YouTube is among the savviest social media platform choices for your influencer marketing campaign since it’s an option that works well at every stage of the marketing funnel, influencing audiences from awareness to conversion, transforming them from potential customers to customers, and evangelists.
YouTube has a large audience, reaching an impressive 81.2 percent of U.S. internet users across all age groups from 18-24 all the way through to 65 plus.
The diversity of the content creator (AKA influencer) community on YouTube offers opportunities for businesses of all sizes and budgets small and large to promote their products to built-in audiences of followers who encompass multiple niche markets and are already regularly engaging with their favorite influencers.
To help you ease in 2020 coming influencer marketing campaigns, we’d like to share some popular trends that present exciting options for marketers who will be opting to build their brands by showcasing their products and services on YouTube in the coming year.
Virtual Influencers, aka VTubers
Virtual vloggers, 3D avatar-influencers on YouTube known as VTubers enjoyed a tremendous increase in popularity in 2018, especially in Japan. VTubers speak to their fans looking directly into the camera—just like human vloggers—and address a variety of topics encompassing everything from makeup to popular culture.
By the end of 2018, the number of views of VTuber videos was quadruple the number in 2017 and Tokyo-based analytics firm User Local estimates that there are some 2000 VTubers on YouTube.
As an example of VTubers growing prominence, immensely popular virtual influencerKizuna Ai’s YouTube channel, which had about 200,000 subscribers in December of 2017, has over 2.69 million subscribers as of January 2020.
In the U.S., 19-year-old Brazilian-American model and music artist Miquela has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and over 33,000 subscribers on YouTube, where she posts music videos. Miquela wears makeup and designer clothes, endorses brands and is even engaged in an actual feud with a virtual troll named Bermuda.
VTubers are also virtual YouTube influencers are a trend that will pick up speed over the coming year and brands are already taking notice. Kizuna Ai has already been tapped by the Japanese National Tourism Organization to be included in the tourism influencer marketing in Japan.
Shopping Videos
Shopping videos of all kinds are an excellent way to showcase your product. Shopping has long been considered a diverting way to spend time with close and trusted friends, and shopping videos featuring popular influencers evoke that feeling of being on a shopping trip with an intimate friend.
We already know that consumers tend to trust advice from friends when considering potential purchases. According to Nielsen, “Eighty-three percent of online respondents in 60 countries say they trust the recommendations of friends and family.” In the context of the shopping video, the influencer becomes a stand-in for a trusted longtime friend. This is also why marketers love influencer marketing.
Knowledge of these stats makes incorporating the shopping video into your influencer-marketing campaign a no-brainer. There are several popular kinds of shopping videos for you to consider in promoting your brand:
The Haul Video: The influencer shares and discusses products bought on a shopping spree and discusses topics like why he chose the items, how and where to purchase them and, last but not least, the price point of the items.
The Unboxing Video: The influencer opens (unboxes) a product and then tests it and provides a review. And Unbox Therapy is the most-subscribed YouTuber of this category, making him the top tech influencer in the world. Now Lewis's YouTube channel has 16.1 million subscribers as of January, 2020.
The Gift Guide Video: Influencers present gift options centered around a theme—for example, gardening or candy-making—or a demographic group, like working moms.
The Shopping Trip Video: An influencer invites fans to accompany her on a trip to favorite stores—or perhaps to check out new shops—while she chooses products and makes purchases.
The shopping video itself is not new, but what is emerging as an exciting opportunity for brands today is the option of partnering with multiple nanoinfluencers (influencers with 1000 to 10,000 subscribers) that will collectively expose their brand to multiple target audiences. Some advantages of using nanoinfluencers are that they are budget-friendly and enjoy a high rate of engagement with their followers.
Fewer followers can mean more authentic connections and greater trust when it comes to taking advice about potential purchases. To promote your product to a wider audience, just add more nano influencers by searching on SocialBook.io.
Morning and Evening Routines
Morning and evening routine videos, in which a YouTube influencer shares his morning or nighttime rituals with his fans are excellent product-placement opportunities for brands since they generally focus on skincare, hair-styling or supplement regimens.
Morning and evening routines provide endless opportunities to showcase everything from breakfast bars to clothes to makeup…to makeup remover.
The intimacy that is part and parcel of inviting fans into your bathroom or bedroom helps to foster that sense of real-world friendship that inspires followers to take purchasing advice from their favorite influencer-friends.
The wisdom of this marketing strategy is backed up by data from Google which shows that morning-routine video watch time better than tripled in 2018, while nighttime-routine watch time increased by 80 percent.
Celebrity YouTube Channels
The most subscribed celebrity YouTube channel is the one by Justin Bieber, which also ranked as the 8th most-subscribed channel around the world.
More and more mainstream celebrities have begun launching their own YouTube channels. Among the celebrities to take the plunge are model Karlie Kloss, actor Will Smith, chef Gordon Ramsey, and fashion designer Victoria Beckham.
Celebrity-driven YouTuber or macro influencer marketing campaigns are an obvious win for marketers due to the huge built-in followings that celebrities have. Gordon Ramsey, for example, has over 8,100,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and by the middle of 2018 had surpassed one billion views.
If your budget allows for a partnership with a celebrity YouTube influencer whose image and follower demographics are in alignment with your brand’s message and mission, your brand will gain a great deal of exposure—a particular boon if your product or service is a new one that you’d like to introduce to a wider audience or create buzz around.
If you want to get to the more detailed channel analytics of the influencer channels your business plans to work with, try SocialBook, the complete influencer marketing software can help you avoid spending on the wrong influencers.
