Black Friday video campaigns: YouTube strategies and creatives

Black Friday continues to maintain its position as one of the most important seasonal events in our country. as in the main European markets. Therefore, you need to have your Google Ads campaigns ready for this period. 

YouTube consumption is increasing annually and this year is no exception! In fact, this channel currently accumulates the highest share among the 18-44 year-old population, surpassing some of the major media groups. Beauty, fashion, home and electronics are some of the categories that experience the highest growth in views during peak seasons. 

Therefore, in order to creating a comprehensive strategy is becoming more and more important not to neglect video campaigns In this post we will show you everything you need to achieve the greatest success in your campaigns! From tips for your creatives to the strategy to follow to succeed.

Before you start, if you want to become a YouTube expert, you can complement these readings with previous posts by my SEM colleagues in which you will find more information on the different types of campaigns y good practices to be applied. 

CREATIVITIES: THE MUST-HAVES

What do we need before we start working on our Google Ads account for this type of campaign? The raw material, i.e. a video. What is the main problem we face on many occasions? We don't just need any video, but we need "the video".. 

That video will become part of our brand image and will leave a mark in the consumer's mind. That footprint has to be positive, so our creativity has to be good. 

We often think that to be creative we need a stratospheric budget and, although this statement may be true, sometimes simple things can also work well. 

The following are a series of tips to ensure that your creativities do not go unnoticed.

• Show your brand at the beginning of the video or along this one: it is important that whoever is watching us knows who we are. 
• Short and concise messageIt is always preferable to convey a few good messages rather than many bad ones to avoid possible confusion.
• Boost your CTA (Call to action)Tell users exactly what they want you to do after viewing your ad.
• Indicate your discount or offer in the first few seconds of the videoSelect the right message at the beginning of the video and place your product or service in the center. In the specific case of Black Friday, this is going to be one of the key points, as consumers are becoming more and more price sensitive.
• Capture users' attention, surprise them!Create a dynamic montage, create an eye-catching message, take advantage of the beginning of the video, add an energetic voiceover, etc.

GOOGLE ADS TOOLS FOR OUR CREATIVITIES

However, if we do not have a creative team or the possibility for the client to generate a video, we have an alternative! Since just a few months ago, all Google Ads accounts have been equipped with a new tool that we had already seen as a beta version in the past and that is finally available to everyone: YouTube Video Builder. 

Although the ideal would be to have a fully customized creativity and based on the objectives of our brand, it is a way to get out of the way if we have no other choice. Video Builder offers a series of templates for different formats, on which we can work. It offers the following options depending on the template we use: 

• Modify the main and secondary color
• Add logos and images 
• Incorporate text
• Modify the font
• Add royalty-free music from YouTube library

Also, through the Google Ads resource library, we have two other options that can be very useful: Add a voice-over and trim a video.

ADD A VOICE-OVER FROM THE RESOURCE LIBRARY

On the one hand, we can add a voice-over to both videos uploaded to YouTube (and that could have been performed on the client side), as videos that we have created with the tool described in the previous point. As we said in the first part of the post, the video's voice-over is very important, since it is an incentive to pay attention.

Likewise, from a study prepared by Googleit has been proven that audio elements such as music, sound effects and voice-over contribute significantly to the best results..

To access this functionality, go to tools and settings > shared library > resource library > + > video > add voice-over. 

Once you get here and after adding your video, you can select the language for the voice, whether you prefer it to be more male or female, the volume, the start time, the speed and finally, the most important thing; the message. 

TRIM A VIDEO FROM THE RESOURCE LIBRARY

The last option that the resource library gives us is to trim our videos. Why do we want to do this, you may ask, it's very simple! Depending on the type of ad we want to work with in our campaigns, it will have different duration requirements. In the case of bumper ads, their duration has to be a maximum of 6 seconds, so this functionality can be very useful in case we want to incorporate this format to our campaigns. 

Ahead of Black Friday, it is essential to be able to count on this type of advertisements, since these are short videos, which cannot be skipped and which condense the necessary information in a short period of time. 

YOUTUBE STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS THIS BLACK FRIDAY

Now that we know the key points to elaborate a creative, let's move on to the strategy to carry out in our campaigns, which is just as important as having a good video. 

Depending on the budget, the possibilities we have and the vertical we are targeting, there will be a more appropriate strategy to achieve our objectives. However, there are thousands of contexts and types of situations, we will propose a generic strategy, which you can apply with the appropriate changes to your accounts.. 

Likewise, taking into account the increase in CPCs that we have been experiencing for some time now and the high costs that we currently have, we believe that the best thing to do is to focus on actions and generating conversions, which is why we will the strategy we propose is focused mainly on achieving sales.

In this sense, we are going to differentiate the strategy in two parts so that we have a differentiated approach the weeks before black friday from the black friday week itself.  

YOUTUBE STRATEGY PRE BLACK FRIDAY

During the first weeks of November, our main purpose will be to create branding, generate expectation and make some "noise". This is the time to launch videos with generic messages, very branding to create image. Therefore, this will be the time to use videos that can be longer. 

