YouTube Marketing and How To Use It For Your Business
Back in 2005 a little video website kicked off. What started as people sharing random videos of themselves evolved to define our expectations of internet media. Today, YouTube is a behemoth and considered the most valuable video-sharing platform site in the world. In fact, one billion hours of video content is consumed on YouTube daily.
Smart businesses are using that massive audience to grab the attention of new or potential customers so that they can ramp up their growth. But it’s not as easy as “throw together a video, hit publish, and rake in the customers”. With everyone scrambling to take advantage of the platform, how can your business get noticed by using YouTube marketing?
Table of Contents:
YouTube Marketing is a Big Deal – and It’s Getting Bigger
Why Your Business Should Use YouTube Marketing
How to Make Sure Your YouTube Marketing Stands Out
Are You Ready to Take Advantage of Marketing on YouTube?
YouTube Marketing is a Big Deal – and It’s Getting Bigger
According to recent data, YouTube has over 1.7 billion monthly active users. It’s not an overstatement to say that's a lot of potential customers. And it's not just people watching cat videos – YouTube is now a powerful platform for marketing and advertising. YouTube marketing can help businesses to reach new and specific audiences, build brand awareness and drive sales. And best of all, it's relatively affordable and easy to set up an account.
All you need is a video camera (we all have one in our pockets!) and a YouTube account. There are many different ways to market your business on YouTube, so it's important to develop a strategy that fits your goals and objectives.
YouTube marketing is important for several reasons. First, YouTube is the second largest website and search engine in the world, behind only Google (hardly a surprise given that Google owns YouTube). With all those eyes passing through each day, there is a huge potential audience for your videos. Also, YouTube is highly effective at reaching people who are already interested in your product or service. When someone searches for a keyword related to your business on YouTube, they are likely to see your video in the results.
As a bonus, YouTube marketing can be very cost-effective. The average cost-per-view of a video is $.01 to $.03 (to figure out your cost-per-view, simply take the total amount of spend on a video and divide it by the number of views) which is a lot cheaper than many other marketing strategies.
Why Your Business Should Use YouTube Marketing
Now that we’ve established why YouTube marketing is important more generally, how is your brand going to benefit? Here are a few points to consider:
The benefits of YouTube extend far beyond the platform itself. We've seen a 300% increase in traffic to web pages with embedded videos while impressions have doubled.
It’s A Powerful Search Engine
Being huge has its advantages. YouTube sees a ton of visitors each day and because it’s owned by Google, it’s actually powered by the most often-used search engine worldwide. This means that if you optimize your videos for search, then you’ll make your videos incredibly easy for anyone to find–which is great for growing your audience, gaining new customers, and generating more leads.
Videos are Great for Building Trust
With the push for more video content by all the major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) these last few years, consumers have come to really rely on them to learn more about products and services. Showcasing your product or services through video, helps customers understand your brand better, see results in action, and it can alleviate any trepidation a potential customer may have. Video is a great avenue for building trust for your brand.
Seamless integration makes it easy
YouTube videos can be shared everywhere with just a few clicks. Once you post videos on YouTube, you can share them on your social feeds, embed them on your websites, and send direct links to anyone. Their ubiquity means practically all platforms have functionality that makes sharing YouTube vids (and thus broadening their reach) super easy.
Directly target the people you want
With YouTube marketing, you have access to unique and advanced targeting parameters. When building out your campaigns, you can set targeting parameters based on demographics (age, sex, location, etc.) and psychographics (interests, attitudes, and lifestyle). This means that only those users who meet your criteria will be served your video.
You can even use retargeting methods based on whether or not someone watched your videos or visited your website with future video campaigns. When posting on YouTube organically, you can’t be as specific, but you can still add keywords to meta descriptions and titles to help your video get in front of those seeking that type of content.
When creating a YouTube marketing strategy, it is important to consider your target audience and what type of content they are likely to respond to. If you create engaging and informative videos, you’ll succeed. HubSpot reports that 86% of marketers believe that video (whether on YouTube or elsewhere) is an essential part of their strategy.
If you’re not using YouTube as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with potential customers.
How to Make Sure Your YouTube Marketing Stands Out
If you’ve never done it before marketing your YouTube channel can feel like a daunting task. We’ve put together a few steps you can follow to get started with confidence.
Create Great Content
Not long ago, it seemed like you could upload just about anything, and it would get views. Now, there are over 800 million videos on YouTube alone. If you truly want to stand out, then your content needs to be well done and your videos need to provide value to your potential audience. We recommend:
- Create Learner Videos - These help customers understand concepts, topics, or products better.
- Create Testimonials - These help customers gain confidence in your products and services and understand how you can benefit them.
- Tell Stories - Stories can be about anything, but you want to make sure they are informational, educational, or provide levity.
