Chapter 3
IN THIS CHAPTER
Creating a profile of your audience
Understanding the power of audience insights
Identifying unique actionable insights
Leveraging powerful insight tools
In this chapter, you discover the power of an audience insight to form an actionable base for your ad campaigns and content initiatives on YouTube. You find out how to use powerful research tools to uncover meaningful insights about your audience and ways to use those insights to influence the creative of your ad campaign or content strategy.
Before you get started, you need to have a deep understanding of who your marketing campaign will speak to. If you know your audience, you’ll be able to make choices that inform both the video creative you make and the media targeting options you select.
You can reach just about anyone on YouTube. Google and YouTube offer lots of tools to help learn about and target your audience, ensuring that you reach only the people you want to talk to. Taking some time to think through who you’d like to target will help make your marketing campaign more manageable and focused. You’ll have lots of options as to how to buy your media to reach them, but start by creating a clear picture in your head of who they are so that you know who you are talking to.
When it comes to defining an audience, marketers often break people into subgroups, which they then use to inform the development of creative, like advertisements and content, ensuring it speaks more directly to that group. For example, if you make a product that is targeted to parents, think about who those people maybe. How old are they? What are their behaviors and lives like? What challenges do they face? What do they like to watch, and where do they like to go?, These initial audience insights will inform your creative choices on how you communicate your product and ultimately how you make your YouTube video ad.
You can build a profile of your target audience by thinking through a few classic marketing dimensions:
These dimensions help you think about who you want to talk to and how to inform the video creative you make.
After you have a deeper picture of who you want to target (see preceding section), you can set about creating a marketing campaign that will speak to them. What you need to deliver a truly impactful marketing campaign on YouTube is a unique insight that you use to inform your creative and media that goes beyond dimensions like demographics or geography.
An insight is not a data point. Knowing that 55,000 people visited your website in the month of June or that 127,000 people watch your most recent quilting video are not insights. Those are interesting and potentially useful data points, but insights are more advanced than mere numbers.
An insight is
Often insights are part art and part science. A great insight just feels right when you land upon it. While finding an insight can take time, when you do, it will influence your whole marketing campaign for the better.
Consider the following data points, insight, and resulting action:
A well-known campaign from the soap brand Dove, part of Unilever, is an excellent example of how an out-of-sight informed the creative of an advertising campaign delivered through YouTube that became one of the most watched online ads ever. Since 2004, Dove’s brand campaign had been the Campaign for Real Beauty, which it created after undertaking a study that found some startling facts about how women perceive themselves.
Consider the following data point, which formed the foundation for the insight and on which the campaign was built:
This insight informed a compelling creative idea that manifested in video creative made for YouTube, lasting more than 6 minutes, delivering over 163 million views, and becoming one of the most shared videos ever, with both metrics still growing. Dove made the video in 25 different languages and uploaded it to 46 Dove YouTube channels globally. The campaign won many advertising awards and continues to resonate with new audiences who discover it today. While the video delivered on Dove’s goal of an effective brand campaign and hopefully encouraged more people to choose Dove products, it went further, giving people an important and meaningful reminder that they can be their own harshest critics.
I dare you to watch the video and not cry. Now walk over to the mirror and tell yourself you’re awesome, because you are.
You know your campaign will be more successful if your brief contains a compelling and actionable insight, but how do you generate insights? If you want output, you need input!
Try the following approach to collect inputs and synthesize them into insights:
Collect all your existing data.
Set about aggregating your inputs, integrating them, and looking for commonalities, patterns, trends, and themes. The more diverse the data set, often the better. Starting with what you already have is easiest — for example, grab any reports from your website, social profiles, existing videos, sales data, and more. I like to print these reports so that I can easily group them later. The idea is to gather any and all previous data, surveys, feedback from customers, and other inputs you have that may help inform your next campaign.
Find more data for a fuller picture.
A fuller data set gives you a more accurate picture and more information to work with, so go beyond your own data and look for articles and studies from third parties. See what relevant information you can find by searching on Google. In the upcoming section “The Best Tools and Resources for Insights,” I list ways to find and uncover new data points and interesting correlations, source surveys, and feedback from people, as well as how to add more data to your total data set.
Sort all your data into the Four C framework.
Take all of these various data points and inputs and start to sort them into groups. You can use the Four C framework, described in the following section, to organize your inputs.
