Last updated on June 15th, 2024
VidTarget.io helps drive higher-quality leads and sales on YouTube. Our host Dane Golden has started the company with two partners and talks about it.
GUEST: Dane Golden of VidAction.tv | LinkedIn | YouTube
HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by:
– Renee Teeley of VideoExplained and ReneeTeeley.com | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
VidTarget is a point solution. And what that is, is it creates placement or channel or keyword lists that you import into your YouTube ad campaigns, and you run more targeted ad campaigns. We’ve made some shortcuts for you that ideally give you a better target audience and make you a lot of money.
Dane Golden:
It’s time for the VidAction Podcast. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners, just like you, get more value out of your video marketing efforts. My name is Dane Golden from Vidiup.tv, where we help you up your game on YouTube for business and transform your viewers into loyal customers. We’re going to be talking about today, VidTarget.io, where we help you drive higher quality leads and sales by reaching your ideal clients one-to-one on YouTube.
Dane Golden:
And with my cohost today, she’s the powerhouse video marketer. From San Francisco, it’s R-E-N-E-E T-E-E-L-E-Y, Renee Teeley from VideoExplained. Hello, Renee.
Renee Teeley:
Hello, Dane. Today, I am happy as a kangaroo on a trampoline to be co-hosting this podcast with you.
Dane Golden:
But are you thrilled?
Renee Teeley:
I’m thrilled, I’m excited, I’m delighted. I am all of the things.
Dane Golden:
She’s all the things. And Renee, what do you do at VideoExplained?
Renee Teeley:
At VideoExplained, I offer video marketing production and consulting services to help companies generate leads and convert those leads into paying customers with video.
Dane Golden:
Paying customers. Boy, that’s a unique approach. And for you, the listener, you should know that, as always, you can follow along on your podcast app with the transcript and the links and all the other info. Please share or review us. It really does help. Usually you just have to click three little dots and you can do that.
Dane Golden:
Today we’re going to try something different. We’re going to talk about my new project VidTarget, and we’ve been very excited about this new platform, and you’ve probably heard me mention it in passing on the podcast. VidTarget has been in soft launch for a while, but now it’s fully public, and I’m going to tell you, our listener, about it. I know you haven’t really started using it yet, Renee, but I thought I could tell you about it, and maybe you ask me some questions. This is all very rehearsed, the viewers, the listeners should know, but Renee may freestyle some questions.
So what do you think, Renee? Can we do this?
Renee Teeley:
Yeah, absolutely. So this is the interview I’ve been waiting for.
Dane Golden:
yes.
Renee Teeley:
No, seriously. I know that you did write out some questions, but this is a tool that I think could help other marketers, but I also believe it’s something that could potentially be useful in my own business. So I’m personally excited to learn more. So I know some of the questions in advance, I’ll ask you some new ones, but I don’t know the answers. So I’m really-
Dane Golden:
Oh, this is really suspenseful.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah. So I’m really excited for this interview.
Dane Golden:
But before you even start asking me questions, you are the exact type of person who we wanted to help. A marketer, a business owner, particularly someone who deals with video marketing, who knows the value of YouTube and just wants some quick shortcuts to make some quick success. This doesn’t do everything. It does some things very well.
Renee Teeley:
So that actually leads into my first question. Just to kick things off, can you just briefly give an overview of what is VidTarget?
Dane Golden:
VidTarget is a point solution, which simply means it’s to solve a small group of problems that are important. It’s not going to do everything. And what that is, is it creates placement or channel or keyword lists that you import into your YouTube ad campaigns, and you run more targeted ad campaigns.
Dane Golden:
These are things you can do manually, but as busy people, it takes a lot of time to do this right manually. So we’ve made some shortcuts for you that ideally give you a better target audience and make you a lot of money, either for your own business or your customers.
