YouTube Pre-roll Advertising for Senior Living

The Longest 5 Seconds in Senior Living Advertising

Creating YouTube Pre-roll Ads That Engage

As senior living marketers, we’re always looking for a new technique or wrinkle in an existing technique within our digital marketing efforts to help give our communities more visibility and engagement with prospects and active leads. One such ‘wrinkle’ often overlooked is right under our noses and easier to implement than many believe…YouTube pre-roll advertising.

If you’ve spent time searching on YouTube, you’ve seen pre-roll ads and there’s a good chance you’ve found them to be annoying. You click to watch a video and suddenly there’s a commercial you’re required to view for five seconds before you can click ‘Skip Ad’ and make it go away. These commercials can be annoying because they aren’t the least bit relevant to your search.

But they can be relevant and highly effective at reinforcing your brand and driving visitor traffic to your site where engagement can lead to an inquiry.

Similar to other forms of pay-per-click advertising, YouTube pre-roll ads allow for several targeting options including:

Interests – based on audience categories
Demographics – age, gender and location
Keywords – specific keywords that are relevant to the video ad
Topics – the particular subject and similar subjects as related to the video content

You don’t have to contract with a video production company to create a new YouTube pre-roll ad. Many senior living communities already have videos existing that provide tours of the community, testimonials from residents and family members and highlights from events and activities. With the help of a video editing expert, any of these videos can be turned into an effective YouTube pre-roll ad.

A few important tips to keep in mind when creating your pre-roll video ad:

The first 5 seconds are critical…your video needs to be engaging and relevant to avoid the ‘Skip’ button
Make sure your viewer knows who you are…either with text overlay or in the voiceover
Limit the video to 15 or 30 seconds. Go longer and you risk losing the viewer’s interest
Make sure your video content is aligned with your targeted keywords
Your pre-roll video should live on the community’s YouTube channel with other community videos
Optimize your YouTube channel’s profile so viewers can easily click over to your main website for more information

There’s no denying that YouTube is a powerful marketing force, albeit often neglected. There are 1.3 billion YouTube users with almost 5 billion videos watched per day. In an average month, 8 out of 10 individuals aged 18 – 49 will watch a YouTube video. Do you see an adult child influencer in there?

Solutions Advisors are experts in search engine and content marketing, including video content and promotion. To learn more about how we can help improve your community’s video campaign, please contact us.

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