According to a recent study, 66% of beauty product buyers say YouTube influenced their purchases by helping them visualise how products fit into their lives. By engaging consumers around their passions and interests, content clearly influences purchase. But the challenge is there’s a lot of content out there for audiences to choose from. YouTube’s Derek Scobie offers advice and actions for beauty brands looking to make their content stand out from the crowd. 
Content influences purchase decisions, but getting your content in front of people can seem like a challenge. The truth is that 50% of the videos on YouTube from the top 100 global brands have average total video views of less than 1,000. So what do brands need to do to make great content famous?
First, remember that passionate and highly engaged communities form around hugely diverse genres, ranging from mainstream to niche. Identify consumer passion points and then think about where your brand can offer uniquely valuable content.
The next task is to create content strategies that stick. A brand can meet different consumer needs with hero, hub and help content. Hero content is designed to entertain and inspire with emotional storytelling. It’s often promoted through advertising. Hub content is regularly updated to provide a valuable and engaging destination for fans. This gets audiences returning, subscribing, liking and following. Finally, help content educates by answering questions.
With these three areas populated with compelling content, a brand is in position to grow and sustain a valuable audience. The aim is to own the passion by engaging users in many different ways.
The work’s not over at that point of course. The key to winning is knowing what success looks like and understanding what actually drives brand value. There are more than 50 metrics in YouTube analytics, but not all of them will be important for you and your brand’s objectives. Decide on objectives first, then identify exactly which metrics can be mapped to them. Measure according to the metrics that matter to your goals.
Different types of content need different distribution channels, so a strong distribution strategy is essential. Hero content deserves massive orchestration, but offers a great opportunity to reach new, light or lapsing consumers. You might consider partnering with collaborators to have multiple pieces of content here. Hub formats connect with core audiences. Use targeted advertising to drive traffic to episodic content, and give people a reason to come back again and again. To answer the questions your audience is asking, produce help videos. Understand users’ needs by examining search and social insights. Look to data – this creates stimulus and scale for help content.
Finally, to succeed it’s critical to shift the emphasis from the creative to the planning. Leverage existing planning skills to take out the guesswork. Start with a goal, then build a plan to get there. Based on social footprint and fans, you have some degree of brand organic reach, which can be measured. If you work with an influencer or network, they may also deliver organic reach – so measure that, too. Add those two together, and whatever is left is your paid promotion plan. Once you’ve allocated budget to paid promotion, squeeze more out of every investment through real-time campaign management. Integrated media planning is vital to igniting viewership, while continual optimisation will enable you to hit your goals.