Renee Teeley:
So it sounds like it’s helping to target ads for your ad campaigns on YouTube. Is this something that would be useful for YouTubers to get more views on their videos or additional subscribers?
Dane Golden:
Yes. I’m glad you asked this very insightful question, Renee, because we don’t recommend it for that purpose. And that is a very common question because YouTubers presume that if they could only get enough people to watch, they’d get enough subscribers and so on. But that isn’t really how YouTube works best.
Dane Golden:
As a YouTube channel, you can get a lot of bad subscribers, which means they may not watch and then they’re sort of zombie subscribers. So what this really, this tool is, is for sales. We might call them direct response videos, videos that are designed to take someone to a transaction quickly.
Renee Teeley:
Okay. So it’s for businesses, it’s not necessarily just to get a broad audience of subscribers on YouTube. So for businesses, and you said this is for direct response, so you’re specifically targeting ads on YouTube. So why YouTube and not Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, or any of the other platforms out there?
Dane Golden:
Right. Those are all good platforms. And maybe I should just elaborate on what direct response is, because I didn’t know what it was until a couple of years, Tom Breeze told me what it was. It’s just simply the things that we see where someone is trying to cause an action, maybe to download an ebook or a checklist, or to visit a webinar, or to make a sale directly from that video, to sign up for some service, as opposed to let’s say a more of an awareness type of ad, which is generally an automotive type of ad. “Here’s the brand new Nissan. We’re not asking you to buy it now, we just want you to know it’s there.”
Dane Golden:
So these ads that we are recommending, what this tool does is help you narrow the audience to the group of people that is actually really ready to buy. And you can toggle a few other things. So back to the question that I wrote for you to ask me, that I ignored, about-
Renee Teeley:
To be fair, it’s a question I would have asked anyway, regardless.
Dane Golden:
I know what’s in your head. We’re good enough partners on this podcast that I know what you’d want to ask anyway.
Those are all very good platforms, and we believe in them, we recommend them, we use them, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others, but YouTube does something special that they don’t do. And that is that YouTube knows at the exact moment you are searching for something.
Dane Golden:
So if I am searching…Just looking at my water bottle here, if I am searching for a water bottle now, best new water bottles, and I, as an advertiser, put my new water bottle ad only on videos that are talking about water bottles, and then I customize for a lot of other demographics and so forth, then I have someone who I know wants it now, and I can share this with them at that time. And that is a very compelling market if you do it right.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah. That’s great. That’s a really good response. I think that, yeah, the right ad at the right time is pretty critical. And so if you can help businesses get in front of people that are instantly ready to buy, that’s pretty powerful. I think that there’s a place for brand awareness ads, even outside of just automotive-
Dane Golden:
Of course.
Renee Teeley:
… and so it’s good to do a mix of ads. But being able to directly get paying customers is pretty important for most businesses.
Dane Golden:
Well, particularly today when budgets are very tight and people are doing everything they can to stay in business, that there’s a lot of marketing budgets that are going to shrink. If you have to decide between telling somebody about something that might happen sometime, and something that can actually make a sale today, we feel we’ve got a compelling story to tell.
Renee Teeley:
So in terms of being able to get people to buy right away, you mentioned this already, that you need to figure out how to get ads in front of the right people at the right time, can you talk a little bit about hyper-targeting on YouTube, what that means and how that plays into getting the right ad in front of the right person at the right time?
Dane Golden:
Sure. So this is particularly good, let’s say, for a software solution. Now, I may have been searching for a software solution on how to market better, for instance. Now suddenly, I might see ads about marketing solutions, right? So the YouTube ad system and the targeting that has done has found me and says, “You know what, Dane? You need this thing that does your YouTube thumbnails better. So you need this software that does that better.” And they indeed target me. I’m a very prepared audience.
