In this episode of In-Ear Insights, influencer marketing will be hot this year, and few channels have as much long-term sway as YouTube. Part television, part search engine, YouTube is the undisputed heavyweight of free video (Netflix for the fully paid side). What should companies be looking for on YouTube when it comes to influencers? How do they find them, who are they, and what should they use for selection criteria? Listen to this episode to find out.
Listen to the audio here:
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher Penn
This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast.
in this episode of In-Ear Insights today we’re talking about YouTube influencers YouTube is the one of the hottest channels for 2019 right up there with Instagram and in a recent stat in terms of Generation Z which is people essentially under the age of 20 right now YouTube is the most trusted channel for them when it comes to consumption of advertising influencers and product awareness so there’s a lot of interest in manufacturers who wanted to get to this next audience of incredibly you know interested digitally connected disposable income How should companies be thinking about YouTube influencers So Katie just start off let’s talk about the things that companies inevitably do wrong with influencer programs number one which is lack of planning on those trying to jump in on that one. Oh absolutely. So number
Katie Robbert
setting expectations so understanding your goals what is it that you’re trying to get out of an influencer program in general so we’ve talked a lot about influencer programs whether it you know regardless of channel and the number one thing that we find people do wrong is what is the goal so they have the they’re trying to measure the wrong thing. They’re trying to measure impressions they’re trying to measure likes and it’s unless it’s set up properly which is really tricky to do. You can’t equate an influencer program to revenue that you’ve brought in unless that is clearly the expectation of the influencer. So you’re absolutely right. lack of planning is my bugaboo in terms of influencer programs, because how often do our people told Okay, you know what, we have to go get an influencer, go get mommy bloggers go get someone to, you know, speak on our behalf at the trade show or someone to take pictures with our products. And that’s as far as it goes, What what are you what are you seeing?
Christopher Penn
So I think, again, like you said, planning is a big part of where people go wrong. So are not knowing the new spending time doing the homework, knowing the platforms, capabilities. Do you know what a true you add is? If you don’t, you probably should get skilled up on learning how to advertise and learning how the YouTube platform works first, before dropping $100,000 to have chaos. I try and promote your widget that frankly, his audience won’t care about. The other thing really is does your product fit YouTube? Right? Yes, you can use it for anything but it is a visual channel it is a video channel it is a search engine, in fact, is the second largest search engine by usage in the planet right next to Google itself. Are you using YouTube correctly? One of the things that we’ve seen so many times go wrong with social media programs that someone will pay a lot of money for an influencer. And but then you go to the brand’s profile, so they got like, four posts like five years ago. It’s like, okay, so you spent all this money, but you didn’t do any of the foundation work whatsoever?
Katie Robbert
Yeah, I think that that’s exactly right. I think that YouTube is a widely Miss understood platform in terms of its utility. And I know that,
you know, we’ve been working on educating a lot of our clients around how to SEO optimize on YouTube. I don’t think people understand that that’s something that you can actually do because, well, SEO means content, written content, not video content. And I think that that’s also a bit of the mismatch. I think, you know, to your point it’s also misunderstood that YouTube is a search engine it’s not a social media platform.
Christopher Penn
Not only that, but Google. Also, if you anytime you load it a video to YouTube, regardless of whether you upload a captions file or not, if there’s no captions file provided, Google will make one Google’s back end user machine learning and it transcribes as much of the audio is can that’s spoken word and turns into text. Well, guess what happens when you go onto YouTube, and you type into YouTube, how to change a faucet, right? If you’ve got those words and phrases in the spoken word inside your video, and YouTube transcribes it correctly, it your video will not show up even if that’s not in the title and the description. And so from an advanced SEO perspective for YouTube, guess what you should be thinking again, back to planning you should have your seo keyword keyword phrase list and all the priority work that you’ve done for your website for your YouTube channel. It’s an astonishing the number of people who don’t think hey, maybe you know, for example we’re doing right now a podcast that is about YouTube influencers we’re gonna say as much as we can in the context of natural language, because we’ll get it transcribed and they’ll go as a blog post. But if we’re going to put this video on YouTube would want to do exactly the same thing, make sure that we’ve done playing and homework to know what the audience cares about. Now, one thing that I think you should talk about, since it’s your one of your public speaking after just how much should people be using predictive analytics to plan their YouTube content
Katie Robbert
by how much I I will say, 100%, you know, because YouTube is like any other search engine, people are looking for the things that they’re interested in. And you can use predictive analytics to determine when people are going to likely be looking for the type of thing that you could be producing. So I think one of the other sort of hidden gems of Google Trends is that you can actually pull YouTube data. So not enough people use Google Trends. But that’s a subject for another time, if you are looking for clean search data to run a predictive analysis on go to Google Trends. But then you can change the type of data that you’re using. So you can use general web search data, which is your Google search engine, you can use ecommerce data, which I believe is Google Shopping, and you can use YouTube data, it actually is part of the drop down, it’s one of the features where you can actually see what people are searching for on YouTube. So then you can use that data is clean, consistently collected data to run your predictive forecast and using that as your video content calendar versus your written content, calendar and produce videos in accordance with the timing of when people are going to be looking for your thing. So absolutely, I would say it’s a perfect candidate for predictive analysis.
