience listening to this podcast are kind of similar to me in some ways where they’d be, probably have some memberships, maybe run events, and probably have books. I’m actually in all three of these things.
I certainly got memberships, definitely run events, I’m more than likely to be publishing a book, certainly a lot of my clients do, like Ryan Levesque for example, have got books. I’ll be sending them to this episode. I want you to tell us, how would you go about approaching my product suite if you’re pulling off a blank page and you wanted to map out some campaigns. What would you be looking at? And maybe you can overlay some of your own case studies here, things that you know have been successful. You can protect the name for privacy if you like. Given that many of your clients do similar things, what sort of things are we going to be looking at here?
Developing YouTube campaigns
Tom: Good question. What I’ll do is I’ll dive in some case studies and some thoughts about how we begin campaigns and then how we can scale those campaigns up as well because there’s some really clever stuff with YouTube, and I think it’d be good to kind of dive in and give you some firm concrete examples to be like, ‘Oh OK cool, I can see myself doing this now.’
I think that what we pulled on earlier, I understand this like Velcro idea is really important because this really plays out in terms of how we start scaling out with clients. What I mean by this is in the past, a lot of psychologists used to believe that memory is almost like putting files into a filing cabinet and we kind of like learned each memory or learned each thing based on isolation. So it’s like, we’ve learned that now, let’s put into a file cabinet and close the drawer, and when we need it, we’ll bring it back out again. There’s no interconnectivity. That’s what they thought, and that’s how they thought the brain worked.
But if you go through this test that David Rubin from Duke University developed, he’ll ask you questions to kind of prompt your memory almost. It would be like, “Can you remember the first line of Hey Jude?” As soon as you do that, then your brain won’t just remember the line of Hey Jude, you’ll probably start playing the music in your head and you’ll hear Paul McCartney’s voice. It’s just kind of like everything comes back about that memory, it’s like all the memories and all the senses are connected together and it starts developing new thoughts and maybe like a time when you’ve heard that song and who you’ve been with, etc. It kind of like plays back memories as a result. And it just shows our minds work in such a way where a memory is not just one simple file. It’s a series of hooks. And the more hooks you get to the loops in the actual Velcro, so if you really zoomed in into Velcro, you’ll see there’s lots of hooks and loops. And the more hooks and looks you connect, the stickier your message becomes. This is really important because you’re trying to develop a brand on YouTube almost, even with your advertising.
When you provide someone with a really good piece of content and they stick around naturally, watch your video for a long time, over time with more content you’re delivering and the more they see you, the more hooks are getting connected to the loops. And so they just remember you. This is very different from text advertising, like a text ad or an image ad, which is like hardly any hooks will be connected to any loops.
“With a video, you’re communicating so much consciously and unconsciously.”
Here with a video, you’re communicating so much consciously and unconsciously. The Velcro’s sticking and you just won’t be forgotten quickly. That’s why remarketing works effectively and that’s a big part of how we advertise and how we develop these campaigns out with clients. So hopefully, that kind of gives a bit of context before we even start diving into campaigns with clients.
Case study #1
But if we tackle let’s say the first case study, and this is a client that’s been working with us for a long time, a guy called Andy Harrington who is a speaker, and he’s an author, and he’s got like a Sunday Times’ best selling book. Now, we’ve done many different campaigns with him in the past, but one of the major campaigns we focus on at the moment is this idea of selling his books.
In a marketing world, it’s kind of like very common to have the free plus shipping book offer. That’s what we’re doing with Andy. Now I won’t go to all the nitty gritties, the numbers, and talk through all of that, it’s difficult to explain it without showing graphs and things, which probably aren’t the most enjoyable and exciting things to talk about.
But what we do with Andy is when it comes to the advertising for Andy, we’re really looking at saying, “Let’s first of all identify the moments that people would be in.” So what we talked about in the previous episode is understanding that when people are on YouTube, they’re looking for information about what to do, they want to know something, or they want to buy something. In the public speaking world, we really kind of map those moments.
A lot of people are going to YouTube because they’re really fearful of speaking in public and they’re just being told by their boss, “You gotta give a presentation next week.” So there’s that sort of moment, which is the fear and the confidence type moment. You’ll also have some people are like, “I got an opportunity to speak in front of a large audience. How do I nail my delivery? How do I speak really eloquently? How do I come across and make everybody in the audience know, like and trust me but also want to buy from me?” So there’s that type of presentation or that type of moment.
