YouTube TrueView: a Healthcare Marketer’s Knockout Punch Against the Competition?
YouTube is making the holiday season even brighter, much to the delight of retailers everywhere. New features will ensure a little less re-gifting this season, but also provide ample opportunity for healthcare marketers to knock out the competition with early adoption.
Already, TrueView provides an opportunity for marketers to be more efficient with ad placement. The YouTube pre-roll service allows more specific targeting and charges advertisers for actual, complete advertisement views rather than blanket fees for estimated, uncertain and potentially unengaged views. If this weren’t incentive enough to try the platform, the announcement that the TrueView For Shopping and Shopping Ads On YouTube features are out of beta and available to all advertisers surely should be.
The new feature TrueView for Shopping leverages YouTube’s preexisting “Shopping Ads” or ads placed alongside video content. It allows all marketers to place ads for their own products within their own videos, meaning you can shop what you see in real time. Yes, adding that perfect holiday gift to your cart the moment you see the ad for it. The content-related products are shown dynamically alongside the video, and are pulled from advertisers’ Google Merchant Center product feeds, ensuring a more seamless user experience.
Shopping Ads on YouTube, another new feature, is where the real fun begins. It expands on the previous feature allowing marketers to also start showing ads in contextually relevant videos. Tied to Google Adwords, the shopper’s experience is almost identical, but allows advertisers to catch consumers where they are already digesting content rather than relying on consumers to find or seek out their products.
Again, all of this is also based on complete content views so advertisers are only paying for meaningful engagements. YouTube promises that the features will be customizable for advertisers’ campaign needs. Whether the goal is app downloads or general awareness, there’s something for everyone.
TrueView Works for Healthcare, too
Healthcare marketers should be paying attention. TrueView and the new features are no gimmick, nor are they just bells and whistles for pre-roll; they’re proven. It is estimated that 57% of TrueView campaigns created a lift in consideration, 24% caused a boost in favorability, and 35% resulted in an increase in purchase intent.
It’s not news that video content can be a powerful tool to create preference for healthcare brands and demand for elective procedures. What will be news is how healthcare marketers adapt retail-inspired platforms for their campaigns in order to excel against the competition. With the campaign adaptability promised, physician referrals, information requests, appointment booking and additional direct actions at the time of content consumption can become reality. New opportunity in digital awaits those willing to adopt early this holiday season.
Sadie Howes
At the time of this post Sadie, was an Account Manager at BPD. She’s a veteran of Draft FCB and Y&R in the Big Apple.