Do Long Ads Work?

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We often get asked, how long should my YouTube ad be? Truthfully, YouTube is such a diverse platform that some ads that are 4 or 5 minutes in length can be very effective, especially when you’re hitting the right audience.

What works best on YouTube is experimenting with not only the audiences that will see your ads, but also the content that they will most connect with.

The above Air Canada ad was about 1:30 in length and was one of the most watched ads by Canadians in 2019 (both organically and through ads). Likely this ad content would connect with audiences that fall into a multitude of categories, such as:

In Market – Air Travel > Travel By Class

Affinity – Travel Buffs

Interests – TV Comedies

We work well with creative marketing teams to provide insights to not only connect with the right audiences but also helping use data to drive creative experimentation to better reach new customers.

Want more information on this and other YouTube strategies?

Hire A Marketing Agency Or A Manager?

Hiring a digital marketing agency, especially for a small or mid-sized business can make more economical sense than to hire a full-time manager. In this article, I want to go over a few reasons why we believe this is a better course for a small business to take.

If you are like many companies trying to find the best way to market yourself and get new leads or sales online it can be a very intimidating area. Do we need a social media strategy? Can people even find us on Google? Is our webpage mobile friendly? How many people visit our web page? Should I still be advertising in the “phone book”?

These are all questions that businesses are asking every day. Unfortunately, these types of skills and expertise aren’t taught in many classes and finding someone that can fulfill this role for a company is difficult to find. We know this because we are always searching for the right talent as well.

Manager Salary Vs Agency Cost

The median salary for a digital marketing manager in Calgary is approximately $92,000 per year. Many of these positions are asking for experience and expertise in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google AdWords (SEM), Social Media, website optimization and platform specialization as well as website analytics. This is a lot of areas for one specific person to specialize in.

A digital marketing agency will typically have a number of people who specialize in each expertise. Quite often you can hire an agency to manage many if not all of these areas at a fixed monthly cost for their services. To hire an agency to handle these areas may cost between $2,500 to $3,000 per month.

At the higher end of the scale, you’re looking at a gross salary cost of over $7,000 per month versus $3,000 to hire an agency. That is a significantly lower annual and monthly cost. On top of that, an agency doesn’t need 3 weeks vacation a year, will never take a sick day and doesn’t require you to cover benefits like dental.

Marketing Manager

$92,0000

Agency Cost

$36,0000

Salary Source: LinkedIn

Agency Expertise

Changes in digital marketing happen quickly and often. Some are subtle changes while others can be industry changing. How many marketing managers know that Google made changes earlier this year that punishes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly? Or that consumer behavior has changed in that if for every one second it takes for a website to load on mobile 20% of traffic will simply leave?

Digital marketing managers that work for your company are great at knowing your product, service, and company inside and out. After all, they work there every day. However, the bias is to stay more on top of what’s going on at the company and not necessarily what is going on outside the company in terms of the digital marketing world. Simply trying to keep up with the many changes in the industry can be a full-time job in and of itself.

A digital marketing agency lives in that space. When new developments happen a good agency can react quickly to adjust campaigns and take advantage of competitors that don’t. Again, they are typically a team of specialized resources that understand the importance of how to get the message of the client out to the right people at the right time.

Why Not Interview Us?

If you’ve been struggling with your digital marketing strategy, have had a rough time trying to find a good digital marketing manager or are having trouble justifying the salary cost of hiring a good one, please reach out to us and we’ll be happy to talk with you. We have many clients where we play an important part of their marketing success but don’t actually have a cubicle or office with them.

The interview process should be fairly straight forward. We want you to interview us about our skills and expertise and you’ll likely find that the services we provide fill the digital marketing role you’re trying to fill within your own company.

To interview us, fill out the form and let us know what you’re hiring for.

YouTube Bumper Ad Campaign

YouTube - Bumper Ad Campaign

There has been a lot of exciting developments and innovations for advertising on the YouTube platform, one of which is bumper ads. Bumpers are six-second ads that are unskippable. They’re designed for and do particularly well on mobile devices, where the majority of YouTube content is viewed. Because they are short and unskippable they aren’t as intrusive as say a 15 or 30-second unskippable ad.

The challenge with a six-second ad is that it’s not a lot of time to have a call to action or explain a product or service, however, it is long enough to promote a feature or brand. Currently, it’s a bit like the wild west in that we’re all learning to be creative and memorable within six seconds!

The Challenge

So the challenge for us at Factor One was to try and boost awareness of our brand name and what we do within our own Calgary market as a digital marketing agency and a Google Partner that specializes in advertising on the Google platform. Display Ads are an economical and effective brand awareness tool, however, we wanted to see how much more effective YouTube bumper ads could be.

There are plenty of generic keyword search terms we do target with our search ads and they do well for us, however, searches for our brand name in our local market were not very high.

The Campaign

We created 10 bumper ads that we would run on YouTube for 3 months. In experimenting with the format we knew from other campaigns we ran for clients that music plays a big part in getting the attention of the person seeing the ad. We also knew humor works well on YouTube. Finally, we needed to highlight an issue or problem our audience might be experiencing so we came up with several humorous ways of highlighting them and ended each video by showing our brand name and service for the last 2 seconds.

For our targeting, we selected a very targeted audience profile of those who were in the market for our services. In addition, we monitored what time of the day our ads showed to maximize our bidding strategy for when our audience might be the most receptive to our message and then did time of day bid adjustments based on the data we got back.

Video Playlist

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