And there’s also like kind of TED talks. People go to watch TED talks because they want to be inspired, and they could have a part of them thinking, I would love to be a speaker. I would like to get my idea out there as well.
And you can really just start mapping these moments and saying, “What is it that people are going through when they’re on YouTube? What are they searching for?” What we do is we map all these moments out and realize where we have almost like a right to play. Where can we show our ads to that audience? And then you really think about, what is it that I would like to say to that audience? And in this instance, we know that the end goal is to get them back to the website to find out more about this potential book offer.
When we create the ads, we’re thinking about what content can we give them. So let’s say for example we tackle the fear and confidence kind of type moments. Then in that instance, we’d give them a couple of tips on how they can relax themselves down before a presentation. But just tell them, “This is just a couple of tips from this whole book that we have on how to deliver amazing presentations. I mean how to develop a whole business around presenting for your own company.”
As a result, we’re really resonating with people thinking, wow these last two tips I’ve just received in that ad itself have been really useful. And now I can potentially go and get this book for free as long as I pay for the postage and packaging. So that’s how to start off that relationship with the advertising. Just pick those moments and make sure you have really good ads that meet those moments and deliver a message that resonates with those viewers. Then the free plus shipping of course gets people’s credit cards, gets people onto the list, and there’s upsells and there’s multiple upsells from the back of that as well. By driving traffic from YouTube to that particular book offer, we’re able to get a 400% ROI for Andy. It’s a really effective strategy to start using, just picking those moments and really delivering on those moments is the way to start it.
Now when we start running those campaigns and we’re seeing what’s working, we obviously go through the normal process of optimize. So kind of taking out those placements, when we’re running in-stream ads for example, which don’t work. Take those ones out and maybe look to spend a bit more budget on those ones that do work. And then once we look at the data as well, it literally tells you which videos are driving the results, which videos are really getting amazing results for you.
When you understand that, and you can see what video is working pretty well, and you see the titles of them, you see them like, you almost like do some, I can’t even remember if it’s quantitative data analysis or qualitative data analysis, but it’s basically looking and seeing the trends of what’s working in that moment and saying, “Right. It’s these types of videos, this type of subject, and this sort of content seems to be really resonating with our audience.
Then you can decipher that and say, “Right. Let’s now create new ads that would better fit those new moments we’re seeing from the data.” If you start doing that, you can start to scale up a lot more. Then you can start to build in some remarketing as well because you’re starting off with this ad that’s providing good content. Then you may say to yourself, “Maybe we’re looking to sell more books.” But if they said no when they first saw that ad, they didn’t decide to go back to the website and sign up. Or maybe they did but they didn’t go and get that free book offer. What else could we provide them first that would then lead them on to the book offer?
So we might be able to give them a webinar or maybe let’s give them some cheat sheets about how to present, maybe it’s like an infographic for example about how to craft your perfect presentation. So you can start introducing these new lead magnets or these new free offers that would then give people a better experience of you as the business owner or you as the company and then start fitting those people back to that book offer again.
Just by doing this, you’re starting to get more data. And then with more data, the algorithm of AdWords will give you things like similar audiences. So you can say, “All those people that have bought, can I build a similar audience?” Or “Can you develop a similar audience for me please, Google.” And they’ll give you an audience that you can advertise to based on that as well.
So it takes a bit more time to develop that. It might take two months or so. But once you started developing these customers and they are all getting tracks inside of AdWords, you can start to scale up a lot more there. That’s where you start to really see some amazing results when you can really push the remarketing and start using the algorithm of Google to help you promote further and further.
James: Right. And you’re able to segment people based on where they’re at? So if they’ve taken an action with the first call to action, can we somehow flag that and not keep advertising the same thing to them?
Can you segment your audience?
Tom: Yes, exactly. This is what allows your account to be a lot more evergreen. Evergreen is once you set them up, they can continue running. So based on who watches your videos, who goes to your websites, who takes you up on different offers, you can segment them and exclude them from existing campaigns.
So one thing we tend to do is if a client of ours is able to create lots of video, what we’ll do is we actually almost do it like a cascading model where we say, “If they watch this video and they viewed that video, we can grab them into a remarketing list and then exclude them from that first campaign as well,” which means really, as the customer experience or as the viewer on YouTube, you might see an ad, but if you watch it for 30 seconds and whether you take action or not, you’ll never see that ad again. But then you might start seeing a different type of ad from that same company. Then you might not see that ad ever again, and you can see a new ad.
