Jake Larsen

After Google asked him to be a YouTube Marketing Ambassador, Jake Larsen quit his job (a month before his first child was born) to start Video Power Marketing; a video production/advertising agency that helps people capture attention, drive traffic and increase sales using YouTube Advertising. Jake works with businesses to transform their YouTube ad campaigns into automated sales machines.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Jake’s success

Using targeted YouTube ads

Result if you follow the steps in Jake’s session

Targeted leads taken from YouTube and sent to your landing page

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I’ll dive into that. So again, a lot of people, I tell people what I do. And I say, “Oh, we do this ads” and you know, I always, I hate those, I always skip them. And there’s a good part to that. But again, 99% of people out there who are advertising on YouTube aren’t doing it correctly, they’re still treating it like TV.

So the question is like, how can you create a video that turns these viewers into paying customers and the loyal following? And again, you just break it down.

So the first the first step is you have to get their attention in five seconds. Remember, people’s fingers hovering over the skip now button, and they just can’t wait to skip it. So you got to get their attention in five seconds. And one of the strategies that we use to get their attention is you call out who you’re talking to.

So when I know, like my audience, they’re entrepreneurs and they’re marketers so in the first five seconds of the video, I say, “Hey, are you an entrepreneur or marketer? If not, skip this ad. I don’t want to talk to you”. Like I kind of call him out directly.

And we had a company. I consulted with a company who sold truck accessories online. They had an ecommerce store. So say, “Hey, do you own a truck and you love your truck and want to pimp it out? Like, keep watching this video”.

So you call your audience directly within the first five seconds. And what that does is like, if they aren’t a marketer, entrepreneur, if they don’t own a truck, you don’t want to waste your ad spend on them.

So the goal is like either click, if they skip it, big deal, you’re not wasting your ad spend. And that way you keep the right audience on, they’re watching.

After you’ve got their attention, and you call it the audience, the second part is to build trust, to inspire them and to kind of show them who you are. So I just told my story. I think people you should tell your story to like how it is.

Why are you spending your own money advertising this message like what makes your message so important? What benefits can you bring to the world so I just tell people, “Hey, look, you’re watching in this YouTube ad. I’ve discovered a guaranteed way of getting your views seen and not only getting your videos seen, but not only that big driving leads and sales with using YouTube ads. So does that mean it’s a great platform to establish yourself”.

And then the last part of the video ad formula, and this is the most important part is the call to action. I like to compare it with this, like, let’s pretend Liam that you’re swimming in out in an ocean and you can’t see anything. You’re just kind of swimming there.

Where are you going to swim? You’re going to go in circles, right? But if all of a sudden there was an island that popped up, you’re gonna swim to the island, because that’s where you’re going to go. There’s an island, they’re going to get there.

So same thing with your videos. Like there’s so many videos on YouTube and so many views that are going on, that when somebody sees your video, you need to give them an island, right? You need to give them a call to action, and it needs to be clickable.

So show them visually like with YouTube, you got annotations, you have YouTube cards call to action overlays. So I always tell people like after somebody watches your video, what do you want them to do? And you build the video around the click. So one of the things that I did was I created a free video marketing course.

So at the end of the video, at the end of my video, and I keep them around 60 seconds, I keep these videos on 60 seconds. And here’s why. Because the way you get charged when you’re spending money on YouTube ads, the way you get charged, it’s a cost per view. And then view is, if they watch 30 seconds or half the video, whichever comes first.

So if you have a 60-second video ad, and they watch till 29 seconds and then they skip it, you don’t have to pay. It’s basically kind of free branding there, feed free view up into that point.

So with the strategies, we try and get people to click the ad on a 60 second video, we try and get them, we put a click like around 28-29 seconds to get them to click and it’s just super cheap advertising especially when you compare it to PPC ads on certain keywords like that’s like a 5-10 dollar cost per click, sometimes even with Facebook, right, a tons of like, Facebook’s super popular right now.

But if you keep the, if you do this like strategy, right and you put a call to action before the 30 seconds of a YouTube stream ad, you can get like, all technically free advertisement, they click on the annotation and then even if they do watch past 30 seconds, we’re talking like seven cents cost per view. So like big deal.

So get their attention called, call out the viewer, provide value, tell your story, and then add a call to action, get people off of YouTube and onto your landing page.