That said, the most appropriate YouTube campaign objective would be the following: "Coverage and brand awareness" to reach a large number of users and increase awareness. The type of campaign, which we will select, will be "video" and the sub-type of campaign we will choose will be "video coverage campaign". Once we have selected this section, the format type to be selected is "in-stream non-skippable".. 

This type of advertisement has a maximum duration of 15 seconds and the entire ad is shown without the possibility of being skipped.which is more than ideal so that users can see the entire ad. As this is a brand awareness objective, the bidding strategy is CPM target, so we will pay per impressions. 

A good practice to take into consideration when setting up the campaign is to limit the frequency of ad impressions to avoid saturating the user. 

On the other hand, with respect to the audiences we will target, we recommend creating a group of ads for each "type" of audience we add so that they can be grouped and we can, a posteriori and according to their performance, modify the CPM of each group based on their performance. Therefore, here are some ideas about possible audiences:

• Audiences similar to our database or to our database of buyers for the month of November of the previous year or other strong seasonalities. We will be able to choose one option or the other depending on whether we have a large or small database, since we need a minimum of 1,000 Googlelisted users in these lists. It is also a good time to carry out campaigns to feed our database. 
• Like-minded audiencesWe will select those that make the most sense based on our vertical. For example: if we have a clothing and accessories ecommerce, we can select audiences who are fashion lovers.
• Audiences in the market or with purchase intentionAs in the previous point, we will choose audiences that are currently actively searching for our products and have the intention to buy based on our vertical. 
• Customized hearingsOnce we have identified our competitors, we can create, from the audience manager, our own proposal with users who have visited our competitors' pages, adding their URLs.
• Channel segmentationAnother option is to target specific YouTube channels where we know that our ad can work because of the type of content they publish or their target.

Once we have our campaign perfectly configured, the only thing left to do is to optimize it as we see data and, once Black Friday week begins, pause it and continue with the second part of the strategy. 

YOUTUBE STRATEGY DURING BLACK FRIDAY WEEK

With the start of Black Friday week (November 21), we will be launching our second phase of our YouTube strategy.

Since we have generated brand image in the previous weeks, it is time to remind our users. This week we will send shorter, more dynamic and, above all, more effective messages, we will let you know that we are doing black friday and our best discounts or promotions.. 

Likewise, the type of ads we will create for these dates will be much shorter and with concise messages. To this end, we can use the following type of video format: non-skippable in-stream ads (they can be skipped after 5 seconds, so at the beginning of the ad we will transmit the most important part), bumpers ads (total duration of the video 6 seconds) or shorts (about which we will dedicate a complete section later since they are YouTube's most recent novelty).  

For announcements of bumper formatIn this case, we will be able to use the campaign objective of coverage and brand awareness and for the non-skippable in-stream adsIn this case, we will use the sales campaign objective. These two ad formats, as we mentioned in the previous paragraphs, are mainly focused on boosting sales. A good practice for this type of ad is to activate in the campaign configuration the option to "use the Merchant Center feed", so that our products appear below the ad with the link to our web page. 

In this second part, we will focus primarily on remarketing audiences. that we have created in Analytics (to be able to impact users from all channels), so the type of audiences we suggest for this phase are the following:

• Audiences of our database
• Audiences with recurring users who frequently visit our website.
• Audiences of all users of our website
• Audiences of abandoned carts: we can try to impact on more or less short lists, since it is likely that in the days before Black Friday, many users have saved products in their cart as "favorites". 

As in the previous point, we will review the performance of the campaigns on a daily basis to make adjustments accordingly.

We also believe that this is a good time to remember that we can also upload our videos to Display and Performance Max campaigns.. 

YOUTUBE SHORTS

Finally, we bring you the YouTube's latest news: The Shorts. Until relatively recently, on YouTube, the format we were used to was horizontal and even medium/long videos. However, with the rise of Tik Tok and, later, of reels (its equivalent on Instagram), we are becoming more and more accustomed to the vertical format and, mainly, to short videos. YouTube has been the latest to jump on the bandwagon to this format. These deserve a mention in this post, since they can be interesting to use during the week of Black Friday due to their dynamism and easy consumption thanks to their short duration. 

YouTube Shorts are an experience mainly intended for mobile devices, in vertical and full-screen format and lasting 60 seconds or less. They are built mainly to generate engagement on the app of this social network. 

In order to advertise in this new space, there are two types of YouTube campaigns that we can create: app campaigns and YouTube action campaigns (skippable in-stream or in-feed format). They are also currently starting to be tested in discovery, but have not yet been launched. 

Finally, we add some of the following tips for YouTube Shorts ads:

• Replicates the type of content that is made organically. to avoid generating rejection among users by making it too obvious that it is an advertisement. Ideally, it should invite continued viewing.
• Captures the user's attention at the beginningwith unique editing, using popular audio, or employing eye-catching visuals
• The message must be clear and concise. Also, add titles, descriptions and hashtags.
• Go to your video to be a loop (Loop)The video starts and ends in the same way, so that users can watch it several times without almost noticing it.
• Join the trendsto increase your chances of being seen and discovered (so apply this to your organic content in shorts as well), join the trends of the moment.

Now that with all this information you've got almost a master's degree, it's time to apply it along with the rest of the Black Friday strategies and start reaping the rewards!