This works best when a client has like maybe five video ads, and you can cascade them through. But it means you can almost like craft a customer experience or a customer journey before the opt in. So you can almost have five videos, I mean if you really wanted to, in the second video, you could say, “Hey look, you watched this video just a couple of days ago and you didn’t convert. What’s wrong? What else do you need?” You couldn’t even do it that way, it’s a bit creepy. But you could just give an explanation of how it could work.
You can segment those people who did watch the video and maybe didn’t convert and show them a new ad to a new offer. If they didn’t convert again, you can show them a new ad. It might be the same offer or whatever it might be, but you can really segment your audiences, and it means that your customer experience is so much better than just what most people do, which is like, “Here’s our TV ad,” and let’s just scattergun approach and just try and show it to as many people, as many eyeballs as possible.
I think that’s because agencies, they won’t look at YouTube as serious as they do something like TV. Or if they do, they might be looking at YouTube purely as that how much reach and how much frequency can we get, and they’re not really looking at the customer experience or really what’s best for return on investment.
But yeah, you’re quite right James. If you were to show a video ad to a certain audience, you can take the people that have watched the ad and didn’t convert and follow those up in different ways.
James: Right. So for example, if I’m running an event, I might be driving people to a campaign for that event, but if they buy a ticket, then I don’t want to show them the ad anymore.
Tom: Exactly, yeah. Or you might even want to show them a different type of ad. So once they bought from you, once they bought the event from you, you might have an upsell or where sometimes, I’ve only done it for myself, I haven’t really implemented this for clients just yet, but you might want to do a thank you campaign, which is where when someone buys a product from you, you might just show them an ad, a one-time ad just to say, “Hey, James here. Thanks so much for your purchase. I can’t wait to see you at the event. Just wanted to say that.” That could be a pre-roll ad without having to have any call to action on it whatsoever but just have that experience where people are like, “Wow. James just said thank you to me on YouTube.”
I think that could just do so well for your brand and well for your customer experience. And it will be dirt cheap to run it like that because it’s only be going to a select number of people. It won’t be going to hundreds and thousands unless hundreds and thousands bought your event. But you could just segment that audience to people who just bought a ticket to go to your event and show them an ad, a one-time ad because you’d exclude them if they saw the ad.
James: And you do this by loading up your event buyers’ list as a segment?
Tom: You can do it that way. But the other way to do it is based on pixel conversions. So AdWords will collect the people that have visited a certain page. This might be your thank you page. And then based on that, you can segment those people. When you set up a campaign, you can say, “I want to advertise to all these different keywords. But then exclude anybody that’s fired this pixel or has landed on this page.” So you can just make an audience of people that have landed on your thank you page and then you can exclude that audience for any future campaigns.
James: Perfect. OK, so what else should we cover in terms of case studies? I’ve got a membership. How would I be generating leads from my membership?
How to generate leads from memberships
Tom: OK cool. So with the membership approach, it’s a very similar approach really because what we’d look in to do is that milestone of typically asking for someone to opt in and provide value. And then the back end of that business is going to still sell whatever products, whether it be a membership, book, event, whatever it might be, it’s a similar process.
But what we tend to do with a membership idea is again a similar thing, which is what we’ve just been talking about, this kind of cascading model idea. One client that we’re working with is a relatively new client actually. We’ve only been working together for four, five months, or so now.
He is a guitar tuition expert. So if you’re looking to learn how to play the guitar, you can imagine how many people are going to YouTube to look up tutorials. In order for our clients to really break through the noise of everybody else, obviously he has to be very, very talented and a great teacher, which he is, which helps of course. But he’s very, very creative in terms of how the ads are done as well. So he’s normally taking the mick out of you in a really polite and friendly way to explain why your guitar practice might not be going quite so well as you would hope it would be going.
So he does these clever ads where he says, “Hey, look, did you know? Here’s some quick tips if you want to become a better guitar player, or if your guitar practice isn’t going quite as well as you think it should be. Here’s five tips to get started.” And his five tips are flipping open the case of his guitar, and saying, “Yeah, that’s right. Get out your effing guitar.”
