Alibris

Alibris connects book buyers with millions of new, used and hard-to-find titles through thousands of independent sellers. It's a brand with a real story to tell, but a demographic problem to solve: its core audience skews older, and its future growth depends on reaching a younger one. Textbooks are a major revenue driver for Alibris, and the buyers who need them most, budget-conscious U.S. college students aged 18 to 24, were exactly the audience the brand had the hardest time reaching.

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We'd already been building that younger audience for Alibris on Instagram and TikTok, with a voice and a content engine that landed with students. YouTube was the natural next step, the one major platform the brand had never touched. And it started from zero: no subscribers, no video library and no watch history for YouTube's algorithm (the system that decides who sees which videos) to learn from.

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What We Did

From April to August 2026, we built the strategy around YouTube Shorts: vertical videos of 60 seconds or less that people swipe through, much like TikTok or Instagram Reels. Shorts are how 18 to 24 year olds discover new things on YouTube, so that's where we met them.

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• Shorts first. 50 of our 57 videos were true Shorts, built for the swipe-and-discover feed rather than search.
• A steady posting rhythm. 11 to 12 videos a month, every month, so YouTube always had fresh videos to show new viewers.
• Voice over polish. Witty, warm and human, like the friend with the good book rec, instead of another ad people scroll past.
• Read the data, then double down. We tracked which themes kept people watching and shifted the content calendar toward the winners.