YouTube Influencers: The new Celebrity Endorsement
The advertising world is changing with consumers consuming more and more media including being attacked by advertisements on every platform they use. The minute a consumer knows they are being sold to, they are a lost cause. Consumers today want honestly and authenticity. They want to believe and trust in the brands they are buying from. The best way to gain a customer’s trust is through someone they trust like the influencers they watch on YouTube.
An influencer is defined as someone with a large social media and internet following (“What is Influencer Marketing?”, 2019). People follow influencers for entertainment, tutorials, travel suggestions, product reviews, and so on. Influencers build a strong bond with their audiences through being honest, relatable, and entertaining. On YouTube, influencers interact with their audiences, especially millennials, on a personal level becoming role models and experts in their niches (Barker, 2018). Influencer’s audiences are loyal and impressionable by the people they follow.
The most common and popular influencers focus on Instagram and YouTube. There are almost three times as many influencers on Instagram compared to YouTube, with YouTube’s conversion rate “five times higher than traditional pre-roll and mid-roll ad conversion rates” (Hoos, 2019). YouTube influencers stand out compared to Instagram influencers who get lost in the sea of people posting, making an influencer campaign on YouTube more lucrative.
An example of a brand who utilized an influencer to market their product is Jergens. They worked with influencer, Jess Conte, to make a video using their Natural Glow self-tanning moose. Jess Conte regularly uses self-tanner and has previously talked about it on her YouTube channel, and has received questions about how she self-tans from her subscribers. This fact means her audience is interested in self-tanning and would be open to suggestions from an influencer they love and trust. In the video, Jess Conte outlines the steps to use the product while she applies it to her skin in the narrative of spending the day outside and going to the beach.
The first step in a YouTube influencer campaign is finding the right influencer for you brand. The perfect influencer for your brand goes beyond their number of subscribers and even their number of likes and comments. The influencer’s brand needs to align with your brand (Barker, 2018). When your brand is relevant to the influencer and their audience you generate trust and interest in your brand, but if you brand doesn’t fit into the viewer’s interests it will create animosity.
The next step in your campaign is to figure out what type of video to create. YouTube campaigns aren’t limited by word count or video length, but allow for more creativity. An interesting YouTube video includes a narrative that shows how your product solves one of the viewers problems.
Some types of YouTube videos are:
Product Reviews and Testimonials
Storytelling for You Brand
Tutorials, Demos and How-to Videos
(Barker, 2018)
The final step in a successful influencer marketing campaign is releasing control as the advertiser. The best content created by an influencer for your brand is creative, original, and doesn’t sound like an advertisement. In influencer marketing, your job as an advertiser is to create balance by providing the influencer with a detailed creative brief to follow and the freedom to think outside the box (Waller, 2020).
Influencers have the ability “to localize a concept across the globe or tap into the mindset of a diverse range of communities and cultures” in their brand marketing (Waller, 2020).
Through creative content generated by influencers for your brand, you can generate trust and work towards building a long relationship with your target audience just like YouTube influencers. YouTube influencer marketing campaigns create unique advertisements that engage the younger generation of consumers like Jergens with Jess Conte. Influencer endorsements go a step farther than celebrity endorsements because influencers are more relatable, thus more trustworthy. Take advantage of the creative freedom of YouTube and take your relationship with your customers to the next level with an influencer campaign.
References:
Barker, S. B. S. (2018, December 20). How to Work with YouTube Influencers to Grow Your Business. Retrieved from https://www.singlegrain.com/influencer-marketing/how-to-work-with-youtube-influencers-to-grow-your-business/
Hoos, B. (2019, December 11). Uncovering The True Value Of Influencer Marketing On YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2019/12/11/uncovering-the-true-value-of-influencer-marketing-on-youtube/#e00b44235728
Waller, N. (2020, January 2). 5 ways influencer marketing will evolve in 2020. Retrieved from https://adage.com/article/opinion/5-ways-influencer-marketing-will-evolve-2020/2224401
What is Influencer Marketing? An in Depth Look at Marketing's Next Big Thing. (2019, September 12). Retrieved from https://influencermarketinghub.com/what-is-influencer-marketing/