There’s no right or wrong way to organize your data and inputs to help generate your insights. You can look for themes and commonalities or even just highlight a handful of the most interesting and useful points that you think are relevant from what you’ve uncovered. I like to use the Four C Framework to group things. It makes the mass of data you’ve assembled more manageable.
Consumer insights deal with the individual’s mindset. Think through how individuals in your target audience are feeling, what motivates them, what are they hoping to achieve, and what encourages them to act. With consumer’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you must look for the why behind those thoughts and actions. If behavior is functional, the insight, the why behind it, is the emotional.
Consider the following questions:
The category in which you operate refers to the division of business with shared characteristics. For example, if you sell specialized sporting goods online, your categories may be sporting goods for specific sports, sporting goods in general, online retailers, clothing, ecommerce, and others. Look for insights through the category lens.
When it comes to your category:
Take a look at your competitors, the people who are in similar businesses as you, even if they are in different geographies, to see what they are doing. You can learn about your audience from how your competitor is talking to them and how they are reacting.
Think about the following questions:
Think about what may be happening at a cultural level that can affect your target audience. The cultural lens provides the context in which all other lenses are operating within and encourages you to take a wider view of what’s influencing your audience. Cultural influences can inform and shape the beliefs, wants, and needs of your audience. Often, tapping into cultural insights will allow you to develop insights that inform your creative, your media, and your marketing campaign.
Use these questions to think through what’s happening in culture:
Google and YouTube offer an array of incredible and freely available tools and resources that you can use to discover more about the audience you’d like to target. They can help you develop compelling insights for your marketing campaign brief.
Take a look through the following tools and resources and experiment with them:
Trends can be helpful indicators of what people are responding to and watching at any given time. A few resources are available to help you track trends:
www.youtube.com/feed/trending
)http://youtube-trends.blogspot.com
)The trending video page on YouTube shows you the videos that are trending around the world (see Figure 3-1). You may see some videos you’d expect, such as the latest music video from a popular artist or the summer’s big blockbuster movie trailer, but you’ll also find videos that will surprise you. Think of those classic videos that trended, like the Cinnamon Challenge, Harlem Shake, and even the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. These videos are what you may call viral videos in that they seem to spread exponentially like a virus.
Trending videos are specific to the country you’re in, but they aren’t personalized to you; the videos you see are the same videos everyone else will see. YouTube updates this list every 15 minutes, so it’s a super-fresh list of what’s hot. Think of the trending videos page as a top chart of what’s big right now on YouTube.
Trending videos aren’t just based on video view count, though. In addition to how many views the video has, the trending videos page can be based on
YouTube writes:
“Even if your video meets all the above criteria, it may not appear on Trending, as many other videos may also meet those criteria. The Trending system tries to choose videos that will be most relevant to our viewers and most reflective of the broad content on the platform.”
— https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7239739?hl=en
Oh, you can’t pay to be on this page either, YouTube doesn’t favor any particular people, and they don’t count views you get from paid media.
Another useful resource is the YouTube trends blog at http://youtube-trends.blogspot.com
. While the YouTube team don’t post on the blog often (at the time of writing, the last post was five months old), it still appears to be an active blog with interesting content about observations and analysis of trends on YouTube.
Search for something like #IceBucketChallenge, and you’ll find a post from 2014 that breaks down performance data of this meme or how “The Gummy Bear Song” broke 1 billion views. (I’d never heard of it either.) Think of this resource as a library of case studies of the most viral of viral videos.
Google Trends, shown in Figure 3-2, is gold, and time spent using this tool is never wasted. Using real-time Google and YouTube data, Google Trends lets you search for anything.
Google Trends is like the world’s biggest survey, enabling you to see what people are interested in based on what they are searching for:
If you spend time playing with Google Trends, you’ll see how useful it is. Follow these steps:
Visit http://trends.google.com
and enter any search term you’d like and press Enter.
For example, enter your favorite celebrity, a product, or a sporting event. The results page, shown in Figure 3-3, displays search interest, or the number of people searching for that phrase, over time, showing peaks and troughs.
Choose YouTube Search from the drop-down menu to see how people have been searching for this phrase specifically on YouTube.
The menu is set to Web Search by default.
Do you see anything revealing, such as certain times of the year when people are searching more or regions where people are searching from?
