How To Make Real-World Product Placement Work On YouTube Videos

July 1st, 2022  |  by maria

How To Make Real-World Product Placement Work On YouTube Videos -

Thanks to the film and TV industries, product placement is a common form of marketing that gives brands exposure to a wide audience. Product placement has evolved and while it remains in TV shows and movies, social media is its new home. The average daily time spent using social media is 2h 27m, offering companies ample opportunity to get their products and services in front of consumers.

With social media content and marketing tailored to each user's tastes and sensibilities, brands can target demographics more easily than ever before. Let’s discover how real-world product placement can work well on YouTube and the ways it can benefit brands.

What is YouTube product placement?

In a nutshell, YouTube product placement is a way to show off your product or service through the social media platform. That can be through a sponsored post by an influencer or streamer or by showing your product off on the platform yourself to show how it works best.

YouTube is a classic sponsorship channel for a reason: 70% of viewers have bought a product they saw featured on YouTube. With such a high success rate, it’s essential to get your brand onto the social media platform.

A YouTuber may create an entire post reviewing a certain product or they may introduce the brand they are endorsing naturally, using the product more casually. Effective product placement must be in style with the YouTube channel, is unbiased and clearly the influencer’s opinion while providing a strong call to action.

Product placement ethics

Unlike in films and TV shows, social media product placement can’t just magically appear on screen. Posts must be clearly labelled as sponsored or including paid promotion. This is an important evolution in how social media personalities post to their followers to ensure they aren’t misleading them.

Given that social media personalities are more commonly known as influencers, the power they have to direct people towards certain goods and products cannot be understated. Viewers who wish to be more like their influencer idols may be buying goods and services they endorse, thinking they are being just like them.

But in truth, those influencers have been paid to promote those products and services. Social media product placement must also comply with advertising laws, particularly age-restricted products and brands from the food and beverage industries.

The benefits of product placement on social media

Audiences who follow a YouTube personality closely often form a personal bond with them. This is because vloggers understand their audiences, and as such have an inherent level of trust. If they are willing to endorse a certain product, then the authority of the YouTuber’s opinion will be weighted much heavier than a generic marketing post. That endorsement can help garner an increased level of trust in your brand with the audiences of these social media personalities which, inturn, increase the authenticity of your brand to your followers.

If the YouTuber genuinely believes in your product and brand you can co-create content that goes into further details about the functionalities, providing informative content and naturally endorsing the products selling points. When collaborating with a YouTube influencer, make sure to establish your call to action early and show the benefits of it rather than simply shouting it out.

Product placement on social media in real-world situations through digital marketing campaigns also showcases the benefits of what your brand is offering. It shows potential buyers what your products and services look like and how they handle while performing the task they are designed for. Having an influencer do a review of your product can help to create a buzz within their audience if they find themselves loving it.

Choose the right YouTuber

One of the most important aspects of YouTube product placement is choosing the right personality or influencer to showcase your product and grow your YouTube channel. It’s vital to choose a streamer or influencer whose content is appropriate for the type of product and service you offer. Equally, their audience must also align with your target demographic.

Fortunately many different types of influencers cover a wide range of industries, specialities and niches. Despite their abundance, selecting the right person requires a lot of work, but that pays off by putting your brand in front of the right audience.

To choose an influencer for product placement, consider a YouTuber who:

  • Has an audience similar to your customers,
  • Works in a style complementary to your brand,
  • Creates aspirational videos your brand wants to use;
  • Has a wide enough audience to make product placement worthwhile.

You may wish to find the right YouTuber through an agency, rather than doing all of the research in-house as this can be time-consuming. Plus, once you have found an influencer you like, you may discover they aren’t receptive to being solicited directly.

Influencer levels

It’s important to note that not all social media influencers are equal. Some have millions of followers while others can count their audiences in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Each level of influencer has their place in digital marketing however, and opting for the widest-reaching YouTube star isn’t always the best approach.

Sure, they might have a larger audience, so your product is exposed to more people, but the vast majority of those followers may have no interest in your product or service. A social media star who has a smaller audience may operate in a more niche section of the platform, therefore exposing your brand to a community of like-minded followers.

Generating a buzz through effective product placement with them can encourage a better rate of conversions and interest than a more generic post by a more popular influencer. There is also the cost of sponsoring a post to consider when deciding on the level of social media personality.

Online commerce platform, Shopify, reports that average influencer level costs are broken down as such:

  • Nano (1–10K followers): $10–$100 per post
  • Micro (10–100K followers): $100–$500 per post
  • Mid (100–500K followers): $500–$5K per post
  • Macro (500K–1M followers): $5K–10K per post
  • Mega (1M+ followers): $10K+ per post

Knowing how much it’s going to cost to get your product placement into a YouTuber’s content helps to allocate a marketing budget for it. There is a sharp increase in cost as you get closer to half a million followers with mid and macro influencers.

Weighing up the cost of a mega influencer versus a more niche and tailored approach to product placement with nano and micro influencers is important. You may be blowing a significant chunk of your marketing funds on a mega influencer whose audience won’t resonate with your product at all. On the other hand, for a relatively small outlay, nano and micro influencers can build better trust in your brand through their reviews and sponsored posts.

In summary

In our digital age, social media is the modern stage for people to advertise new products with an eye-catching post. YouTube is a unique channel that requires special attention (and an appropriate budget) to promote your brand and highlight your USP. With a well-timed and targeted strategy tailored to your hero product, YouTube becomes the perfect platform. In an instant, you can upload an engaging video that elevates your product and resonates with your audience to achieve valuable followers, increased rates of conversions and overall business growth.

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