Christopher Penn
And so many people don’t use that you’re right. Google Trends really is sort of the, the, the hidden gem of Google’s research properties. And if you think about if you’re predicting YouTube trends for when your people are searching for those terms, you’ve got your video content in place. The next logical step is of course, you should be using that to to create all the demand content and the advertising run your YouTube ads, run your YouTube budgets on it. And again, it’s something just people just don’t do
Unknown
No, they don’t.
Christopher Penn
So let’s talk about the influencers themselves. Who should we be looking for, for YouTube, and this is just the biggest mouth in the room.
Katie Robbert
So I will look to you for a little bit of help remembering this framework. But there are different types of influencers. You have your influencers, who have the biggest mouth, the biggest reach, those are typically your celebrities,
you have your influencers, who don’t speak a whole lot, but when they do people listen, and I know that there’s a third one, and I apologize that I’m forgetting
Christopher Penn
it’s, it’s the it’s the, the mayor, the person who, who’s got the Rolodex, you can connect with people. But you’re absolutely right. And YouTube as a platform is well optimized really, for the first the last like when you’re saying the big mouth and also the expert the expert content and it’s so important However, one of the tricky challenges with YouTube itself is that it’s analytics that’s a good at least stuff you don’t own. But we do work with companies like talk Walker that provide really good YouTube Analytics so make sure you’re working with a good analytics platform.
Katie Robbert
So back to your question about types of influencers. So again, that goes back to planning what is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? And so that should help you understand the type of influencer you’re going after So the example that we always use because it’s something that everybody can understand is a Kardashian so a Kardashian is what we call sort of that big mouth influencer in the sense that they have such a wide audience they have so much reach but and this is the caveat they may not do anything for your brand specifically because it might not be a good match just getting reached doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to take action because it’s so saturated because they’re doing so many different things. So you may be better off finding someone who has a smaller network but has the right network and that’s where that
research and homework has to come in of just because someone has a large network doesn’t mean that it’s the right network for you to be reaching
Christopher Penn
and if you want to fund stealth play if you are better at Google Ads then you are at YouTube and you have a competitor with a big mouth right either they’ve hired one they are one using YouTube’s keyword targeting for YouTube pre roll ads targeted towards your competitors influencer allows you to show your ads on the influences content has all these influences trying to make money as many ways as again understandably right they have sponsored content they have YouTube ads and so on and so forth so if you wanted to pull a a ninja move on your competitors figure out who their influences are and advertise your stuff on their channels
Katie Robbert
that’s a that’s a good pro tip but i think that you know people to definitely look into that I’m one of the things that people might not also know is you can run YouTube ads through AdWords Isn’t that right?
Christopher Penn
That’s right in fact that’s probably the easiest place to do it all in one location
Katie Robbert
so we’ve kind of gotten a little off topic from influencers in general and we’ve spent some time talking about the YouTube platform as a whole which to be honest you really need to understand the platform before you start hiring influencers so Chris to your point you can plan it you can measure it you know what you’re getting from it so
YouTube influencers in general we know that influencer marketing is going to be one of the hottest things this year YouTube influencers versus Instagram influence search versus Facebook, Instagram or whatever. I’m sort of getting all of my platforms confused. Now, it’s an influencer an influencer or does the platform really matter?