He’s kind of clever about how the ads are done. But if you’re into guitar, it’s kind of like, really talking to you as a guitar player, because you’re like, “Yeah, I haven’t gotten to my guitar nearly enough as I should do.” But he really understands your pain. And as a result, he says, “Look, here’s a daily play checklist that you can go through and it will really help you become a much better guitar player. And you can stick it up on your wall, and you can just play to that, and you’ll become a lot better in a couple of weeks.” And people do. And it is an amazing product.
So what happens is it’s just a free giveaway, people print it, put it up on the wall, and I think that’s a really clever way of advertising, is to actually get someone to take a further action, because it’s part of that commitment and consistency principle from Cialdini, where it’s like, get someone to do one small action, the chance of them taking a bigger action is so much more likely. Likewise, if you’ve got someone’s printed up on the wall and you got the brand all over that thing that you have put up on the wall, then you’re always in someone’s mind. And I always think that’s a really nice way of getting into people’s homes or mostly it’s the fact that you actually have got physical presence where they practice guitar, so they’re not going to forget about you quickly.
With that role, it just makes sense for that type of product to be a membership product, because there’s so many lessons, there’s so many things. Instead of just keep on buying different products, it’s just like, hey, just join the membership because there’s so much stuff in there. And it is all amazing and it kind of guides you through the whole process.
But that’s where it’s like a low end, and there’s a high-end membership to that as well. But it all starts with a similar process, with YouTube, is understanding people’s moments, kind of meeting those moments, and giving a really good experience. And it doesn’t always have to be a huge amount of aducation that we talked about earlier, it doesn’t have to be like three tips all the time, it can just be slightly humorous or kind of really giving a tip that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, for example, and that can be a really, really nice way of advertising as well.
Ads that he creates are really watched, all the way to the end, and loads of people take action, just because of that huge amount of curiosity, of like, “That was really funny, I really appreciated that.” And it’s broken through the noise that “Everyone else is just teaching me stuff on YouTube and it’s not very good.” You can see that our client’s stuff is actually such high-quality stuff that it breaks through all of that.
“Try and be different.”
But that’s sometimes what’s needed in the marketplace as well, not always be the same as everybody else. Try and be different, so you can kind of like grab their attention for a second, so that then they’re much more interested. And if you have something then really useful to give, you can start moving people away from YouTube as a platform for them to be learning from and actually a dedicated membership site for them instead.
James: Nice. OK. So you just basically have given us some good ideas on what we might be doing if we have a book, if we have a membership, if we have an event. You’ve given us an idea of, in the previous episode, you talked about the one ad that you would get started with, which was a great one tip format with a “did you know” headline. We’ve talked about placements, we’ve talked about the different moments, especially the intent, we’ve talked about remarketing. How does this slot into campaigns that you’re running on other ad networks? Do you find that some of your clients are running in multiple platforms at once, or are they just doing YouTube? Do you have conversations with other marketing or advertising people within their business? How do they coordinate all of these segments?
Coordinating with clients
Tom: Yeah, good question. When it comes to the advertising that we do with clients, we work with them on a basis of cost per acquisition. So instead of charging for production, or setup fees, or that sort of stuff, we tend to agree a cost per lead, or a cost per customer approach and work towards that. So we’d normally handle all the campaigns. So instead of working with their team, we become their team. We work with them on their campaigns to grow it out like that.
With that basis, when we look at somewhere like YouTube, we’ve created these videos that are normally this aducation-based video where it’s providing good content, good value. We’d normally like to try and follow up that aducation video with a more direct sale video to that remarketing list to get them to take action and buy a webinar, or join a webinar, or join whatever offer that might get people to actually take another type of action.
Advertising on different platforms
What we tend to find is we are very well known for the YouTube advertising side of our business, in the sense that that’s where we come from, we’re very good at creating videos, and so that lends itself to YouTube. But with all of this, we often love to advertise on Facebook as well because it’s another platform whereby we can get in front of a slightly different type of audience. We still very much think about the moment that people will be in and still try and connect with that. But because we’re providing good value content videos, it’s very easy to take that same video, tweak it ever so slightly just for the call to action really to be then applicable for the Facebook platform.
You can then get in front of a slightly different type of audience because you can go in front of people based on their interests and different types of custom audiences. But then if you’re really clever about it, you can say, those people that have come from a YouTube video, if that’s where you’re getting lots of good results, go onto your website and didn’t convert, when they land on your website, they will also fire a Facebook pixel, which means that you can do some really clever retargeting through Facebook and very cheap indeed. And vice versa as well. You can say, if we’re going to advertise on Facebook to a cold audience, maybe like a lookalike audience or something along those lines, you can take that traffic, whichever traffic lands on a landing page on your site, you can then say, I want to now get in front of those people again by using YouTube ads.
