When it comes to social networks, few channels can compete with YouTube’s success; with over 1 billion registered users and over 1 billion hours of videos being watched every day, YouTube is one of the most popular and most used websites in the world. Naturally, this presents a huge opportunity for businesses to leverage this popular platform in order to market their business.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about using YouTube for business, why you need to consider it for your marketing strategy and how to get started and start putting together your strategy.
Why YouTube?
As I mentioned earlier, YouTube is an incredibly popular platform, used throughout the world. So what does this mean for businesses?
- Reach a new audience and boost brand awareness: with such a huge user-base (YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world!), the potential reach is staggering. By creating quality videos, optimising them for SEO, and being an active member of your community, you can not only grow your brand awareness and website traffic, but also your lead generation
- Demonstrate your knowledge & expertise and boost your authority: video marketing in general is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge of a subject, through educational and instructional videos, video interviews with relevant influencers and thought leaders, and so on. For those who want to become influential in their niche, YouTube is a great option.
- Build trust and generate more leads: following up on my previous point, by creating educational and informative videos, you’re also helping build up trust and credibility with your target audience. Just like with a blog, strive to create only high-quality videos, with a focus on providing value to your target audience
- Boost your engagement: videos tend to generate much more engagement than other popular forms of content: more shares, more likes, more comments. You can use YouTube as a way to connect directly with your audience and interact through comments regularly
- YouTube content is evergreen: the content you post on YouTube can continue to generate results even years after the publishing date. Just like an evergreen post on your blog that people keep finding via Google, years later!
So, if you want to start leveraging this popular social network, go create a YouTube business account and read on for some useful YouTube tips:
How to get started with YouTube
What’s your strategy?
Like with any digital marketing tactic (or any kind of marketing tactic, really!), strategy is very important – and it needs to be established before you start creating any content or posting anything.
Especially since video requires more work in terms of content creation than other social networks, so you need to be clear from the start about what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it if you want to be productive with your time.
Most importantly, you need to establish what exactly you want to achieve with your channel: promote your products? Become a thought leader or influencer? Build trust and engage your audience?
Your goals will then inform the rest of your strategy: what types of videos you need to create, how often you need to publish new content, and so on.
Creating content for YouTube
One of the main things that keeps businesses from leveraging YouTube, as opposed to other social networks, is that, well…you need to create videos, consistently.
Which is definitely not as easy as creating images to share on Instagram or text-only/link updates for Facebook. But it’s also not as difficult as one might think. You can try:
- Live streaming interviews, educational topics, and Q&A video
- Create animated videos using tools like Moovly, Powtoon, and Biteable- all very easy to use so you don’t need any experience with producing and editing animated videos
- Just film yourself talking: if you’re charismatic and good in front of a camera!
- Use video marketing tools like Wave and Slide.ly Promo to create and edit live-action videos using existing video stock footage
YouTube and SEO
YouTube has amazing reach. And what’s more, as I mentioned earlier, it’s the second biggest search engine in the world (yeah, no, it’s definitely not Bing).
So what does that mean for your videos? Well, quite simply, that if you properly optimise your videos and target the right keywords, you can help generate impressive numbers of views on your videos.
For example, Evan Carmichael is an entrepreneur who is very active on YouTube, with over 1.3 million subscribers as of date.
And yet, his most popular videos (and there are quite a few!) generate in excess of 2-3 million views. So, how did he achieve that?
Well, for one, the videos are good. They’re well edited, they provide value, and they deliver what’s in the headline.
But arguably, another big reason why videos like “Steve Jobs’s 10 rules for success” get over 5 million views: they’re using keywords that people often search for (both on Google and on YouTube). So if you want to learn more about Steve Jobs and success, this is the top result you’ll see:
Or, if you look up “success tips”:
By optimising your videos for search and targeting the right keywords, you can generate some pretty amazing results – like getting millions of views on your videos.
Managing your YouTube Channel
Managing your YouTube channel can get a big challenging as your account grows and gets more subscribers and engagement.
However, if you want to continue to grow your channel, you need to be as active as possible, engage, and monitor for other opportunities.
Make sure to:
- Post new videos consistently: preferably, build a schedule and stick to it, so your subscribers know when to expect a new video
- Respond to every comment you get in a timely manner
- Use social listening to uncover any mentions of your brand, as well as any lead opportunities
The issue with managing a YouTube channel is that unlike other popular social networks, there simply aren’t that many tools that allow you to manage your account like you would on Twitter or Facebook. And as your channel grows, managing your account will only get more challenging.
Use a tool like Agorapulseto help you manage your account, including a social inbox where you can see all of your comments and respond to them (as well as with “saved replies”, to help you save time), a CRM tool for managing your fans and followers, and social listening for uncovering more opportunities.
Conclusion
YouTube marketing is a great way to stand out from your competitors and generate better results for your business, like:
- Reaching a wider audience and improving your brand awareness
- Build trust amongst your audience
- Generate more leads and convert more of your leadsinto customers
- Demonstrate your knowledge of your niche and your expertise, in order to boost your authority and build trust
- Become a thought leader and influencer in your industry
Have you tried using YouTube for marketing your business yet? What is your strategy like and how did it impact your overall results?