Dane Golden:
But even further than that, well, you know what? A lot of people just run ads. They don’t even target by demographic, by nation, by language. The thing about Facebook, is it does do a really good job and just sort of will go out and find that audience for you. But YouTube, you have to do a little bit more work in that it’s probably better if you say, “Listen, I only want people that speak English, only want people that are between 25 and 45.” You might find even that you should cater a particular service to men more or women more.
Dane Golden:
And that’s really … Once you’ve done that, then you can also target your message. Let’s say you’re only targeting people who want thumbnails, and you only advertise on videos that talk about how to make thumbnails for YouTube better, well, you can start your actual ad and say, “Well, if you are looking to make thumbnails better, you’re going to want a solution like this one.” And they’re thinking, “Gosh, I really am looking for thumbnails.” Of course, you know that, and the system knows that, because you’ve only targeted videos that talk about thumbnails, and you only target, maybe you only do business in the United States, you’ve only targeted people in the United States. Or maybe you only even do business in California, you can target by that.
Dane Golden:
So that’s what types of things I mean by hyper-targeting. And then you can go further if you’re doing lead generation, where you can have landing pages customized. Because you know where they came from you could say, “If you like thumbnails, you should get this marketing solution.” And your marketing solution may be nothing about thumbnails except one part of it.
Renee Teeley:
Okay. So let’s back up a little bit. You delivered a lot in there.
Dane Golden:
Did I give you too much?
Renee Teeley:
No, no, no. You gave me the right amount, but I want to unpack a little bit of this.
Dane Golden:
Good.
Renee Teeley:
Okay. So in terms of hyper-targeting, so that’s great. You’re really niching down so that you can get specific messaging for specific audiences. Can you talk a little bit about what types of ads are best suited for this approach? And do you recommend running multiple ads at the same time?
Dane Golden:
Yeah. There’s a few different types of ads you can run. One of the most effective, not the only way, is just recording yourself talking to a camera. We all see a lot of these ads of people, just a simple person at their desk, or walking around, talking to the camera. They don’t do these because they’re bad. They do them because they work. Just an honest, direct approach with almost no graphics sometimes. That’s one way.
Dane Golden:
You can also do animated ads, but the structure is pretty similar. There’s a definite structure to this that has been talked about by guys like Jake Larsen, and Tom Breeze, and Tommy Powers, and Chamber Media, and the Harmon Brothers. There’s a definite structure to each of these ads, where you initially try to get someone interested, but also try to filter out the people who would not be interested. Because if they stop watching and they skip and that’s not your good customer for you, you actually don’t have to pay for that ad. It doesn’t even count as an ad. So there’s a way of leading them through. There’s a choreography, which is a little too far to get into right now, but there’s a definite structure.
Renee Teeley:
I really like this idea of filtering people out, and I wish more people took that approach on YouTube. I have been re-targeted by some ads. I don’t remember the name of the company, and I’m not going to call them out in the podcast by name, but there is a company that has been … I’ve just been seeing their ads over and over again. And they do that type of ad where it’s them on camera, talking to the camera, trying to relate to the audience saying, “I’m just like you.” It turns out that they are not just me. I’m not like the ad, and I wish they would filter me out so I don’t see this ad anymore. I do think it’s pretty powerful to filter people out though, so you can really focus on the people who are a good fit for your business.
Renee Teeley:
In terms of figuring out how to get the most out of your ads, you mentioned this already in terms of landing pages, but can you talk about the importance of having a landing page and whether or not you even need a landing page that’s part of your ad campaign?
Dane Golden:
Right. And just for those who are a little newer, a landing page is really almost any page that is not on the ad itself. So what’s the purpose of a landing page? It’s to further the message that you gave them in the video ad. You can do a number of things with that, including having a follow up video on that landing page. “Hey, I’m so glad that you’re a thumbnail designer and want to find out more. When you get this download …” You can offer a download, you can offer to purchase, really depends on the level or cost of the product itself.
