How To Quickly Make Cost-Effective YouTube Video Ads to Promote Events
YouTube is an incredibly powerful event marketing channel that event promoters are starting to pay more attention to. At myZone, we spent some time testing out a variety of ways to promote events via YouTube and found remarketing to existing customers via pre-roll ads to be one of the most powerful, yet most overlooked, event marketing techniques.
Creating professional YouTube video advertisements can be a very time consuming and expensive task, especially if you’ve never made one before. A 60 second teaser can cost you thousands of dollars if you choose to work with an agency, and if you’re wanting to create a 2-3 minute video with professional voice-overs and custom animations you can expect to spend anywhere between $3000 to $5000. Now, if you’re planning a small event at a local nightclub, it’s not hard to see why this just isn’t a financially feasible event marketing tool.
But fear not; in true myZone fashion we’ve worked overtime to figure out the perfect way to get the power of Youtube remarketing at your fingertips, regardless of how deep your pockets are. Here’s how:
Creating Your YouTube Video Advertisement
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Script: Write your own script in a Google Doc that includes exactly what you want to be said and/or animated in the movie. Add comments to the script with instructions for the videographer that explain exactly what imagery should accompany each phrase. We recommend you save 2 scripts; one to use for your voice-overs, and the other as an instruction manual for the videographer.
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Voice-overs: Instead of using a local studio to create your voice overs, we recommend you use www.VoiceBunny.com, a super cheap and fast online recording service. We use this to create 11-20 second YouTube video advertisements for new promotions, and they cost less than $250. And to top it off, you can save yourself 25% off your first first with this special promo code: http://voicebunny.com/?gift=voi-mar-acq-ema-wom. The only downside is that making edits to a recording will cost you, so make sure your scripts are perfect! Please note: we do not make a cent from this referral. We are being completely unbiased here.
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Stock Audio: Be sure you get clearance from the agencies you are working with so you have permission to use their tracks in this video. If you are not careful here, you can have your video banned from YouTube and all your efforts will be wasted. For events that do not feature performing artists, or if you can’t get permission to use an artist’s music, use stock audio sites like http://audiojungle.net/ to get generic music clips to run in the background.
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Related Media: Get all your high-resolution graphics, flyers, logos, artist pictures, video clips, stock photography etc. and upload them to Dropbox or a Google Drive. Label all elements clearly and have them referenced within your script where you’d like things to appear. Be sure to include the URL to the location of your media within the script that you’ve prepared for your videographer, and ensure they have access to download all files.
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Videographer: If you don’t have a good contact to work with, let us know and we can refer you to one of ours. We often find outsourcing this kind of work offshore can save you quite a bit of money, but if you are able to find a talented local videographer hungry for business, that can work as well.
Note: Quotes for this kind of work can vary widely, so make sure you shop around to find a price that you’re happy with. A good way to reduce costs here is to do as much work for the videographer as possible. This includes preparing scripts and media files, and attaching voice-overs. Anything that you can do without the help of the videographer, make sure you do it to save yourself those hard earned dollars!
This entire process can be done between seven to ten days if you really know how to hustle. We recommend using task management software like Asana.com or Basecamp to keep all moving pieces nicely organized.
YouTube Remarketing Using Pre-Roll Advertisments
These video ads are the ones that annoyingly appear while you are waiting for a Youtube video to load. Most of the time you’ll be shown the first 5 seconds of the video before getting the ability to skip the ad. Rest assured, you only pay for ads that were not skipped within a few seconds after the option appears (we found that we weren’t paying for 90% of the video impressions we were getting via Youtube remarketing). That being said, make sure you get all your branding and important messages out in the first 5 seconds to maximize your results.
Once your ad is ready to go, we recommend you use the remarketing data from your own website and/or clubZone.com to specifically target your audience (consider age, interestes, location, etc). If you do not use this kind of targeting, this kind of event marketing strategy can be quite expensive and yield little results.
Setting Your Event Marketing Budget
You will be charged somewhere between 10 to 30 cents per view. We recommend you adjust your budget to roughly 15 cents per view and monitor the kind of exposure you get. Make sure to test higher and lower budgets, monitor the results, and find that sweet spot that best suits you.
Conversion Tracking Rates
Be sure you’re tracking your eCommerce conversion rates on the check-out/thank you pages of your ticketing provider. If you are using ticketZone.com, send your Google Adwords conversion tags to us and we’ll insert them on the right pages for you.
Need a Hand?
This is article serves as a basic outline on how to quickly create a professional video, and get the most value from YouTube pre-roll advertising. Getting your video watched by thousands of your customers is a very effective way to build hype around your event and we highly recommend you give it a shot.
If you want us to take of any parts of these services for you, please let us know by contacting us via info@myzone.com. Remember, time is money, and if you are short on time, outsourcing this whole process to myZone can let you focus on other parts of your event while reaping the benefits of this incredible powerful event marketing strategy!