Most businesses, when they think about social media promotion choose Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to power their marketing efforts. However, YouTube is one of the biggest social networks in the world.
In fact, YouTube is the second biggest global website which is packed with immense opportunities to increase awareness of your business, drive more traffic and engagement, and generate more leads.
In this article
Why YouTube?
Before getting to the why’s and how’s, here are some useful figures that help you understand why YouTube is the ideal platform to promote your business. YouTube has got 2 billion monthly users and 73% of adults in the U.S use YouTube. Moreover, YouTube isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, which makes things better. If you want to enjoy the benefits of this popularity, you can alternatively think about making a site like YouTube.
YouTube is where your audience is which is one of the biggest benefits of using YouTube from a promotional point of view. YouTube has become an indispensable advertising and marketing tool for brands in every industry to promote their business to prospects and customers.
How to Leverage YouTube Marketing to Grow your Business?
A good YouTube marketing strategy will help you reach a more global audience and improve your business performance overall. The reason many businesses use YouTube marketing is that it is very effective in targeting specific audience bases. It is not only a way to reach an extremely large audience base, but also one of the most effective marketing channels.
Here are some of the proven tips and tricks to intelligently use YouTube to grow your business.
Create a strategy
Creating YouTube videos may sound easy, but it actually requires a lot of planning and following specific guidelines to make your videos get found, watched, and compel your viewers to click on it. To start with it, find your specific goals. Why do you want to create YouTube videos? What do you want to achieve with YouTube and video marketing? For example, YouTube marketing goals for businesses can be:
- Driving more traffic to your site
- Increasing brand awareness and engagement
- Generating more leads and conversions
- Improving sales
Knowing your specific objectives will place you in a better position where you can create the right videos for your channel that will help you achieve your specific business goals.
Figure out your format
There is no one best formula for an effective YouTube marketing strategy. Some style works great for certain niches and resonates well with your target audience. The key to success lies in finding the format that suits your audience’s requirements and your business goals. You can stick to formats including tutorials, explainers, vlog styled videos, product reviews, TV commercial style videos, etc.
Decide on the type of videos you can create
The best thing about creating videos for YouTube marketing is that you don’t have to be experienced to create professional videos. You can just use a smartphone to create videos. But, make sure you use a tripod, have a good lighting set up, and audio sources so that everything on screen can be seen and heard clearly. Consider using a tripod to keep your phone or camera steady. You can also use basic video software to add titles and edit between different shots.
When deciding on the length, try out both shorter and longer videos to see what works the best for you. When you are starting out, shorter videos work best as these can be shared on social media as well. Choose the length based on what works for your audience.
If you are looking for effective ways to foster engagement, running YouTube contests can be a great way. For example, you can use tools like Woorise to create powerful YouTube contests and competitions to generate user engagement and generate sales.
Research your competition
Competition analysis is the first thing you need to do if you want to stay ahead of your competition in your niche on YouTube. Fortunately, there is no shortage of tools and information you need to find the opportunities available.
Research your competition by taking a look at your competitor’s channel and analyze which videos get the most and least views and why. This will help you gain a better understanding of what kind of content your target audience likes to watch so that you cause use these insights to power your own video content strategy.
Apart from competition analysis, pay attention to your YouTube channel and start actively engaging with your community to understand their needs.
Keywords are important
Using keywords is one of the most significant things when you are doing YouTube marketing for your business. Keywords must be relevant to the nature and content of your videos. You need to use the main keywords in your video title, description, and tags.
Having relevant keywords also tells the search engine what the video content is all about. When people search for videos similar to your niche, the keywords will help to find them easily.
Use a good keyword planner like the one from Google to find hot keywords relevant to your niche. You can also check out similar videos from your competitor’s YouTube channel and adopt the same keywords if it works for you.
Include an appealing call to action
The whole point of creating YouTube videos is to take some sort of action that gets them closer to your sales funnel. Usually, you won’t sell directly on YouTube. Instead, you would want to generate leads that you can market to regularly.
In your YouTube videos, it is important to add a link to the landing page or blog page or website. At the end of your videos, you must also tell your viewers to visit your website or do a particular action. Wherever you take them, you must have integrated effective ways to capture the contact information of viewers.
Besides adding a website link, some of the other effective call to action can be asking them to subscribe to your YouTube channel, rate your videos, or follow your business on social networks. You can also encourage your audience to share your videos with their friends as well.
Maintain an active presence
YouTube is a popular social network, which means you need to be social and maintain an active online presence. When people comment on your videos, take time to appreciate their opinion and thank them. If someone throws questions at you, answer it as well.
You must also comment on other YouTube videos so that viewers from those channels will come to your channel. Another effective technique is to create playlists of videos on a similar topic where you can add your own videos and those of others.
Managing your channel
When you actually start using YouTube for your business, you will get to know that there are many management tools to maintain your YouTube channel- at least not like social media. But as you grow in YouTube, a management tool becomes a necessity as it is vital to manage how you respond to your viewers as well as monitor your performance.
You can also go for social media management tools that work great with YouTube as well. What you need is a good tool that helps you monitor and manage all of your YouTube channel activities in one single place-and that includes responding to the comments of your viewers. Plus, you must be able to pre-moderate comments and choose what to publish and when you do it which helps you to respond to comments more efficiently and quickly.
Promote your videos and channel
To taste true success, don’t wait for viewers to simply find your videos. Take the initiative and tell the world you have a channel where you regularly post videos on particular topics. Spread the word on your website, blog, social media handles, and send emails to your list as well.
Whenever you contact your prospects and customers, tell about your YouTube channel. As YouTube is one of the biggest search engines in the world after Google, you need to optimize your videos for the YouTube search engine.
For effective search engine optimization, here are some of the things to consider.
