There are multiple ways to find Youtube Influencers that can assist you in promoting your brand, service or product. The most affordable way is to just do searches on youtube for your products and services,
What I’ve realized over the years is that customers don’t necessarily consume a ton of youtube content or content in general, that relates directly to your brand. You can do market research and make intelligent assumptions, which are probably going to quite accurate most of the time but there is a way to see what your customers are watching on youtube.
But, what if a segment of your customers (and potential customers) are parents, and you have no idea what parents in the southern states are watching on youtube? You may be asking yourself “Why Would I care what they are watching on youtube?”. Valid question. However, if you are like me you love to explore the data, understand data and use it to make better business decisions. If I’m working on an influencer campaign, or just finding youtube channels to either run ads on, or partner with, this data does matter to me.
You can easily find a long list of youtube channels that your customers are viewing, and even look-a-like audiences of your customers. It will require a small investment, but its an investment that you can also use to generate more traffic to your website.
Here is the method I use to find Youtube Influencers, using a little budget and a lot of cool data!
Setup a Google Adwords account if you haven’t already and drop the retargeting pixel on your website.
Let the pixel collect data for several weeks (note: if your website receives minimal traffic, you may need to create a small campaign on social and Google to generate interest and quality traffic so that you can start building audience data. Another recommendation would be to send out an email to all of your customers and ensure there is a strong call to action that leads back to your website. Basically, the idea here is that you want as many customers and interested potential customers visiting your website so google has enough data to utilize).
Create two audiences within Google Adwords. One would be your website’s visitors, and the other would be a very tightly targeted look-a-like audience based on the users who have visited your website.You essentially now have the ability to target your website’s visitors + a healthy audience data set of potential customers who have similar characteristics as your customers.
If you are worried that a lot of people browse your website and aren’t customers, you can even segment the audience further and only target users who visit a specific area of your website, like an online store for example.
Create an awesome google display campaign (banner advertisements work) that promotes your product, service or company in general.
Execute the campaign and ensure that you are only targeting youtube as your display network. Click here for more information. This campaign needs to target ONLY your retargeting audience and your look-a-like audience.
Make sure your campaign runs for several days (I’d prefer a few weeks) and has a decent budget. You want impressions.
At the end of your campaign (which hopefully brought you some quality traffic) you can view your Placements data and see all of the youtube channels that your ads were displayed on while people were watching content on youtube.
That was the “Ah Ha!” moment.
You are targeting your website’s visitors AND people who have similar traits ONLY on youtube when THEY are viewing content on youtube.
You may find some interesting data! The channels they are watching may surprise you.
You can then either specifically target these channels in future campaigns, or even reach out to youtube influencers and ask them to partner with you on campaigns.