Dane Golden:
If it’s generally more than 50 to $70, you probably want to give a lead magnet. And for those who don’t know, a lead magnet is just something you encourage somebody to download in exchange for some information. Usually it’s a name, an email, and sometimes more. So that landing page is just sort of the next way of continuing the relationship you’ve begun. Take it to the next level.
Renee Teeley:
Do you recommend a landing page for every ad?
Dane Golden:
You can do that. It really depends how much effort you have and how granular you want to get in. But if you have a custom type of ad, not only would you want to have, in some cases, if it’s easy, a custom landing page, we might want to try several landing pages. But it really depends on how much you want to A/B test all of these different options.
Dane Golden:
Initially, you may be just fine with one video and just send them to your sales page or your home page. But then you want to keep tweaking things and seeing if they increase sales, if you tried multiple landing pages, multiple videos, multiple different types of targeting. The people who are retargeting you are clearly going very broad, and that’s not really what I’m talking about.
Renee Teeley:
True. They’re going broad in terms of they’re showing me the ad over and over. They’re not filtering me out. But it’s targeted in the sense that it’s helping marketers create videos and use video for their business, and I’m searching for that a lot on YouTube. So I understand why I’m getting the ad, but I keep skipping it. I would like to not see it anymore.
Dane Golden:
And by the way, there is some features in YouTube campaigns where you can limit by day or month or week the number of times someone sees an impression, which is anything that they don’t click on, essentially, so anything either under 30 seconds, or that is not clicked on. Or views. So if you watched longer than 30 seconds, that counts as a view. So you might think … It depends on your interest in bugging people, but you could, say, you get a couple of impressions a day or a couple of views per day, and that’s plenty.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah. I think that being able to bundle hyper-targeted advertising, so understanding exactly who it is that you’re trying to reach with a custom message in your ad, and then also a custom landing page that speaks to that specific target audience, I think that’s a really powerful combination. It does take a little bit of upfront work because you are creating a landing page or creating very specific ads, and of course, figuring out how to hyper-target those customers within YouTube. But I think if you spend that time upfront, you might be able to get even more value out of what you’re doing.
Renee Teeley:
One of the nice things about direct ads is you can instantly see the impact. You can tell if it’s working or not working. So can you talk a little bit about maybe using the ad campaigns with VidTarget? Do you have a minimum ad spend that you recommend in terms of figuring out if something’s working or not working?
Dane Golden:
Right. Yeah. And by the way, yes, the better you get at this, the more customized you can make this. But you could record a video right now on your webcam, create a targeting list and have an ad ready to go on your YouTube ads campaign, also known as Google Ads, on the system, you can have that ready to go today, in an hour or two. It’s not that hard, but as you develop it, you’ll want to tweak it further and further. But we do recommend just getting something up, something simple, have a small budget.
Dane Golden:
So when I say minimum ad spend, it really depends where you’re going, but this is designed to have small ad spends. Because why do you want to spend a whole bunch of money on something that’s not going to work? So this is designed all up and down to be cheap. And cheap, I don’t mean not good. I mean low cost for the return that you’re getting. Now, initially you want to start with a small, I recommend anyway, start with a small ad spend, maybe even $10 a day, $100 a day, just to see how things work.
Dane Golden:
Because when you do Google Ads and YouTube ads, you really want to tweak them, you want to test things, change this. You tweak the audience older or younger, tweak the part of the country you’re running in. You can also narrow down these … If it’s going too broad, which usually it’s narrow enough with these lists, narrow down by some topic of interest that someone’s interested on. So the minimum spend can be very, very small. I’d start a campaign with $10 a day, see what happens.
Renee Teeley:
Okay. Well, that’s great. So I think that when people say kind of a small ad budget, that varies widely depending on the type of company?
