James Dooley:
So I've got Dan Grant who's the director at FatRank and Promoo and today's video is about YouTube advertising and whether using YouTube ads for lead generation specifically is a good platform for UK businesses.

Dan Grant:
Yeah I think with YouTube ads it definitely can be a good platform. I don't think it's one of them where it's guaranteed to work for every industry and every company. It's also not going to work for everybody because of the fact that they might not know how to set up the ads properly, looking at the right demographics, where to place the ads, how much money to spend on the ads and actually managing that side of things. I think people don't realise sometimes with social media advertising specifically that there's a lot of additional things you might need to learn, whether it's creating the advert, how the ad needs to look, how it needs to sound, what words you include that will trigger someone to say they need this product or service. There's a lot that goes into it that's often best left to a marketing agency to carry out, and even when you do that you might be paying extra on a markup for that service and it may not even convert because your niche might not be right for it. So I think there's a lot of areas where it can go wrong. It obviously can work and it's something that maybe I'd encourage companies to try and test, but I definitely think there are better avenues out there for companies to look at for generating inquiries.

James Dooley:
Yeah I mean the bar to entry on YouTube is a lot higher because first and foremost you've got to create a good video for it to convert. So where Instagram or Facebook or a platform like that you can just put a nice image which is a lot easier to generate than a good converting high quality video, the barrier to entry is a lot higher. Video converts brilliantly, it does really well, but you have to have big budgets because even just to set up the ads and get a well produced video from a videographer is expensive. The initial expense is much higher and you need to be looking at putting five or ten thousand pounds in before even spending anything on the ads just to create a very good converting video. The first fifteen seconds is key for when you are doing YouTube advertising to try and get the hook and get them to watch it. You might need to split those out and create five or six different introductions to see which gets you the best hook. Once you've got it set up it can convert very well. We use YouTube advertising a lot alongside Instagram, Facebook, Twitter ads, Pinterest ads, PPC. We try to use all the different models we can, we do organic SEO to find what works best for your niche. So that moves on to the question of how do you feel YouTube ads compare against the new pay on performance and pay on conversion lead generation model that you've decided to set up Dan?

Dan Grant:
Yeah I personally feel the pay on conversion is much better and I think there's probably a lot of reasons for that. The first one mainly is that it's risk free. There's no risk involved, it's just a flow of inquiries that comes through to the client. The client deals with that inquiry as they normally would, they don't have to pay for those inquiries, they don't have to learn anything in terms of video scripts or how to put videos together. The inquiries come to them, they deal with them and we only ask for a kickback from the converted jobs. As a result it's completely risk free. We're eliminating the risk and I think also with some industries in comparison to YouTube ads, the niche just doesn't work. Maybe in the construction niche there's nowhere really to place it to convert for that type of service, or it might be that the company don't want to put their faces out there and they're not salesy type people, they just want to do their job and crack on. For companies like that it makes sense to get the inquiries and do what they do best and convert them. That's what companies want, high quality inquiries, and if they're getting them for free it's a really good model. So I think that's definitely the route I'd advise people to take if they were a nationwide company.

James Dooley:
Yeah I mean the pay on performance obviously is going to be a no-brainer for businesses. We are very selective with who we work with. We've got to make certain they're good enough to take our leads, that they work nationwide and they are good at conversion. Some of the bigger brands running YouTube retargeting can be good for branding and I would recommend trying it if you are a big agency and maybe just having us as a lead generation company that can do it on the back end on a conversion model. You still try to improve your own lead generation platforms by doing SEO, retargeting tags on Facebook and YouTube. I do think it's a great platform, I think the barrier to entry is high. But let us know your thoughts in the comments. Are you using YouTube ads for lead generation? Is it the best platform you're using? For certain industries it is the best platform for generating leads. How does it compare against Instagram ads, Facebook ads or PPC? And have you ever tried the pay on performance setup? It is a no-brainer. It's a high bar to entry being selected because there's only one or two companies in the UK doing it because they take all the risk. Let us know whether you have tried it and how you think about YouTube advertising for lead generation.