- Niche related keywords – Choose keywords that represent your business and your content to make YouTube understand what your videos are all about.
- Title and description – You need to craft a catchy title and description by including relevant keywords.
- Tags – Just like keywords another important thing to incorporate in your videos is video tags that are relevant to your video content to ensure higher visibility.
- Watch time – The more your viewers watch your videos, the better your SEO would be. This is because YouTube will promote videos with longer watch time rather than the ones being opened and closed quickly.
- Engagement metrics – When it comes to engagement, YouTube measures the engagement through comments, likes, dislikes, and shares each video gets. You can use Youtube rank tracker to get grips with how your video is performing in terms of search.
- The number of subscribers – YouTube does take a look into the number of subscribers you get immediately after viewing your videos as well.
How to Leverage YouTube Ads for your Business Growth?
For businesses that use YouTube to grow their business, YouTube ad represents a big opportunity to reach the target market efficiently. YouTube business model is basically an advertisement powered revenue model that uses advertisements to power their services.
You don’t have to be a creative video creator to grow and generate revenue for your business. But as YouTube ad format relies primarily on videos, mastering YouTube ads can seem a bit daunting initially.
In this section, let’s take an in-depth analysis of how you can leverage YouTube ads to grow your business.
The different type of YouTube ads
If you are thinking about how to create a website like YouTube, advertisements would be your primary revenue stream. In a broad aspect, YouTube ads are divided into two- Skippable and non-skippable advertisements.
Skippable ads are ads that don’t force viewers to watch. These types of ads are popularly called as TrueView advertisements and can be displayed in two different ways- In-stream ads and In-display ads. While YouTube doesn’t clearly specify a desirable length for TrueView ads, it is better to keep it short.
Over 50% of In-stream ads follow an ad format where the length of the videos is around 15-30 seconds. If you want to create videos longer than this, make sure you keep the length around 3 minutes. Whereas In-display ads don’t have a maximum suggest length, but these types of ads take people directly to videos so that there is no problem in keeping the length a bit long.
There is no problem if your video length crosses a definite length, but ensure that the length matches with quality and value. However, if you are creating a YouTube ad from scratch, you might want to keep the length short as it would be easy to create. In-stream ads are pre-roll ads displayed at the beginning of videos. Pre-roll ads are a common type of ad businesses use when advertising on YouTube. If you are new to YouTube advertising, in-stream pre-roll ads can be a great way to achieve a variety of business goals.
Non-skippable YouTube ads are the ones that force viewers to watch. The ideal length of such type of videos is typically 15-20 seconds. These types of ads are also great to get better user engagement and are often associated with a higher video view abandonment rate. However, non-skippable ads get a bad reputation as they seem to be forceful. However, if your ads are targeted effectively, they would not be viewed in a bad way. In fact, good ads would be shared on social media for entertainment as well.
Creating videos for your YouTube ads
To place YouTube ads, you need to create niche videos that are powerful enough to bring in more viewers and engagement. When you create the script, make sure you are well versed in how to sell your product.
Consider using an explained ad format that will help to create effective video ads. YouTube ads represent lucrative opportunities to bring forth your brand in front of potential customers.
As with all ad platforms, you must have a well-prepared content strategy if you want to run successful ad campaigns for your business. That includes learning how to create compelling pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll videos and knowing how to target your customers with ads the best way.
Whether you are using skippable or non-skippable ads, you have to keep an eye on the engagement metrics. You might not get it right initially, but frequent usage and testing will help you understand how to create ads based on your goals.
Try collaborating with influencers
One of the great ways to display your products and services on YouTube is by closely working with popular influencers on YouTube. The statistics from Google says over 60% of the audience consider the opinions of their favorite influencers. Tapping into an influential audience can result in massive results if used significantly.
Choose influencers who you trust your brand and are ready to put up their honest and upfront view about your brand. When it comes to paid partnerships with popular influencers, work closely to craft the content strategy. The more freedom you give them to create a content strategy, the more genuine the videos would be making a huge positive impact on your brand.
Upload and schedule your videos
Once you have created well-optimized videos according to your plan, it is time to upload and schedule your videos. What is the best way and time to schedule your videos? As you might already know, YouTube is as popular as traditional TV and most viewers treat YouTube channels like TV channels. So it is important to run your channel like a traditional TV channel by sharing content on a consistent schedule.
If you promise your viewers they will get a new video on a regular schedule, they will tune in at the same time every day to see your videos. If you just starting out, make sure you keep a few episodes of content ready to schedule ahead of time. Creating YouTube videos in advance generally means you can keep up the consistency in quality and timing.
Organize your videos to playlists
To make the most out of your videos, organize it into playlists so that they will auto-play until the playlist ends ensuring longer visibility. This will also keep your audience on your channel for longer increasing the average watch time on your channel. You can build YouTube playlists on your channel and manage them using your regular management tools. However, make sure you curate your playlist carefully. Maintain a logical progression of ideas from one video to another. This will reduce the chances of people clicking away to another YouTube channel.
You can either choose to create playlists using your own videos or videos of others. Similarly, if you have started partnering with other popular YouTubers, you can ask their permission to add your videos to their playlists. Make sure you include all keywords in your playlist title to power your SEO activities.
Conclusion
When you start implementing YouTube marketing for your business, start simple. As you create more videos, you will get a better hang of it. You will get to know how to film better, refine the style and format, improve keyword usage, and add call to actions.
Never forget to get feedback from your viewers about your videos through your YouTube channel and social media. Be consistent and focus on delivering quality content. No matter what your niche is, viewers will appreciate it if you stream the best quality content. Upload new videos consistently so that your audience knows when to tune in to your channel.
Over time, you will advance with YouTube marketing and grow your audience base and YouTube will become an essential advertising channel for your brand.
