YouTube is among the savviest platform choices for your influencer marketing campaign since it’s an option that works well at every stage of the marketing funnel, from awareness to conversion.
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 creator community on YouTube offers opportunities for businesses of all sizes and budgets 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 into 2019, 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. 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 influencer Kizuna Ai’s YouTube channel, which had about 200,000 subscribers in December of 2017 has over 2,400,000 as of January 2019.
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 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 promote tourism 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.
Knowledge of these stats make 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.
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 nanoinfluencers.
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 Channels
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 YouTube marketing campaigns are an obvious win for marketers due to the huge built-in followings that celebrities have. Gordon Ramsey 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.
In Conclusion
YouTube is an especially good platform choice for any influencer marketing campaign because it allows for what feels like an almost first-hand experience of a product. In a YouTube video, influencers are able to show multiple angles of your product and interact with it in ways that are not possible in still photos or shorter videos seen on other social-media sites like Instagram.
To aid you in your search for the perfect influencers for your campaign, you can avail yourself of a platform like socialbook.io. Socialbook.io lets you research influencers and get information about their reach and audience type, while also giving you the option to communicate with them directly instead of having to go through a third party.
You can also check out tools like Facebook Groups, Mention or Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to connect with influencers that have audiences who would be interested in your product.
The most important point to remember when planning a YouTube influencer campaign is to choose your influencers with care. The influencers that you select must above all be able to honestly and authentically advocate for your brand. Consider these folks bona fide members of your team; and when properly incentivized, they can help you make magic.
This article was originally posted on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trends-should-convince-you-launch-your-influencer-marketing-heidi-yu/
