Why you need YouTube for marketing and how to use it

YouTube is watched daily by 1,300,000,000 people, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. There is no doubt that YouTube appeals to a mass audience and can help position your brand in front of a defined and relevant target audience too. With TV advertising skipped by 86% of viewers, YouTube is increasingly becoming the go-to effective way to visually showcase your brand.

YouTube videos perform really well, generating 1200% more shares than written text and images combined (Responsive Inbound Marketing). So next time you’re thinking of creating a blog, think about whether you could turn your content into a vlog or video content.

Where both video and text are available on the same page, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service. Your potential customers actually want your video content. Four times as many customers prefer video over other types of marketing (Animoto). Customers are also 144% more likely to add products to a shopping cart after watching a product video.

YouTube for Search

YouTube is also a great discovery engine and because of this there is great marketing potential. When you create your videos, tag them and add keywords into your title. People look up how to do something or for a certain product by searching on YouTube. By providing that content, a mass audience could potentially find out about your company. Provide “how to” videos on your industry topics and offer advice and tips along with showcasing your products and people can then find you.

It also offers you the chance to rank well in Google and gives you additional exposure for your products and services, as well as enabling people to discover your business via search and also suggested videos.

Even if someone is viewing a competitors video, yours could come up right after that. So even if they want an alternative to their better known competitors or a comparison, they can potentially see your brand right there and then.

YouTube Partner

Once you have built up your channel to 10,000 public overall views, you can become a YouTube partner. This means that you can add clickable links to your site from within your videos, building up traffic to your site where people can potentially buy your products and services.

What type of content should I create?

Create a content calendar for your business so you can generate some great ideas that are timely and relevant.

Do some keyword research to see what the most commonly searched for queries are. You could use a site like Moz to help you with this.

1. Speak with customer service teams to see what the most FAQ’s are.
2. Use seasonality to come up with timing for each piece of content
3. Show happy customers
4. Show your product or service being used
5. Showcase your offices, your team, let people see the personality and people behind the brand. This helps people to better connect with the brand.
6. Testimonials

How to create great videos

You don’t have to have a big film and production crew to make a video for YouTube, a smartphone would do. Buy yourself a gimbal which stops the camera from shaking and will help to create more professional videos.  

You have part of the hard work done for you by connecting and working with YouTube vloggers in your niche and industry. They already have a defined, relevant, engaged audience that actively seek their content and your business can capitalise on this. The exposure can be amazing and you could end up paying thousands for the equivalent for a television advert.

They can create content on your behalf in the form of a review, mention or showing how your product works. Some will be happy to work with your brand but you may need to compensate them with either products or money.

Optimise your videos

Optimise each of your videos so that people can find you when they’re searching. Include a detailed title tag, description and add valuable content to each video page.

Once you’ve created your videos to your web page, promote the video using the URL from the page on your website where the video is displayed. People will then be directed back to your website rather than just staying on YouTube watching other videos. So perhaps in your other marketing messaging - print, email or social channels, direct them to a link on your website.

How to measure the effectiveness of video content

You can check out some stats on YouTube like how many interactions, subscribers, likes and comments your videos have acquired and how well people are engaging with your content. You can also set up a dashboard to see how well each video is doing, particularly if you have a fair bit of content going out there.

Check out Google analytics and see how much referral traffic is coming in via YouTube and then you can tweak your videos accordingly.

If you’d like help in any video content creation or in creating a marketing strategy for your business, please feel free to get in touch.