The world is more visual-centric than ever; video has become central to the future of content marketing. Whether you want to build your brand image, increase its exposure, or even drive up sales, a YouTube channel can be a great medium to help you do so.
Forty six percent of millennials use YouTube more often than they did the last year. Fifty nine percent of Gen Z has followed suit. What’s more, people are responding more and more to YouTube influencers and the affiliate links that they post on their channels.
Keeping all this in mind, let’s assess how fruitful YouTube affiliate marketing can be for your business.
What is YouTube affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a way to advertise your product/brand by piggybacking of videos that that content creators make. These creators make YouTube videos and placing affiliate links in them, for example in the annotations or the description.
Most popular YouTubers add the link in the description because annotations can be irritating when they pop up on a video. If you’ve hired an influencer to market your affiliate link, it’s probably in your best interest to give them guidelines about how you want it posted. However, either way can redirect traffic to your landing page.
What are the benefits?
Uploading a video has barely any costs associated with it. There’s no need for budget-breaking expensive equipment; a good smartphone can pretty much do the trick. This means that you don’t have to pay influencers anything apart from the commission they get on every affiliate link.
YouTube is a big site, and has an even bigger audience. It has the potential to transform the impact of outreach tenfold. It also has no other competitors, which means that there’s a high concentration of users on it.
Videos are personalized, build a lot of trust with your target audience. Depending on the format of the video the influencer you partner with posts, you can either invite people to get a glimpse into your brand, build a personal following if you’re using your own YouTube channel, or sell products.
What type of content should you target?
There’s a ton of versatility when it comes to YouTube content. You can either choose to partner with people who use tried and tested formats, or find more creative and out of the box channels. Starting a trend on YouTube is a piece of cake, and good marketing is about capitalizing on it as soon as you can. YouTube marketing also gives you the leeway to experiment and find out about who your target audience is. Remember, that a large number of people use YouTube, but not all of them can be turned into customers for your business. Keeping track of your audience will allow you to get to know them better and what they want.
If you’re new to YouTube affiliate marketing, it can be daunting; but don’t fret! You can reach out to creators who do product reviews, how-to videos, or even reach out to creators doing a best-of series and get your product featured.
At LeadDyno our affiliate marketing software gives you instant access to an entire network of affiliates. Sign up today to get your product seen on YouTube by targeting the right influencers!