I’ll be the first to admit I’ve enjoyed a fair few evenings on a YouTube binge session. Autoplay, tantalising thumbnails, coupled with infinite content - it’s easy to let yourself go. We all have. It’s okay.
But YouTube is more than an endless well of novel entertainment. Like any platform with an audience, YouTube doubles as an incredibly powerful marketing tool. I would say it’s one of the most cost effective channels to reach New Zealand audiences in 2021.
If you haven’t yet, here are four reasons why you should consider adding YouTube to your marketing mix in 2021.
YouTube has 87% penetration in the NZ market
It’s no secret that YouTube is popular. YouTube is New Zealand’s #1 social media platform, and our second-favourite website (behind Google.com). 87% of New Zealanders are using YouTube each month - more than Facebook (83%) and Instagram (57%).
With 3.92 million kiwis visiting YouTube every month, watching 30 minutes per day, it’s an excellent opportunity to get your brand in front of anyone and everyone.
Video & TV assets can be repurposed on YouTube
You may have existing 15 or 30 second video assets created for TVC. In addition to sharing these on social media, they can also be used across YouTube to get extra mileage from your video.
We note that the nature of YouTube ad placements does differ from other digital inventory across social media. YouTube offers non-skippable 6 and 15 second ad formats which essentially “brickwall” content. This means users have to watch the entirety of your ad in order to view their video.
In contrast, other digital placements - such as display or video ads on social media - sits between content. Users navigating other social media such as Facebook and Instagram are generally able to scroll past ads and move directly to their content with relative ease.
Excellent targeting options
YouTube falls within the suite of Google advertising. Naturally, YouTube enjoys the same powerful targeting options as seen in Google Ads.
In addition to your standard interest and contextual targeting options, a key competitive advantage of YouTube targeting is the ability to manually select specific channels and videos you’d like your ads to appear on.
YouTube is cheap in New Zealand right now
Broadly speaking, New Zealand’s digital industry is generally a few years behind Australia and the US. While we do love to whinge about it, in this scenario, I would argue it actually works in our favour.
Compared to other Google-owned platforms such as Search and Display, the YouTube space today is extremely cheap. While there is a low barrier to entry to other digital advertising such as Google Search or Facebook Ads, not all businesses have video assets
This leads to relatively low competition today. With a $1,000 investment, you could expect to drive around 70,000 ad impressions and reach over 40,000 users.