How to use YouTube Advertising to grow your business?
In today’s virtual competitive world, one of the most cost-effective methods used in digital marketing is social media promotions that help in increasing business visibility and reaching targeted audiences easily. Generally, implementation of social media strategies can hugely improve customer engagement that can drastically promote brand awareness of products and services.
Social media marketing is an effective way to gain website traffic through social media platforms. SMM is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks to achieve marketing and branding goals of a business. Social media optimization (SMO) is a part of SEO, where social media communities and networking sites are used to build brand recognition for a product and boost website rankings. SMO process can optimize websites to make it more sociable and keep brand messaging regular across all platforms, improve traffic from organic search and social sites, as well as manage the online presence of a business.
Some of the tools used in social media marketing are Agorapulse Barometer, Twitter Analytics, Agorapulse Timeline Contest, Headline analyzer, Facebook Ads Compass, Tagboard, Canva, Easel.ly, Bitly.
Promoting a product using social networking sites
The use of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have drastically increased in recent days and it is necessary to add these networking sites for promoting a product or a service. Traditional marketing and advertising methods are already outdated and it is high time to use social networking sites to reach a huge number of people.
- 1. Choose the social media channels where you wish to promote your products.
- 2. Define the goals and objectives.
- 3. Create a Facebook page to connect with the potential audience.
- 4. Set up an account on Twitter to attract more customers with comprehensive product promotions.
- 5. Use LinkedIn to reach out to business professionals.
- 6. Write own or guest blogs about your products and services.
- 7. Make YouTube videos for valid promotions of products and services.
- 8. Use other social media communities such as Pinterest and Google Plus that are related to your products.
Here are some of the Social Media Optimization strategies that can be followed to boost your website rankings in search results.
- Complete the product profile in websites with socialized integrations.
- Use targeted keywords, position ads, and branded hashtags in your social content specific to your business.
- Promote your products across multiple channels to develop a follower base.
- Implement distinctive social icons on the website along with external inbound links.
- Elevate social accounts of your business in email signatures, articles, and newsletters.
- Create and share quality content.
- Optimize posts for searches and microblogging in various platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Use social bookmarking techniques for web pages.

The most commonly used SMO strategy – YouTube Advertising
According to statistics, “300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Nearly 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube each day.”
YouTube works in 80 different languages and about 1.9 billion active logged-in users visit YouTube every month. This is a massive opportunity for marketers and small business owners for their product and services promotions. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and a powerful social media platform used by advertisers to reach their potential customers in minutes. People place ads on YouTube to attract the right audience and increase brand awareness. Nowadays, YouTube online video advertising campaigns have become an efficient form of media advertising and can comprehensively enhance product promotions.
Many successful brands use YouTube Marketing Strategies to increase ad exposure through social media sharing. It is a great option to engage with various audiences and provide real-time insights about views.
Categories in YouTube ads
1. Skippable ads (Also known as TrueView ads)
These ads appear at the beginning of YouTube videos that don’t force people to watch. TrueView ads are flexible as it helps you to advertise your products and services with demos, video testimonials, and how-to videos. TrueView ads are pay-per-click (PPC) ads that are one of the cost-effective methods of advertising to reach the broadest range of suitable audience.
TrueView ads can be skipped after five seconds and are offered in four different types: In-stream ads, In-display ads (Discovery ads), In-search ads, and In-slate ads.
In-Stream ads are short video messages that appear at the start or end of other YouTube video contents and also in Google’s display network videos, games, and applications. This kind of ads can be less than 3 minutes in length and routes directly to the website when clicked on the actual display of the advertisement. This is an advanced way to boost YouTube channel subscribers through the continuous generation of new video content in the specified ad format.
In-display ads are the suggested videos that appear on the YouTube homepage, or as recommended or related videos in YouTube search listings. The length of discovery ads is not limited and the display ad headline has a maximum limit of 25 characters with 35 characters maximum for each description. When clicked on the video thumbnail, it routes to the video and when clicked on CTA overlays, it routes directly to the website.
In-search ads appear at the top of the search results page when users search for keywords that you select. In-slate ads are commercials that play before or in the middle of longer videos.
2. Non-Skippable ads
These ads force people to watch and are 15-20 seconds long. There are two kinds of non-skippable YouTube ads: Pre-roll ads and Mid-roll ads.
Pre-roll ads appear before a video plays and Mid-roll ads appear at the halfway of a video.
Non-skippable ads are viable for the expansion of brand exposure to specific target markets. They are paid for on a cost-per-mille (CPM) structure with control over the ad promotion spends.

3. Bumper ads
Bumper ads are a kind of non-skippable ads that lasts a maximum of six seconds. They are paid for on a CPM basis and usually appear at the end of YouTube videos. Bumper ads are perfect to target mobile users and can be used to recycle long contents.
How to set up and launch a video advertising campaign on YouTube
Once after creating a marketing video, you can set up your advertising campaign with Google Adwords account.
- 1. On the main toolbar, click +Campaign button. Select the ‘Video’ option as the campaign type from the drop-down menu.
- 2. Enter the name of your campaign and select any type of ‘video ad format’. It is advisable to choose ‘In-stream or video discovery ads’ option so that your video ad will be in TrueView format.
- 3. Set the budget per day and choose one from two of the delivery methods shown.Standard delivery shows ads evenly during the day and accelerated ads can drive views more quickly.
- 4. Choose the networks where you want to display your ads. The option ‘YouTube Search’ can make your video ad to appear in search results and also in YouTube channel pages, video pages, and home page. The option ‘YouTube Videos’ can make your video ad to appear before or in the middle of videos shown across the Google Display Network.Separate campaigns should be created for YouTube Search and YouTube Videos to track and monitor the performance metrics in a better way.
- 5. Select the location of users whom you want to show your ads. Also, options are available for excluding certain locations.
- 6. Define device, carrier, and operating system with Adwords for advanced targeting. This option can be used for mobile application ads and also you can increase or decrease your bid based on the users watching ads in mobile devices.
- 7. Set begin and end dates of your campaign, create a custom schedule, and control the daily views and impressions for users with the advanced settings option.
- 8. Name your ad group; insert the YouTube link to run the video ad. Choose whether you want this ad to run as an in-stream ad or an in-display ad.
- 9. Define the maximum price that you will pay for each view and the audience you would like to show the video.
- 10. You can also target individuals by topics, keywords, or websites where you would like your video ad to appear.
- 11. Finally, link your Adwords account to the YouTube channel where the video is hosted and click “Finish” to start running your video ad campaign.
YouTube offers different ways to advertisers for reaching potential customers: demographics and topics, keyword contextual targeting, custom affinity and in-market audiences, and re-marketing.
A typical video ad on YouTube runs between $0.10 – $0.30 per view, depending on the quality and targeting of the video.
The benefits of running video ads on YouTube are:
- Engage and connect with the audience easily
- Reach the right audience
- Create a video ad campaign within minutes
- Track viewers using Analytics
Get started with YouTube Ads from AES Technologies to reach the valuable prospects of your business.