Creating more effective video advertising starts with understanding where you are now. We've combined video metrics (views, sentiment, and comments) into a simple brand insights framework to help automotive marketers understand the landscape and how to up their YouTube game.
Before Australian car buyers head to a dealership, they head over to YouTube. In fact, 53% of car buyers watch auto videos on YouTube, and that number jumps to 75% of luxury auto buyers. Buyers watch YouTube videos to evaluate offers they’ve seen in auto ads, search for models, and watch/post reviews.
There are different ways your brand can evaluate how its YouTube content resonates with auto buyers. YouTube Analytics allows you to look at how individual videos perform and enables you to make data-driven decisions. We've also created a brand insights framework (using publicly available data) to analyse your brand's performance within the Australian automotive landscape. This can aid you into creating better content to connect with car buyers.
Each circle represents an individual YouTube video and is plotted on the chart based on sentiment (measured by likes and dislikes), view count, and the number of comments (the size of the circle) it received. You can see where videos cluster and the landscape as a whole. Best-performing videos like these ads from Lexus, Honda, and Subaru appear in the top right quadrant, Brand Advocates, where most brands will want to be.
Getting to the Brand Advocate quadrant
Think about the current videos you have on YouTube. Where would they fall on this grid? If you're not where you want to be, here are some thoughts on how you can move to another quadrant:
If you're in the Great Content quadrant, your content is well received, but you may not be reaching as many people as you could. To move to the top right quadrant, promoting your video with TrueView can help get your well-loved content in front of a much larger audience.
If you're in the Wide Coverage quadrant, a lot of people have seen your content, but sentiment is low. You might want to use techniques from the YouTube Creator Playbook and test different creatives to improve sentiment.
If you're in the Neutral quadrant, you may also want to test different creatives to see how you could improve sentiment. This is a good step to take before investing in getting your content in front of a larger audience.
If you're in Brand Advocates quadrant, keep up the good work! Try to pinpoint why sentiment and views are high to replicate your success in future creative work.
Success on YouTube can be measured in a number of different ways. What matters most for your brand or for each individual video can differ. For some videos, the goal may be high engagement with a select group of key targets. For others, you may be going for mass reach.
Get insights for your branding strategy
Seeing where your videos fit in this brand insights framework can also help you:
1. Test your creative before a big launch
If your team wants a quick read on a new creative, you can put it on YouTube to see if it resonates. You can see if the ads are getting liked, shared, and commented on and use that to inform which creative will get pushed to the masses.
Tess Kelly, digital marketing manager at Subaru Australia said, "We knew we had a really great piece of content within hours of it being posted—the sentiment, number of views, and shares were all really positive. Our web traffic, branded Outback searches, and enquiry for the model skyrocketed within the first few days of being online. The initial online results made it really easy for us to continue to invest in digital environments like YouTube."
You can also use Brand Lift surveys to see if the creative is driving brand recall and/or incremental searches.
2. Influence future creative development
When you gain insight into which ads are performing well and outpacing the others, you can develop better-informed creatives. Reactions to things like tone and humour can be difficult to predict when you're developing new creative. You can use the quadrant framework to analyse which kinds of messages and approaches seem to resonate with YouTube audiences to take some of the guesswork out of future creative.
3. See how you fit into your competitor set
The static view above shows a high-level view of the automotive industry and can help you get insight into how your videos stack up against your competitors' videos.
Better auto videos can delight online buyers
Brands across Australia are finding success on YouTube as they better understand the platform and why people are spending more and more time on it. Great videos, like the ones by Lexus, Honda, and Subaru, hit the sweet spot of delighting viewers and getting a brand message to large numbers of people. See where your brand fits among the automotive landscape, understand your goals, and start taking steps today to get to where you want to be.
