6 Reasons Why YouTube is the Next Frontier for Perfume Brands
The perfume market is crowded with new niche brands being born every year. The consumer has an ever growing list of distractions to click on or scroll through. Fighting for attention online while maintaining a positive Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is critical for any perfume advertising campaign.
Competing for eyeballs on Instagram is a large part of the traditional advertising playbook for perfume brands. Paying fragrance influencers to talk about your perfume brand on Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram is also a popular way for perfume brands to reach new people.
The question remains, why aren’t perfume brands investing in their own Youtube Channel?
All Roads Lead to Youtube for Content Creators & Brands
Youtube has 2.5 billion users
54.4% of YouTube users are men and 45.6% are women
720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day
Youtube is Too Big to Ignore
Many people don’t think of Youtube as a social media platform but it is, and it’s the second biggest in the world, behind Facebook. Unlike Facebook, Youtube acts more as a content discovery platform. Facebook primarily serves to connect people. When people think of video content, they think Youtube. Speaking from an audience size standpoint, if you are not on Youtube posting content you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Whether you are a performance marketer focused on paid ads, or a brand marketer involved in storytelling and content creation, you need to be thinking about getting active on this platform. Video content is a fundamental part of any perfume advertising strategy, and the best home for video content is Youtube.
Here Are 5 Reasons Why Perfume Brands Need to be Marketing on Youtube
Youtube is the Best Home for Long-Form Content
Running a brand marketing strategy involves long-form content. More specifically, people want long-form video content. If they are researching your brand they want long-form content. If they are brand loyalist they want long-form video content. If they are retailers looking to carry your brand they want to see long-form content. The bottom line is, short form videos are great for building brand awareness, but if you want to build a stronger connection with consumers, you need to be making long-form video content.
Other platforms will never be a good home for long-form video content for two reasons:
Consumer behavior for other social media does not facilitate long-form content. Of course, you have the ability to upload up to 60-minute videos on Instagram. TikTok is experimenting with the ability to upload longer videos as well. This doesn’t matter because people scrolling through the FYP feed on TikTok aren’t stopping and watching a 10 minute video. TikTok has the market cornered for people with short attention spans. This is borne out in retention data (which I will cover shortly). For some perspective, Statista found that the average TikTok video length was 35 seconds and the average length of an Instagram video was between 26-40 seconds. Youtube has an average video length of over 11 minutes.
Instagram and TikTok do not have the platform functionality (UX/UI) of YouTube to facilitate long-form video. Youtube has features like:
Video search functionality
Ability to create video playlist
Related videos sidebar
Timestamp ability
Robust sharing and embedding features
12 hour video limit
In-video info cards
Customized end-screens
A more functional desktop experience
Customizable playback speed
Customizable pixel resolution
These are only a couple of the features that make the Youtube platform more video content friendly than rival video platforms.
Retention, Retention, Retention
Youtube has a higher viewer retention rate than all the other social media platforms. Retention rate in this context is defined as the total percent of the video that was watched by the viewer. This metric is important because it is one of the most important metrics for whether or not your video gets organic promotion is the retention rate. It lets the algorithms of these social media platforms know that viewers like the video, which signals that other users might like the video. Thus, the video gets promoted more.
If your perfume brand is going to be posting long-form content on Youtube that is intended to convey your brand, a high retention rate indicates that people care about your brand. This performance metric functions as a signal to let you know what content is resonating with your audience. You can then use this metric to help guide further content
It isn’t just about in-video retention. Youtube also is the best platform to build a loyal audience. Youtube followers have the highest ‘return viewership rate’ out of all of the social media platforms. When someone subscribes to a brand or content creator on Youtube, they tend to stick around more than any of the other platforms. This is reinforced by a Youtube algorithm that prioritizes showing people content that they subscribed to, as opposed to Instagram and TikTok which tend to favor showing users new content from accounts that they have never interacted with. With Instagram and TikTok, the algorithm favors engagement at the expense of retention.
Furthermore, Youtube’s interface intuitively allows users to find the accounts they are subscribed to, and see new videos posted by these accounts. You can even enable push notifications to alert you to new content posted by accounts that you are subscribed to. In contrast, Instagram doesn’t even allow users the ‘Following’ feed for desktop. The Instagram algorithm determines the content you see.
If you are a brand that cares about retention, the audience you build on Youtube is more sticky, and consequentially, more valuable.
Brand Storytelling
You just can’t convey in-depth storytelling with a 60-second video. That isn’t to say you can’t do storytelling in short-form videos, however, if you want to talk about the difficulties in environmentally sustainable ingredients sourcing for the perfume your brand is releasing soon, it will be hard to recount anything but the basics of this story in under 60 seconds. Long-form allows for an evenly-paced video format that gives more discretion to video editors to tell a story.
Despite the overall decrease in people’s attention spans that media outlets love reporting on, people still crave long form video content. It just has to be good content. It needs to have an emotional element. It needs to convey a message. It needs to be authentic. If your perfume brand can create compelling long form video content that is brand-aligned, the best home for this video content is Youtube.
SEO Integration
Google owns Youtube and prioritizes it in the search results. Google is also the biggest search engine in the world. Any search query will usually have a top column of videos related to the search query. Most of these videos will be Youtube videos.
You are not doing your brand any favors by not being on Youtube and prioritizing your own account. It is not enough to have fragrance influencers speaking on your brand’s behalf. Your brand needs to be creating content and increasing your visibility on the search engines.
From a SEO perspective, another aspect of creating your own videos is that you can add links in the video description to products or other website pages. The links you can add are considered ‘no-follow’ links, however, they still help increase the search engine visibility of your website.
You Can Include Active Links in Video Descriptions
Compared to Instagram and TikTok, Youtube is the only social media platform that will allow you to put active links in the video description. There is zero evidence that Youtube throttles videos with active links in them. Furthermore, you can include multiple links in the description in order to direct people to relevant pages on your website and get some of that Direct-To-Consumer revenue that we talk about frequently.
Your Competitors Aren’t Here
This is one of the most dramatic things that stood out to the Parfum Digital team as we assess perfume brands. There are very few brands on Youtube, and the brands that are on Youtube are clearly not prioritizing publishing content.
Examples:
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There is an open ocean of potential on Youtube for perfume brands that can execute correctly on creating video content that aligns with their brand, the consumer, and the Youtube platform. Perfume brands need to find points of differentiation in their marketing strategy. Where can you find untapped advertising opportunities? Where are there opportunities that are underpriced relative to the potential outcome?
If you are operating a perfume brand you need to be asking yourself: Why aren’t perfume brands taking Youtube more seriously? Do they think it is a waste of time? Do they just not have the resources, time, or skill to handle this platform?
At Parfum Digital, we see a huge upside for brands in any category to create content on Youtube.
Much like TikTok, there are case studies of huge brands being built solely on Youtube like Mini Katana and Epic Gardening.