Scroll down to the Related Topics and Related Queries sections to see other topics and search phrases people use similar to your search.
This information, shown in Figure 3-4, can be a source of inspiration to think through other angles, revealing what else is on people’s minds when searching.
Scroll up to the top of the Results page and add a comparison search term by clicking on + Compare.
You can compare two search terms against each other. You can even add more comparison terms, up to five in total (see Figure 3-5).
You can explore even more on Google Trends. Use the left-hand side menu to find
Use all of this data to think about how your videos can tap into people’s intents and interests, and to uncover related topics, times of the year when you may want to run your videos, and more.
One of the best ways to develop insights about your audience is to ask them questions! If you’re able to hit the street, email, or call up friends, simply start asking people questions about what they like and what they want, what motivates them, what they would like to be different, and more.
If you’re looking for an easier and more scalable solution to survey people, you can use Google Surveys, which is a paid service that lets you build and run your own survey, delivering it to your target audience wherever they are on the Internet.
Google Surveys works by enabling people to answer short surveys in exchange for access to premium content. For example, imagine you want to read an article on a popular newspaper’s website, but that content is behind a pay-wall. You may be given the option to answer a survey in exchange for accessing that content for free and not having to pay for the subscription. It’s a win-win!
You can get results within 48 hours, and the data is presented back to you in beautiful graphs and charts, making it easy to interpret the results. Remember, real people are answering your questions, so the potential to learn is enormous.
Sign into your Google account and then follow these steps the first time you run Google Surveys:
https://surveys.withgoogle.com
and click on Run a Survey.Choose your country.
Remember to choose the country where you are located. An option later allows you to change the country where the survey will run.
View and accept the terms of service.
To accept them, check the I agree box after you’ve read the terms and then click on Submit.
You’re then able to get started building your survey.
To create a new survey in Google Surveys:
Click on the “+” button.
You see a page that allows you to build your survey.
Choose who you want to target and then click on Continue.
You can choose options like country, age, and gender (see Figure 3-8). As you choose options, the price per completed survey will change. The more specific the audience you want to reach, the likely the higher the cost.
After you click on Continue, you see a screen that allows you to add questions.
Choose the type of question you’d like to add and then click on Add Question.
Your choices include a single answer question, a question with multiple answers, rating scales, questions where you show an image and ask for an answer, and more.
You return to the main survey screen.
Edit the question’s text and answer options.
When adding questions, you can set up some advanced options. For more information, see the nearby sidebar “Randomization and screener questions.”
Note that you can click on Save to save your survey’s progress.
Continue adding questions and editing the text and answer options; click on Confirm when you’re finished.
To get better results, ask no more than four or five questions. While Google Surveys is a great tool to test things, it’s not as useful for lengthy questionnaires.
After you create all your questions, click on Confirm to proceed.
You see a summary Review and Purchase page, shown in Figure 3-9.
Indicate how many survey responses you want to purchase and how often you want to run the survey.
For example, you can run the survey only once for 100 times or every month for 100 times, which is great if you want the same survey to run on a regular basis for a steady flow of market research.
Google calculates the total cost.
Before you confirm and purchase, Google Surveys may show you a screen explaining that it can test your survey to determine the cost and the audience size. This screen typically appears when you have a screening question. Google Surveys wants to make sure that enough respondents meet your criteria. For example, if your screener questions are “Is your name John? Are you 35 years old? Do you live in Tampa?” then the screener questions may be too specific! You can edit your survey to reduce the restrictions your screener questions impose. (For more on screener questions, see the nearby sidebar.)
Click on Buy Now when you’re ready to proceed.
You may be asked to enter payment information if you don’t already have that information associated with your Google account.
Your survey will go live shortly after you’ve made payment.
One of the easiest ways to discover insights about your audience is to look directly at what they’re saying on social media, such as on your Facebook page, your Twitter, or in the YouTube comments section.
One way to use YouTube and the comments to help mine for insights is to create a video where you simply ask people what they think! The vast majority of popular YouTubers will end their videos by asking their audience to comment, telling them what they thought of their video, of the topic, what they’d like to see next, and so on. Maybe you can make a video and post it to your YouTube channel asking people questions that you’ll then use to inform your campaign.
YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, and your Google Ads Reports are so important for mining insights that Part V is dedicated to them.