The reaction I get most often when I suggest YouTube to a B2B client is a flinch about budget. They picture TV money. Big production, big media spend, the kind of thing only consumer brands with deep pockets do. And then they’re surprised when I tell them what it actually costs, because the gap between what they assume and what’s true is enormous.
So this post is mostly about clearing that up. The real case for YouTube isn’t that it’s a cheaper TV. It’s that it does things TV simply can’t: you aim it surgically, you optimize it toward an actual goal, and you do it all without the enormous media budget a TV campaign demands. The lower cost is a consequence of that, not the headline. But cheap and easy aren’t the same thing, and I’ll get to where the actual work is.
What many get wrong about TV
The flinch comes from picturing a TV campaign: a budget big enough to buy mass reach you can’t steer, shown to everyone whether they’re a buyer or not. That’s the part worth correcting. With YouTube you decide exactly who sees the film, by interest, by what they’ve been researching, by where they are in the buying process, and you can pour budget toward the people who matter instead of paying for a whole nation’s worth of viewers to reach a handful of them. TV can’t do that. It sells you everyone, at a price set for everyone.
The cost follows from that. Reaching a thousand people with a video on YouTube runs at roughly a half to a third of what the same reach costs on national TV. The numbers floating around put YouTube somewhere in the region of 85 to 160 kronor per thousand views, against a couple of hundred and up for national TV. Treat those as direction rather than gospel, the way I’d treat any external benchmark, but the direction isn’t subtle. And crucially you don’t need a TV-sized budget to begin at all, because you’re not buying mass reach, you’re buying the right reach.
The reach is also no longer the consolation prize it once was. In Sweden roughly 8.6 million people use YouTube, close to nine in ten of the population, and daily YouTube viewing has now overtaken linear TV here, with the fastest growth happening among older age groups rather than teenagers. That last part matters for B2B. The decision-makers you’re trying to reach, the ones you assumed were only watching traditional TV, are on YouTube now too.
So the old trade-off, mass reach on TV versus precise targeting online, has quietly collapsed. YouTube gives you the reach and the control, without the budget TV would demand for far less of either.
You can optimize towards what you actually want
The other thing TV can’t do, and where YouTube pulls ahead of a lot of awareness channels, is that you’re not stuck buying raw reach and hoping. You can optimize the campaign toward a specific outcome: video views if the job is memory, clicks if you want traffic, or conversions if you’re chasing action.
That flexibility is genuinely useful, but it comes with a trap I keep flagging across this series. Choosing the wrong objective quietly kills good campaigns. Optimize an awareness film toward conversions and the algorithm will chase the tiny slice of people ready to act today, which is exactly the 5 percent you don’t build a brand on. Know what the video is for before you pick the objective, or YouTube will happily optimize you toward the wrong thing.
Different videos for different jobs
This is also where B2B has an advantage over the single-film thinking most people bring to video. You’re not making one ad. You’re building a small library, each piece doing a different job at a different point in the funnel. An expert video that builds authority and gets you taken seriously early. A case video that proves you actually deliver, for buyers weighing you against alternatives. A service video that explains plainly what you do, for the ones trying to understand the offer. And broader brand films whose only job is to be remembered by the people who aren’t in the market yet.
That range is the whole point. The expert film and the awareness film aren’t competing, they’re aimed at different people at different stages, and YouTube lets you serve each to the right audience. Knowing which type belongs where, and how they add up to a coherent presence rather than a pile of unrelated clips, is the strategic part. It’s also where most of the value sits, long before anyone touches a camera.
Why YouTube targets better than display
This is the point I’d most want a client to take away, because it’s the one that’s least obvious. YouTube gives you noticeably better control than ordinary Google Display, and the reason is ownership. Google owns YouTube. Display, by contrast, is a sprawling third-party network of other people’s websites, so the connection between what someone searched for in Google and the ad they then see is looser and patchier.
On YouTube that link is tight. Because it’s all inside Google, the signal from what a person has been searching for can steer what they see on YouTube far more reliably than it can across the display network. For B2B, where the people researching a problem are exactly the people you want to reach, that’s a real advantage. You’re not scattering video across random sites and hoping the targeting holds. You’re using Google’s own understanding of intent, on Google’s own platform.
It’s the difference between renting space on a thousand strangers’ walls and advertising inside the building where your buyers already do their research.
Sequence targeting: the part worth getting right
Once you’re comfortable with the basics, this is where YouTube gets interesting. Sequence targeting lets you show someone a series of videos in a deliberate order, rather than the same film on repeat. It’s a smarter form of remarketing: one video to introduce the problem, a second to show how you solve it, a third to make the case for you specifically, served in that order to the same person over time.
Done well it mirrors how a B2B buyer actually moves, from not knowing they have a problem to weighing up suppliers. Done badly it’s just three ads in a trench coat. The value isn’t in knowing the feature exists, it’s in deciding what each step should say, in what order, to which audience, and how it connects to everything else you’re running. That’s the judgement, and it’s not something the platform hands you.
Where to begin
If you’ve been mentally filing YouTube under expensive TV-style advertising, that’s the assumption worth dropping. You can aim it at exactly the buyers you want, optimize it toward a real goal, reach an audience that now rivals television in Sweden, and start without a TV-sized budget. You can start small and learn fast.
What the low barrier hides is that the decisions still matter. What the film says, which objective you optimize toward, how you sequence the message, whether the targeting genuinely lines up with your buyers. Those are where a YouTube program is won or lost, and they’re not cheap in the only currency that counts, which is judgement. The platform is affordable. Using it well is the skill.
In the next post I’ll turn to video inside a display banner, the format most marketers don’t realize they can run at all.
If you in the meantime want to discuss effective marketing, just reach out to:
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
