How to address a global video audience

The challenge

Video campaigns let you show video ads on their own or within other streaming video content on YouTube and across the Google Display Network. But, as your global audience continues to grow and your channel reaches different countries speaking various languages, it’s tricky to know how to feel local and relevant in every market.

Your aim

To find the best model to suit your brand and keep users, wherever they may be, feeling engaged and enthused.

How to go about it

As your YouTube brand channel reaches different countries speaking various languages, you can adopt one of the three models to address your global audiences. What will work best for your YouTube brand channel and your market? Here, we lay out the advantages and disadvantages of each in terms of branding, engagement and channel management to help you decide.

Establish one main YouTube brand channel and upload content to it in multiple languages for multiple countries.

Branding

With this single channel representing your brand presence, your brand and any associated assets will be consistent across regions. If your audience uses the same terms to search across languages (e.g. a product name), this channel will be highly relevant and easy to find.

Engagement

Driving your video audience to one global channel will consolidate your viewership and channel subscribers and make it easier for users to find your channel in YouTube search. However, once discovered, it may become challenging to engage with your subscribers from across the world as a single audience since content is available in multiple languages. So your channel’s audience will be fragmented by language, and your channel community will see posts, comments and feed updates in many different languages.

To help your video audience stay engaged, you might consider adding subtitles and captions to your videos to make your content more accessible and available to a larger audience. You may also create unique sections and playlists on your channel for each key market to provide a consolidated offering by language and drive watch time.

Management

With all of your content in one place, your team can focus on deploying all resources on managing this single channel and make it easier to maintain consistent global branding and tone. Of course, the actual number of resources needed to manage a channel will depend entirely on how often you plan to upload content and the intensity of your individual channel strategy. Being consistent with uploads, ensuring brand equity and audience management is critical to growing a successful channel.

You create multiple channels, each featuring different language and geographical content. This can be very helpful for languages with various alphabets or search terms.

Branding

With a unique channel for each geographic location or language, you can customize each channel to the local audience and easily incorporate local events and promotions. If your brand identity varies slightly in different regions, this allows you to respect those differences and incorporate them into your YouTube brand channel strategy.

Engagement

While your viewership and subscribers will be split across multiple channels by language preference, it allows you to have focused communications with a specific, engaged audience. All items on the channel will be targeted to a language-specific audience which will mean an improved user experience. Don’t forget to specify which language a particular channel targets, since users may see various channels available in a search and typically larger channels trump smaller channels. It’s important to cross-promote your various language channels amongst each other to help improve discoverability. A great way to ensure that you’re cross-promoting effectively is to add channels of interest to the featured channels section of your channel’s "About" tab.

Management

With your channel content spread across multiple regions/languages, each local channel needs to allocate resources to manage the channel on an ongoing basis. Whether your channels follow a pre-defined framework or are managed by local teams, you’ll want to make sure that your brand can devote enough resources to launch and maintain each channel with a regular upload and engagement schedule.

You create a single YouTube brand channel serving as the main brand hub featuring global campaigns in the main brand language while supporting local channels that target different languages and regions. The aim is to foster a larger global presence while still connecting to local regions.

Branding

With this distribution of channel content, you can have consistent global branding in your hub channel while using the various local channels to feature local events and promotions. It may be helpful to adopt templates for your video metadata and video thumbnails to help maintain brand consistency across your various channels.

Engagement

With so many channels, viewership and subscribers will be segmented across multiple channels. However, users will still be able to find the relevant content for their specific language and receive a consistent experience when viewing content and engaging with the channel community. It’s important to use the main global channel to drive viewers to local channels using video metadata, channel descriptions and featured channel programming. Depending on upload frequency, more frequent uploads on the local channels may result in those channels receiving a more prominent placement in search results.

Management

This channel organization structure requires coordination between global and local teams but allows for flexibility when customizing brand messaging for local markets or featuring local campaigns. This may be the most resource-intensive channel organization structure as you will need to dedicate time to both a larger global channel and several local channels. But, the actual number of resources will depend on the regularity of uploads and engagement strategies implemented on each channel.

• Find out more about localizing your video ad campaigns here