YouTube influencers, and how they can take your marketing message to the next level

YouTube influencers can be some of the most successful, creative figures in the influencer marketing ecosystem, and frequently enjoy the closest relationships with the most genuinely engaged, loyal audiences. When designing influencer marketing plans, working with a YouTube influencer (or several) should be a no-brainer. But some marketers still miss them out of the conversation. It’s time that changed.

At Fourth Floor, we know the value of working with YouTube influencers better than most. Having grown as an influencer marketing agency with YouTube culture at our foundations, we’re fully versed in the versatile, creative potential and powerful audience reach available. So we’ve put together this quick, topline guide to YouTube influencers, and why (and how) you absolutely should work with them.

YouTube influencer marketing, and why it’s different

YouTube influencer marketing, on the simplest level, is the process of engaging YouTube content creators in commercial promotional work in order to leverage the power of their trusted connections to their audience. But to get into its real strength takes a bit more explaining. Because the thing is - even in 2021, with YouTube itself such a dominant mainstream entertainment platform - when the phrase ‘influencer marketing’ comes up, many marketers still think Instagram-first by default. 

That is a big mistake. 

YouTube influencer marketing is a rather different beast to influencer marketing on other social platforms. Where Instagram is often good for a quick hit of big exposure with an eye-catching image or striking video clip, and TikTok influencer marketing can trigger a viral wave of exposure if you manage to kickstart an engaging creative trend - and how Twitch works is completely different yet again - the content you’ll get from YouTube influencer marketing is often deeper, more involved, more engaging, and much more long-lasting. 

YouTube influencer campaigns can deliver much more, and for longer 

YouTube influencer marketing campaigns can have much greater scope and potency than influence marketing elsewhere. Being a long-form video platform with no technical restrictions, YouTube is wide open in terms of the kind of creators, content, audiences, subject matter, and styles of discussion it can host. On YouTube, you’ll find everything from gaming influencers, to food influencers, to short film-makers, to animators, to musicians, to documentary channels, to sketch comedy groups, to vloggers, to combinations of all of the above and more. That makes YouTube the most creatively versatile platform you can use for influencer marketing. 

Whatever format you want to use, whatever showcase treatment you want to give your product, and however you want to tell your brand story, YouTube influencer campaigns can provide an innovative, progressive creative solution with high-end production values. And thanks to the audience loyalty that YouTube influencers enjoy, and the persistent, long-tail content-surfacing inherent to the platform, a well-designed YouTube influencer campaign will connect with an engaged, highly targeted community, and stick around accruing further views for a very long time after its launch. 

A YouTube influencer agency vs. a YouTube influencer platform 

Of course, if you’re looking to navigate YouTuber influencer marketing, you’re likely looking for some form of external guidance. There are - broadly - two forms of assistance you can recruit to this end, a specialist YouTube influencer marketing agency or an influencer marketing platform. The former is (at least in Fourth Floor’s case) a full-service group of humans filled with campaign management, creative ideation, data insight, and delivery experience, who have extensive personal connections and deep roots within the YouTube influencer ecosystem. The latter is a largely data-driven service that utilises database search to ‘match’ brands with an extensive, pre-existing list of YouTube content creators who might be a good fit for a campaign based on certain entered criteria. 

While a YouTube influencer marketing platform might initially seem an efficient and approachable method of researching the influencer marketing space - and there are certainly plenty to choose from - for us, the human factor of a YouTube influencer marketing agency is vital in getting a campaign right. YouTube influencer marketing has so much open-ended creative potential, and such ever-evolving tools, approaches, and audience in-roads to explore, that to work with it most effectively needs more than a search function. 

It needs human insight, and a nuanced understanding of individual content creators, their output, their audience, and their personal values and working practices. It needs organic, flexible, adaptive creative thinking to put together campaigns - whether long, short, or ongoing in the case of YouTube advocacy marketing - that utilise the full potential of the platform. YouTube influencer marketing should tell real stories and create exciting, compelling moments that present things in fresh ways, to capture the imaginations of exactly the right communities, fans, and cross-over demographics. 

And of course, it should be able to capitalise on successes by both truly understanding results  data, and maintaining beneficial, human relationships with content creators over the long term. As we see the real potential of YouTube influencer marketing, to get it right, you need the full scope of a YouTube influencer marketing agency. 

YouTube influencer data is vital to mastering the science behind the art 

YouTube influencer data is the solid, unambiguous foundation that holds up the human nuance. While the right creative idea and execution are key in crafting a message that a YouTube audience will respond to, zoning in on the right initial partnerships needs a combination of instinct and insight. 

Deep YouTube influencer data - like the kind sourced and analysed by our Insight team using our proprietary Insight Engine technology - can effectively see through the Matrix of YouTube performance, acting as an x-ray for audience behaviour, community reactions, viewership cross-over, and potentially undiscovered adjacent markets. 

Combining with human expertise and cultural awareness of the sector, you can weave YouTube influencer marketing campaigns that are creatively exciting and strategically bulletproof.