What you need to know to make successful YouTube marketing videos for your brand

So we've gotten a TON of questions on this as we've introduced new brands onto the platform, so I thought it would be helpful to run through the basics of what you need to know about making a YouTube promotional video. If you ever want any tips, check out the Aspire platform to do this yourself!

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1) Dedicated videos vs. mentions/integrations

At a high-level, there are two types of promotions a brand can do in a YouTube video.

• Dedicated videos: typically 2-3 minutes in length, where your brand is the focus
• Mentions/integrations: typically 30-60 seconds in length, where you might be one of a few brands

Both are great ways to reach new customers and expand your awareness.

Dedicated videos, because the focus is intently on your brand, tend to be more expensive, but worth it if you are trying to drive direct sales for a given product line. Mentions and integrations, because they are tied into a themed-video, tend to get more viewership for the money, so they are better for driving overall awareness in addition to direct conversions.

2) Driving clicks and conversions using tracking links and coupon codes

To see direct sales from any video, the main thing to focus on is to make the links to buy your product and any associated coupon codes as highlighted as possible.  The best practices we try to follow are:

• Have the link placed in the highest part of the video information section, so that it is "above the fold"
• Make sure that the video itself mentions the coupon code and associated discount
• (Even better) Use annotations with the tracking link to drive even higher conversions.  

For coupon codes, you should be able to use whatever e-commerce system (e.g. Shopify, Magento, Big Commerce) to easily generate individualized discount codes for each YouTuber you're working with.  Make sure to do individual codes for each YouTuber so that you know which ones are performing the best!  

If you use Shopify, you can integrate with the Aspire app to see direct sales from the platform. For tracking links, make sure you link to the product that the YouTuber is selling to optimize the conversion rate, not your homepage.  To generate a link, you can either:

• Generate a link from your e-commerce system: this is the best way to do it, so that you can keep track of any sales that happen in case they forgot about the coupon code
• Use a bit.ly link

3) For pricing, focus on the YouTuber channel's recent median views + the type of promo they're doing

While pricing depends a LOT on the type of content, channel and size, we've typically seen pricing geared around the expected number of views that a video will generate in its first two months as a benchmark.  Because views tend to fluctuate a lot, focusing on the median (vs. average) views is helpful.

From there, pricing is simply a matter of cost-per-view (CPV), where the CPV range depends on the type of ask.  Dedicated videos cost a significantly higher CPV than mentions/integrations, due to the fact that you're getting a much bigger shoutout.