How to Leverage YouTube Influencers for Your Brand

Through video marketing, you can improve your visibility, generate leads, and even get conversions. Nearly 84% of marketers claim that video marketing helped them improve their website traffic. 

It’s due to the high potential of video marketing that many more marketers are jumping on to the bandwagon. When it comes to video marketing, YouTube is the go-to platform. With over 2 billion monthly active users, it’s one of the largest social media platforms and also the second-largest search engine. 

On the other hand, influencer marketing is an extremely effective method of marketing your brand and products. By partnering with social media personalities, you can leverage their influence over their followers and reach your marketing goals. 

Here’s how you can combine both YouTube and influencer marketing to promote your brand. 

1. Set Goals

Just like every other form of marketing, you need to set goals when you’re dealing with YouTube influencers as well. Decide on what you want to achieve out of the influencer marketing campaign on YouTube. 

Do you want to reach a wider audience? Maybe, you want to generate more leads? Or perhaps, get more sales? 

All your goals should be clearly defined and must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based). It’s also a good practice to identify some key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the progress of your campaign. 

Without set goals in mind, you shouldn’t start finding and approaching YouTube influencers. This is because the objectives will determine who you should reach out to. 

2. Find and Choose Your Influencers

The next step in leveraging influencer marketing on YouTube is that of finding and partnering with influencers. Your goal should be to find influencers who have similar values as those of your brand and are passionate about the videos that they create. Randomly partnering with a YouTube influencer won’t bring you any significant results. 

You need to look at the relevance of your product to the content that the influencer creates. Similarly, their reach and engagement need to be taken into account to understand the influence that they exert on their audience. It’s also advisable to look into the influencer’s experience in partnering with brands in the past.  

To find influencers, you can run a YouTube or Google search to get a collection of the most popular YouTube influencers. You can then refine this list based on your niche, their reach, engagement, number of subscribers, etc. 

If you want to simplify this process, you can use tools. 

3. Partner With Influencers

The next step in leveraging YouTube influencers is that of partnering and creating content with them. 

To efficiently manage your influencer marketing campaigns and securely share data and usage rights, you can use the Lumanu platform. All the data that you transmit through Lumanu’s SocialCert remains safe and encrypted. This way, you can easily whitelist your creator content and execute campaigns with scale and full transparency. . 

There are a plethora of options when it comes to creating videos with influencers on YouTube. Some of the most popular ones are: 

How-tos and Tutorial Videos

Videos can be used to teach and educate people about certain topics with ease due to their ease of communication. You can show the influencer’s audience how your products or services can make a huge difference in their lives. 

Nearly 94% of marketers stated in a survey that video marketing helped them educate their customers about their products and services. 

You can ask YouTube influencers to explain how your product or service functions through their videos. In the process, they can describe their features. This can motivate their audience to purchase them from you. 

For instance, Segway partnered with Unbox Therapy to promote their latest product, the Segway miniPRO. The how-to video created by the influencer got over 2.6 million views, and this way, Segway managed to reach a massive target audience. 

Image via YouTube

Product Reviews/Testimonials 

It can be fairly difficult to win the trust of consumers in today’s competitive market. Brands that blow their own trumpets may not find many takers. In such a situation, an influencer’s review or testimonial of a product or service can come in handy. 

When you partner with a YouTube influencer, you should consider giving them a sample of your product or service and invite them to use and review it. When they publish a video review or testimonial of your product, it’ll build your brand trust. 

For example, ORIGIN PC partnered with Linus Tech Tips. The YouTuber, Linus Sebastian, posted a video review of their product on his channel and it received more than 1 million views.

Image via YouTube

Unboxing Videos

Another popular method of leveraging YouTube influencers is through unboxing videos. These videos serve as a great way to launch your products. You can team up with YouTube influencers in your niche and ask them to unbox your products in their videos. 

Such videos are both engaging and fun because the influencers give their genuine reactions on unboxing the products. These videos can help improve your visibility and engagement. 

Many brands partner with YouTube influencers for this form of promotion. For instance, Apple collaborated with Marques Brownlee to promote their newest phone, the iPhone X. In the video, he unboxed his new phone and talked about its features. This video garnered over 13 million views.

Image via YouTube 

Final Thoughts

Promoting your brand through YouTube in partnership with influencers can help boost brand awareness, as well as lead and revenue generation. 

You can partner with influencers to create product reviews, how-to videos, and even unboxing videos to promote your brand. And, due to the engaging nature of videos and the high engagement rate of YouTube, YouTube influencers can help you get the most out of your marketing budget. 

However, do keep in mind that you need to set your goals first and then look for relevant influencers for your brand. Only when you partner with genuine influencers will you get the maximum results from your campaigns.

Have you worked with YouTube influencers before or do you have any tips to add? Let me know in the comments.