How YouTube Is the Surprising Secret Weapon for Smart B2B Advertisers

Creating a video used to be the only use B2B marketers could make of YouTube. Recently, YouTube has really stepped up their game to help B2B brands run advertising campaigns on the platform, from more granular targeting to ways to expand reach and increase conversion. It’s time for B2B marketers to give YouTube another look, writes Sara Luckow, Senior Director of Strategy, Channel Factory.

For B2C marketers, it’s hard to imagine life without YouTube. Yet, I was talking to a friend recently about their marketing strategy for his company, which sells professional products for salons, and YouTube never crossed his mind as a potential marketing channel. I immediately thought I had a great idea for an article, but, when I searched  “B2B marketing on YouTube,” I found a long list of articles already out there about how YouTube is a great channel for all sorts of B2B marketers. It quickly became clear, however, that much of the advice is limited to how to make a good video, not how to reach the right target audience.

YouTube actually offers more than content marketing. B2B brands must also prioritize reaching their audience through advertising if they want to succeed on YouTube. It might surprise many B2B marketers to know just how many different advertising options there are to create a robust campaign on and off the site.

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Finding that Needle in a Haystack

For years and years, audience targeting was just too limited for B2B marketers with segments like “business travelers” and “avid investors” that offered no customization. If you sell things like salon chairs, industrial cranes, dialysis monitoring software or legal document management services, you need specific targeting, or it’s just a waste of money. Now brands can use many features to find the right audience targets and pick what content to advertise against.

Starting less than a year ago, YouTube delivers specific, customizable segments for B2B brands through exact Google Search keyword targeting. By tapping into your brand’s search keyword analysis, Google can transfer that knowledge over to YouTube to deliver one-for-one targeting with the terms that generate the most effective engagement. With these segments, brands can determine if they want to run a broad audience-targeted campaign, or combine that targeting with channel or content specific targeting. While the scale might be limited as a result of such granularity, the accuracy is spot on. With features like Customer Match, which uses first party data, and Similar Audiences, which allows B2B brands to expand their reach, Google offers tools to help dial in the right approach.

For the company trying to get in front of buyers at a salon, Contextual keyword targeting can help reach users watching relevant videos about salon products in the metadata, description, or titles. By targeting a term like “salon chairs,” the company could get to show their ad against videos like thisOpens a new window , ensuring a relevant audience. And B2B brands can use Custom Affinity to find more people who engaged with similar content and expand their message to new people.

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Better than DMAs

Not every B2B marketer is a global brand; many are regional or local. For a local plumbing company, it’s not worth it to waste money on campaigns that blanket too big of an area. YouTube offers very specific geo-targeting that can help eliminate wasted advertising. Marketers can pick from a variety of options from zip code targeting to a specific location radius. For example, a reseller showing advertising only within a 100-mile radius of their warehouse based on where they can deliver their products.

Geo-targeting is also helpful for big B2B brands if they want to tailor their message to different parts of the country. For example, a marketer might want to alter their message by state based on specific regulations, or if the same product has different names in different countries. With the right creatives to match, geo-targeting can be the tactic that delivers much more relevance to a B2B audience.

Planning for Conversion

Brands should also think beyond high-level brand messages. Once an advertiser has dialed in the right audience and target set of videos,   they can activate a broad range of tactics to reach them again with new messages and move prospects through the purchase funnel.

For example, people who viewed an ad can be retargeted through the Google Display Network with conversion-oriented messaging. Advertisers can also trigger a series of messages to tell a story across several interactions with someone in their target audience. They can also layer in display advertisingOpens a new window on YouTube such as CTA overlays or companion banners to encourage a conversion.

Success with advertising on YouTube comes down to expert tactics to find and engage the right audience for a B2B brand. With so many featuresOpens a new window now available on YouTube (and Google) to do that, B2B brands can step up their efforts.