So there’s really clever ways of using both platforms to almost sing from the same hymn sheet. And then you can have this really effective campaign work on both YouTube and Facebook. And often what we’ll do with clients if they got existing agencies working on their Facebook stuff, we just have a chat with them, explain the concept, they’re normally very familiar with the process as well. We just dovetail off each other as well to say right, if we’re going to send a lot of traffic on YouTube, you might as well retarget it, and if you’re sending a lot of traffic from Facebook, we might also remarket it and look to generate more and more results to clients. But sometimes they haven’t got started with Facebook or YouTube, so we can go on both levels and advertise with that clients on both those platforms.
But yeah, that’s kind of like a really clever way of growing your audience and increasing your reach because you can get in front of a very different type of audience on Facebook than you would do on YouTube. And obviously there’s a consideration for that and working out the best strategies for Facebook as well. But video advertising on Facebook works very, very well, as does other types of advertising on Facebook but we tend to find that videos work extremely well on both YouTube and Facebook, and then it feels like you’ve got this omnipresence where you’re constantly in front of your audience. And if it’s come from YouTube to begin with, you know the timing is right. You just want to take that as much out of that moment as possible, and you want to make sure you will really give the customers an amazing experience at the same time knowing that you’re advertising a lot right at the moment where it’s right for the customer.
James: Perfect. OK. So Tom, what should I have asked you that I haven’t? Because I don’t know enough about YouTube advertising even though I feel like I know a lot more than I did at the beginning of this series.
Getting started
Tom: Good question. I think that’s the case of getting started. I think a lot of people get excited by this and then think like, what do I need to do right now without going into further procrastination because it literally, if you took 15 minutes now just to jot down a few ideas, you’d be 80% of the way there and then you wouldn’t take long to actually execute on that. It’s all about forming a plan to begin with.
I think the first thing that I’d recommend that people do is just really think about your audience and who’s your ideal audience. If you think about their day-to-day activity, if they were to visit YouTube, what would they be looking up when they might be interested on what you have to offer. So think about what those moments might be and where you have the right to play and then say, let’s just pick one of those. It might be like an obvious keyword, it might be a slightly different type of keyword, but just like choose that moment and say, when people search this type of thing, that’s where I definitely want to be.
“Pick that moment and say ‘That’s the moment where I want to be.'”
The way to do it is pick that moment and say “That’s the moment where I want to be.” Think about what you want to say in your video ad and go and create that. Again, don’t try and be really creative. Just be helpful, just be useful, and it can be done with a webcam if it really needs to be, or it can be done with an iPhone. It doesn’t have to be clever at all. It just needs to be done.
And then on YouTube, just take half a day just to go into YouTube and AdWords. Think about setting things up and then just think, the first campaign should be an in-stream campaign to the URLs of those search terms people might be typing in. Doing that and just thinking about just getting started there should get your amazing results. And then once you start there and you get amazing results, it’s going to be like, great, I’m up and running, how do I scale up from here?
I’d always recommend try and get in front of people when they’re on YouTube looking for some information and provide them with a really good experience. That really is the strategy behind YouTube advertising.
James: Tom, that’s just amazing. You’re going to come over to SuperFastBusiness Live in March 2017?
Tom: I’ll definitely be there. I missed it this year. I was really gutted that I missed the last one. So yeah, I’ll definitely make sure I’m there on the next one.
James: Looking forward to that. I want to hear what you’ve got to say then. Thank you in the meantime. It’d be great if our audience can get their campaigns up and running, do a bit of in-the-trenches learning. Of course, if you’re a world-famous author, expert, speaker, or you’ve got a membership that’s kicking butt, then you might want to get in touch with Tom Breeze over at Viewability.co.uk and talk to him about perhaps setting up some paid advertising. If you’re at a serious level, then obviously he knows what he’s doing there and he’s got some top-shelf clients. I’ve seen behind the scenes in his business because I’m privileged to work with him through SilverCircle, and I know he’s doing some amazing things for his customers.
So Tom, thanks for joining us in this three-part series. I look forward to catching up with you again on our weekly call.
Tom: James, thanks for your having me. It’s been great fun.
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