Your small business can now create professional video advertisements courtesy of a new DIY app, YouTube Director. On June 15, Google launched three (mostly free!) ways for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to create video ads. With the new YouTube Director app, businesses can now create — on their own — commercials of a quality similar to the ones larger companies pay for. YouTube Director has several different templates, editing tools and music choices available for producing the perfect ad.
According to Diya Jolly, Google’s director of product management, YouTube is where small businesses struggle the most.
“The reason we did this is because we believe that video is becoming a more and more important medium on the internet,” Jolly said in an interview. “And today, what we see is we have a lot of big brands being able to advertise on video because they have the resources for a video campaign — and while we have SMBs, we see that the quality of the video isn’t as high.”
According to Marty Swant of Adweek, a small business located in Los Angeles has already successfully used the new app and has seen steady increases in its brand awareness and ad recall as a result. Utilizing the app to personally shoot and edit a short video advertisement that it ran in correlation with an AdWords campaign, The Barber Shop Club generated over 250,000 views for its ad since late May. Swant sees no reason for The Barber Shop Club to stop using this app to grow its consumer audience.
While the Director app is user-friendly, Google has provided two additional alternatives for making videos. One of the alternatives is a service that will use a company’s logo or screenshots of the company’s app to produce a promotional video. This alternative primarily uses existing material the company already has.
In Swant’s article, Jolly states that smaller businesses tend to create lower-quality ads because they use older content for longer periods of time, whereas larger companies constantly produce new content. To help smaller businesses alleviate this problem, the second alternative YouTube is working on is creating a connection between businesses and nearby filmmakers who can make reasonably priced video ads while providing innovative ad ideas. The service will still be provided through the YouTube Director app — the only commitment a business has to make is spending $150 on YouTube advertising. After this commitment is made, the chosen filmmaker will visit the business on location to film the spot. Currently, the service is available in six U.S. cities, with future plans to add more.
As reported by Swant, Jolly believes there is a good mix of small- and medium-sized businesses advertising on YouTube, but bigger businesses run a majority of the ads on the site because they have more resources and a bigger budget.
Implementing this app will help eliminate production-budget concerns for SMBs. With this new app, SMBs will also have the opportunity to compete with larger businesses without spending the same amount of money. Taking advantage of this app and its additional features will save your business money and will allow you to give your audience a different perspective of your company.
If your business is struggling with communicating with its audience, contact The Brandon Agency for a complete integrated communications experience. Still have questions? Comment below.