Dane Golden:
Yes. Yes. Under a $1000 a day.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah. But $10 a day, $1000 a day even, something low to get going. So maybe under $1000 a month, but $10 a day just to test out what’s working and what’s not working before you do additional spend. And the goal is to, if you start small, to be able to put $1 in and get two or $3 out, so you can test-
Dane Golden:
Yeah. And if you’re not getting two or $3 out, then you’re probably doing something wrong. But when I say $10, I mean, maybe you run 10 different campaigns at $10 to see what works, and then one works or two work and you just kill the rest and expand the others to much larger. Because if they are working properly, you should be able to spend a lot of money on them.
Renee Teeley:
Right. Because you’re getting even more money in return. So in terms of figuring out what’s working and what’s not, do you offer any analytics within the platform, within VidTarget, that help you understand what’s working and what’s not? Or are you using another platform for that?
Dane Golden:
We’re not doing that at all, but we highly recommend you use the Google Ads system and you can also use YouTube, Google Analytics rather, for that. So you set that up as a conversion and then you set up your ads to track those conversions, those sales, or the download, whatever you’re trying to track, and then you can compare how the ads are doing.
Dane Golden:
You don’t necessarily just want to get a click. Some of the other social media platforms are better at getting clicks. People are just so click happy whenever they see a cool new gadget of some sort, but are they ready to buy? There’s a little bit different sometimes. Some advertising platforms might be better for getting clicks, but others might be better for cost per conversion or something called longterm customer value, which takes a longer time to track.
Renee Teeley:
Okay. So VidTarget is really that upfront planning tool in terms of your ad campaigns, and then you’re still using other platforms for analytics.
Dane Golden:
Yes.
Renee Teeley:
Well, maybe you can get some test cases out of me because-
Dane Golden:
Yes.
Renee Teeley:
… this actually does seem like a platform that I can use for my business. So one of the businesses that I’m part of, I’m a co-founder for Bubble, which is an online security platform. Not something I talk about a lot on this podcast, but it is something that I am looking to run ads and figuring out different ways to, basically for direct sales. So getting people to actually sign up for the product.
Renee Teeley:
So this seems like something that could really help me with my business, and I’m really, really happy that you’re, that you came onto the podcast as a guest. I do think that this is a tool that can help a lot of marketers out there, in addition to helping me as well. So thank you so much for sharing all of your amazing insights about YouTube ads, and how to get the most bang for your buck using VidTarget.
Dane, how can people find out more about you and potentially their inquiries into using VidTarget?
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Well, let’s get them to check out the demos and the YouTube channel and so forth, and they can find all that on VidTarget.io. That’s V-I-D-T-A-R-G-E-T.I-O.
I guess I will read the rest.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah, I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to jump in there.
Dane Golden:
Good, good, good.
Renee Teeley:
But take it away, Dane.
Dane Golden:
My name is Dane Golden, and my cohost, of course, you know her, she’s R-E-N-E-E T-E-E-L-E-Y, Renee Teeley. And we want to thank you, the listener, for joining us today. Don’t we, Renee?
Renee Teeley:
Yes, absolutely. And of course today I want to leave you with a quote. As I once told my good friend, Walt Disney, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” So I want to encourage all of you to start something today that you’ve been putting off.
Dane Golden:
Walt Disney. One of the best ever. By the way, this little quote you said, was this from the cricket? Did he say that?
Renee Teeley:
Honestly, I have no idea.
Dane Golden:
Okay.
Renee Teeley:
He said this directly to me. What are you talking about, the cricket?
Dane Golden:
Walt Disney? Yeah.
Renee Teeley:
This is my good friend. We were on a picnic and yeah, he just heard me over and over talk about these things that I want to do, and I just haven’t done them. So he said, “Quit talking, begin doing.”
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Okay, good. I want to invite you to review us on Apple Podcast. And if you can’t find that review button on your podcast app, click the share button instead and let your friends know that we’d also like give them video marketing tips via the podcast.
Dane Golden:
Renee and I do this podcast and our various other YouTube videos and other projects because we love helping marketers and business owners do YouTube and video marketing better. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers improve video.