Using YouTube ads to drive repeat custom and build brand awareness

PPC Article

Any business that depends on repeat customers knows it's a constant struggle to keep them coming back again and again, whether it’s down to price, the quality of your offering or how slick your branding is, businesses need to be constantly re-engaging and incentivising their existing customers to increase customer lifetime value.

A crucial cog within this is keeping your brand front and centre in your customers minds, with your competitors relentlessly trying to poach new business the need to reinforce why consumers should keep coming back to you has never been more important.

With 2 Billion monthly users and 500 Million hours of video watched every day, YouTube’s reach cannot be understated. And because it's integrated into Google Ads it’s a perfect arena to cost effectively push your brand out too.

Remarketing to existing customers on YouTube

Using powerful remarketing techniques we can keep reaching your customers, by building a remarketing list in Google Analytics using first party data from your existing customers we can then pull this into Google Ads and target this audience alone within YouTube.

Choosing your creative

First things first though, the creative. Now more than ever, breaking through the noise is a big challenge for most brands and peoples tolerance for ads is very low, for this reason your creatives should be concise, snappy and get your point within the first 5 seconds.

Because you’ll be reaching existing customers only, this should be a message either with an incentive to buy again or simply reminding them how your product or service adds real value to their lives, or helps them solve a particular problem better than anyone else.

Setting up a YouTube remarketing campaign

Whilst you're building your creatives make sure you have a remarketing audience built within Google Analytics for your existing customers, this can then build data if you don’t have one already.

In Google Ads, you can then create a video campaign and using the targeting options select only your remarketing audience for existing customers, be sure to turn off ‘optimised targeting’ which will expand your audience outside of your existing customers which we don’t want for this approach.

Upload your video into YouTube and you’ll be able to search for it at the campaign build process and use this as your ad, then hit that live button and you’re good to go.

How We’ve Used This Approach

For Discount Supplements, their customers come back on an almost monthly basis for their supplement stacks so it was crucial we kept them engaged with the brand considering how ferociously competitive the industry is.

They have built a loyal following for many years now so pushing new brand releases and developments through YouTube formed a fundamental part of their retention strategy to reduce churn rate.

Between May and July 2021 we have seen some fantastic results through Google Ads new attribution data capturing click & view assisted sales:

Spend: £414.90
Sales: 309
Cost Per Sale: £1.34
Revenue: £14,408.30

Summary

For driving customer loyalty and increasing your customer lifetime value YouTube should form an essential part of your digital retention strategy, your brand is one of your most valuable assets, showcase it to your customers on a regular basis.