YouTube Influencer Marketing Strategy for Brands

Why YouTube Works

YouTube has historically been a long-form platform that offers enough depth to change perspectives and enough digital tracking options to have the platform commonly part of a performance campaign. 

YouTube creators influence purchasing decisions through long-form storytelling, consumer education, and demonstration of what products, services, or trends they support. Long-form content often allows deeper relationships to form between creators and their audience. This deep relationship, combined with an easily accessible clickable link or QR codes, allows brands to tap YouTube as both a performance and branding platform for influencer campaigns. YouTube is owned by Google, which means that YouTube content generally has a very positive impact on search results, with content often remaining relevant for weeks and months after the content goes live, particularly for science and educational content.     

Long-Form vs Short-Form

While YouTube is relatively new to the short-form world, YouTube Shorts have quickly become a major player in the short-form content battle. YouTube Shorts drive awareness and serve as a great way for brands and products to be discovered. In contrast, long-form content on YouTube tends to drive understanding, trust, and consideration. Shorts are very conducive for paid campaigns, making YouTube Shorts a great extension of short-form success that brands may have experienced on other platforms like TikTok and Instagram.  

Long-form content on YouTube allows for brands to tap into the deep connection that exists between creators and their audience. While there are multiple approaches for how brands partner with creators in long-form creator content, the most common is a brand integration where creators spend ~60 seconds advocating for a brand as part of their content. Since people typically view long-form content when they have more time on their hands, viewers tend to be more willing to explore content-creator recommendations when compared to viewing short-form content. In addition, long-form content on YouTube offers readily accessible brand links, which can often deliver organic influencer marketing performance campaigns.  

Finding the Right YouTube Influencers

The best creators tend to be domain experts whose audiences trust their opinions. The Outloud Group is renowned for having fantastic historical performance data, which allow brands to partner with those creators that have a strong historical track record of adding measurable value to brands.