UK watch time of fashion and beauty videos on YouTube is skyrocketing, revealing key opportunities for marketers to reach engaged audiences and convert them into customers
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12 OCTOBER 2020
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How consumers buy into fashion and beauty brands through video
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Fashion and beauty are burgeoning sectors that serve ever-expanding niche styles, as well as mainstream interests, and it’s no surprise that consumers in this area have an insatiable appetite to find the next trend. They look for inspiration everywhere, including YouTube.
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By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones
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Sources of inspiration
With youtube.com/fashion having just turned one year old, with over one million subscribers and counting, consumers on YouTube have an insatiable demand for style-focused videos that inspire them to make purchase decisions. This is particularly true in the UK, where watch time of designer clothing videos increased by over 200% since last year.
This presents a clear opportunity for both luxury and mainstream brands in terms of where they’re advertising, the content they’re creating and the partnerships they’re landing. Fashion content creator Patricia Bright, in conversation with Woodall in ‘This Is My YouTube’, typifies this trend: “I watch ‘haul’ videos to see what people have bought from stores such as Zara, what they picked up and their styling,” she says. “As much as I create content, I also consume content.”
Indeed, YouTube is also a source of beauty ideas and information about brands that don’t traditionally get the limelight. Bright, for example, passionately promotes black-owned beauty brands, and cites Nigerian-American creator Jackie Aina as a role model in this regard. “In a mainstream world where my beauty was not represented, seeing other girls in this space made me feel like I belonged,” Bright says.
And the inspiration brands aim to offer consumers on YouTube isn’t just driven by style – it can also be price, according to Tom Goode, customer and ecommerce director at online fashion retailer MandM Direct.
“We use YouTube to explain our buying model and how it started,” he says. “Our content is lifestyle-led and allows us to focus on our USP as an off-price retailer buying last season’s stock at a discount and passing savings on to consumers.”
He says the brand’s advertising aims to reach viewers watching videos about specific products – which indicates they are in-market for them – and to demonstrate how they can achieve the look they want for a fraction of the full price.
Shortening the path to purchase
In the highly competitive fashion and beauty sectors, marketers not only need to generate consumer desire, but also to convert that quickly into action before other brands have the chance to lure them away. Shoppable ads on YouTube are the mechanism by which brands can turn consumers’ engagement with video content into sales.
More brands want to sell direct to existing and new customers, and through Video action campaigns, for example, they can create a virtual storefront on YouTube with a browsable feed of products and a link. It means that, once inspired by the content, people get the chance to buy immediately from a brand’s website rather than remaining in browsing mode to consider alternatives.
Google research shows 51% of YouTube viewers say they have bought a brand after seeing it on the platform and Bright says she is one of them: “I do use YouTube as a shopping tool…I watch videos and think, ‘oh, where’s that belt from?’ If you had a link, I’d click on that and buy it. I am literally [just like] my audience.” This habit is not lost on brands such as MandM Direct, where Goode says there has been increased investment on YouTube thanks to advances in shoppable ads.
Similarly, at ASOS, Mooney says: “With the formats of ads that YouTube have now got, which are far more actionable, what we're more interested in is how we can show someone an advert and give them a true action.”
That means clicking through and, ultimately, buying. And these objectives – as well as the performance of ads and content – are best achieved through a keen understanding of what consumers are engaging with. As Mooney summarises, having this data means “we can discover what our audience are interested in and make better commercial decisions”. ■
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By Steve Hemsley
On YouTube, watch time of fashion review videos, for example, has increased by 130% in a year. And brands are taking notice, trying to authentically connect with customers and shortening the path to purchase by making their video ads shoppable. They’re upping investment in direct response ad formats such as TrueView for action, which saw a 260% annual increase in the number of active advertisers in 2019, and the newly launched Video action campaigns.
Seeing that fashion audiences are increasingly turning to YouTube, ASOS brand creative director John Mooney knows that “the authenticity has to shine through” in both advertising and organic content because, if it didn’t, audiences would “rebel” against them.
He also sees video as part of the brand’s “responsibility” to help fashion consumers along their journey from discovering products and looks, through finding out more about them, to making a purchase. “That's a responsibility to give people guidance and it's also a responsibility financially [for the brand], because if you give people guidance, that obviously helps convert into sales as well.”
Style expert Trinny Woodall illustrates this point in a new episode of ‘This Is My YouTube’. Woodall remembers attending an event in Ireland to launch Trinny London, and when her fans walked in, she says it was as if her entire wardrobe had entered the room. Her experience reiterates just how much consumers like to style themselves based on recommendations and advice from fashion and beauty channels and creators on YouTube. And they’re acting on those recommendations by purchasing.
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about what the UK loves
to watch on YouTube
Google internal data, UK, June 2020 vs June 2019
Google data, Global, Jan-Dec 2018 vs Jan-Dec 2019. Active advertisers count based on advertisers that had multiple TrueView for action campaigns with nonzero spend throughout the year.
Google internal data, UK, June 2020 vs June 2019
Global YouTube data, 1/3/2020 - 31/3/2020 compared to 1/3/2019 - 31/3/2019
Google/Talk Shoppe, 51% of 327 YouTube UK viewers, Jul 2020
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Advice and education
Consumers have plenty of opinions about style and beauty, but they’re also determined to learn more – whether to help them pick the right brands, to get the best out of products or to combine them to achieve a look. Hence the rise in viewing figures for how-to videos such as make-up tutorials, and tips on recycling and upcycling clothes. In fact, watch time of videos with ‘for beginners’ or ‘step by step’ in the title has increased over 65% year on year.
Through advertising alongside this kind of how-to content or producing their own videos in the same vein, brands have an opportunity to earn consideration from new consumers actively exploring and learning about new product categories. Mooney says creating how-to videos on YouTube has been “the lifeblood of ASOS for 10 years”, adding: “We want people to have the confidence to buy into what ASOS sells, and to give people confidence, you have to give them a little bit more guidance.”
For Woodall, fashion designer, writer and model Alexa Chung is one of her favourite YouTubers for fashion tips. She points to Chung’s video on how to dress like a stylish French woman, which has been viewed more than 3.5 million times. Chung’s videos and the people she interviews “tell you something and you leave with a little bit more knowledge”, Woodall says.
Imparting wisdom and advice to viewers is something brands can do too, to build trust with consumers. Indeed, the production style of YouTube how-to videos has become the new vernacular of fashion advertising, according to MandM Direct’s Goode. In the last 12 months the company has shifted its strategy to focus on core messaging to explain the company’s proposition in an authentic way, including through working with creators.
“We’re making advertorial or educational content around us as a brand, and the way we forge meaningful connections is in the way we create that. We use real people,” he says. This means showing how, for example, the retailer can help someone buy all their child’s clothes for the new school year for under £100 and get it delivered the next day.
Like ASOS, MandM Direct has embraced YouTube creators’ visual language in its creative. Fashion consumers seem very receptive to it, as Goode says the brand’s advertising “has worked a lot better for us”.
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