Success on YouTube: These Four Brands are Doing It Right

The opportunities are huge: The Top 100 brands have a total of 40 billion views, a YoY increase of 85%.¹

Let’s look at a few success stories from the past few months that demystify the process of creating a strong YouTube presence: A cosmetics company launching its latest eye makeup palette, a men’s grooming brand harkening to the history of shaving and online retailers using helpful how-tos to draw in viewers.

Below, I’ll share some easy techniques you can leverage. Our new gallery of YouTube success stories from 2015 showcases even more brands that have moved the needle with great video content.

Create the Kind of Content Your Audience is Already Watching

Maybelline New York’s “Go Nude” campaign leveraged both YouTube creators and the greater YouTube beauty community to launch a new product. Working with 13 prominent beauty vloggers, Maybelline New York posted audience-friendly how-to videos on its YouTube channel. The brand was able to tap into the YouTube ecosystem and drive product awareness in an authentic way.

To make sure this content was seen by the right people, the brand used YouTube’s built-in tools and services such as securing a YouTube Masthead takeover for a massive single-day awareness boost. It coupled that takeover with TrueView ads to drive opt-in views for its longer pieces of content in addition to using Google Preferred to place 15-second spots in front of popular YouTube videos. By combining quality YouTube content with the power of YouTube’s promotion tools, Maybelline New York garnered 140M impressions and 1.46M clicks via the YouTube Masthead takeover, 15M impressions via Google Preferred, and a 2.4X to 2.9X lift in brand and messaging awareness.

YouTube Targeting Connects You to Your Consumer

P&G’s Gillette BODY found success through creative video content aimed at millennial men. Knowing that YouTube reaches more millennial men than any cable network in the U.S.,² Gillette BODY created a digital and mobile-focused campaign anchored by its “100 Years of Hair” video. With the help of YouTube, the video racked up 13.5M views and 54M impressions.

By identifying and optimizing against top-performing geographics and demographics, the campaign also delivered more than 500K clicks-to-buy and surpassed sales expectations by up to 4X across seven international markets. Furthermore, Gillette searches grew by 211%, and clicks grew by 111% during the campaign, the biggest increase ever for the brand.

Drive Sales with YouTube’s Built-In e-Commerce Tools

Wayfair and Sephora have both built robust online offerings in the home goods and beauty sectors, respectively. And both brands wanted to connect with consumers in a more intimate way to create brand lift and loyalty while driving conversions and sales. YouTube’s latest feature, TrueView for shopping, helped the retailers succeed by offering a true direct-response layer for their YouTube campaigns.

TrueView for shopping lets viewers click on products in YouTube videos for easy online purchasing. By incorporating this e-commerce experience into its YouTube videos, Wayfair saw a 3X bump in revenue performance compared to similar campaigns while Sephora saw an 80% lift in consideration and a 54% lift in ad recall. Coupling TrueView for shopping with helpful, product-specific videos that spoke to audience interests, Wayfair and Sephora gave viewers the exact content that was most likely to help them build a relationship.

These are just a few of the brands and stories you’ll find on our Video Insights page.

1 Top 100 Brands defined by Interbrand’s Best Global Brands, 2014; Top 100 Brands Pixability research, all time global data (2005–2015).
² Nielsen study (U.S.), December 2013–February 2015.

The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage/MyersBizNet management or associated bloggers.