- Entertain - It’s hard to beat a good laugh. Connecting your brand to an emotion as powerful as laughter can help raise your brand affinity. In fact, customers who form an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value.
Smash the Subscribe Button
If you’ve watched more than a handful of YouTube videos, you’ve seen the person on the other side asking you to like, subscribe, and update your notifications. It’s repetitive and has become a bit silly, but it’s also effective. Just as a good email or social post needs a strong CTA to encourage clicks, ask your audience members to take action.
Post It Everywhere
People can’t follow you if they don’t know where you are. You should post your YouTube channel link or social buttons on your website, your social media pages, and even in your email footers and signatures. You can even match specific videos to a customer’s interests. If someone likes your products or services or wants to know more about you, then directing them to that information ensures they can find it quickly and easily.
Connect with Other Channels
If you have the opportunity to collaborate with other channels, especially popular ones, then that could be a great way to help promote your channel as well. Essentially, you are borrowing their audience, the trust they’ve already built, and getting your name and company out there in more places for people to discover you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimizing your individual videos is important, but so is optimizing your channel itself. Make sure that you have product and company names but also targeting keywords that your potential audience members would use throughout video titles, meta descriptions, and in your “About” description. scattered throughout your channel. Consider “If I were in the market for the products I sell, what phrases would I search for?” A great tool to consider is Answer the Public. You can fill in a keyword and it will show you questions asked through Google regarding that keyword, and sort the questions by popularity.
Besides using the correct keywords, providing detailed information, and making great content are all factors considered when optimizing your videos for search. Google isn’t interested in promoting bad content and they will punish those that don’t take the time to do the few basic things they ask for. Ensure that you are following optimization best practices every time you post a video.
In summary:
Choose strong and proper keywords (in the title and description)
- Use quality thumbnails (previews of your videos)
- Select the right categories
- Add subtitles and closed captioning
Educate, Inform and Entertain
Any content a business creates should have a purpose. A general rule of thumb is that content should either educate, inform or entertain your audience. If your video doesn’t achieve one of these things you might be wasting someone’s time–which is a quick way to lose trust, and potential customers.
Fortunately, the ways you can achieve these three objectives are endless. Here are several types of videos you can create:
- Make how-to or 101 style videos
- Show real customers using your products
- Interviews and case studies showcasing strong results
- Make a fun commercial
- Make industry-specific videos that don’t showcase your product directly
- Develop a video FAQ to explain your product–this is great to share on your website
- Share videos of your products at live trade shows or demonstrations
Get creative and have some fun while you do it.
Don’t Forget Links and CTAS
YouTube Marketing allows brands to post links and lead their viewers to more of their videos. Make sure you utilize these tools. Post your company’s name and website in the video through logos or graphics. Then provide links and information in the details section of your video as well. Just as we ask our audience members to like and subscribe, ask them to visit your site for more information or to purchase your product.
Purchase YouTube Ads
There is a tried and true way of increasing your chances of people seeing your videos; purchasing an ad. Similar to Google ads, these are those “Sponsored” videos mentioned at the top when you search for specific keywords or phrases.
YouTube Advertising offers a variety of ad placements, and it’s a great way to get your content seen.
Learn From Experience
Similar to other marketing methods, there is no perfect way to do something for every business every time. You have to find what works for you and reach your desired audience. As you continue throughout your YouTube marketing journey, consider what’s working and what’s not. Try new things often and test whenever you can. Looking through metrics provided by your YouTube Ad account can help you decide if your current strategy is playing out as expected or if you should consider pivoting to something else.
To do this properly, you should create a video marketing playbook that can be edited as you go along.
Pay Attention to Trends
Very few things in this world, especially in marketing, are “set it and forget it.” Pay attention to new YouTube trends and jump on them when it makes sense for you to do so. It’s always essential to be looking into the future to see how you can use it to grow your business.
Here are some important video trends for 2022:
- Captioning - Adding captions to videos make them more accessible and lead to higher views and completion rates.
- Even More Video-Making - Video streaming is expected to be as much as 82% of total web traffic by 2022.
- Watch Videos, Buy Products - 68% of YouTube users watched a video to help make a purchasing decision.
- More Devices, More Ways to Consume Content - The average U.S. household has 11 wifi-connected devices.
- Shoppable Videos - Love that skirt you saw in a Target ad? Videos can now direct you exactly where you need to go to purchase it.
- Make Videos Interactive - More video marketers are making interactive videos for people to engage with.
Are You Ready to Take Advantage of Marketing on YouTube?
By this point it should be pretty obvious – YouTube Marketing is a great tool for your business. And the best part is that you don’t have to go at it alone. There are a great number of video production partners you can connect with such as Superside, and tutorials you can watch or read.
If all of this seems too daunting, reach out to Superside. We are experts at building video marketing strategies that see results. We also have amazing designers ready to help you level up and grow your business.
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