Christopher Penn
That’s a great question. And the answer is absolutely the platform matters because people use each platform in a different context. Instagram when you think about is really a quick serve platform right? You pop on Instagram you scroll through a few things this is one of the reasons why Instagram TV has been struggling so much together because that’s not how people use the thing fate Instagram is where you go to basically feel bad about yourself. Facebook is where you go where to make to have other people make you all feel bad together because you’re all arguing about politics 99% of the time YouTube is where you go to sit down and spend some time kill some time falling down what it called YouTube holes right so you click on one video and the next thing you know you’ve watched five seasons voice
Unknown
but
Christopher Penn
but it’s a very different usage it’s a lot like next flicks and a lot of ways you know you you sit down and watch one show next thing you know you binge watch the entire season of House of Cards you know like what the hell just happened last 12 hours and so understanding how people use these platforms how the consumers these platforms should dictate your marketing and dictate your influencer Do you one of the things that drives me up a wall is what a I’ve always marketing oh you have to have short content short content only you know people only want snack size content that’s excrement Totoro as the Spanish would say. Because there would be no such thing as binge watching. If people only watch short content. So your content has to be good. One of the things that brands don’t do and again, it goes back to planning and budgeting is they don’t plan for what great content they’re going to make. And YouTube is one of the most challenging platforms because there’s literally infinite amount of things customers could be watching. When you work with an influencer, the influence you in the influencer, half of your brands have to be aligned, your video has to be aligned and the best influence of videos are the ones in which the the there’s value being provided the influencer is using the thing or doing something with the thing or talk about how the thing makes things better and the viewer can go Oh, I totally need this thing as opposed to oh god you know Cass is showing yet another you know the pharmaceutical product right there’s that you have to have that greatness of the content has to be just as good as the influencer and people don’t do that
Katie Robbert
so um I’ll be the first to admit I have not kept up on who the YouTube personalities are so you just mentioned one
chaos I think you said so
I guess my question is if someone wants to hire a YouTube influencer where do they even start like what is so we know that they need to create a plan but what is the best way in a nutshell for someone to start to figure out who would be a good influencer YouTube influencer match for that?
Christopher Penn
Well, you said it earlier in that planning of what are the goals what kind of goals you want. So if you want a big mouth and you you want awareness, right, so you’re aiming for awareness you’re aiming for reach you then use it look for influencers, who frankly have really big audiences, but their content is targeted towards what you talk about, right? So I like trust insights would not hire Kardashian, right? If we were going to hire somebody, we won’t hire somebody like Malcolm Gladwell, someone who is provides thought leadership has a big platform but it’s a business focus platform.
So that’s one avenue. The Second Avenue would be if you want to build that brand authority then you look for engagement who are the the the YouTube influencers, the people who got good channels with decent reach but really very high engagement, lots of comments lots of shares, lots of embeds all these things that say yep this person’s gets their audience to do stuff and that’s who we’d want so we’d want somebody who’s like hey I want you to check out our 2019 key marketing trends forecast paper available trust inside a slash 20 1920 trends
but that’s that’s exactly that’s that’s what we you you want if you want you care about engagement YouTube is a lot about brand in the sense of your site TV you want those repetitions and third again going back to planning you don’t want to do this alone you want if you’re going to do an influencer you also want to have an ad strategy you also have an own strategy of your own content you got to do the three in concert and if people don’t think about and plan ahead to make all the efforts synchronous you waste a lot of money
Katie Robbert
so I think that sort of the takeaway for this episode of any or insights is yeah influencers a great but if you don’t have a plan then stop what you’re doing and figure out how an influencer helps you move your goals forward if you don’t know that information don’t start hiring influencers because you’re going to waste your money and you’re going to get bad metrics
Christopher Penn
exactly and so your steps are set goals set a plan run your project families to figure out when you supposed to be doing stuff and all we then go start looking for influencers
Katie Robbert
and if you need help with any of that then let us know we’re always happy to help you put a plan together for your influencer strategy.
Christopher Penn
That’s right. In fact, we’ve got a great new place for you to check that out. If you go to trust insights AI slash analytics for marketers. We’ve got a Facebook group set up you can drop in ask questions about this episode asked questions about analytics in general, and it will be happy to have a discussion. So until next time, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and on our newsletter and visits in the Facebook group and we’ll talk to you soon. Take care.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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