Let’s start with the facts:
1. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
2. Since March 2014, the number of people watching YouTube videos has increased by 40%
3. YouTube has over a billion users which is almost a third of ALL people on the internet.
YouTube is a video hosting platform – a free one at that – and when you look at the stats above, there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t be using it for your business videos.
But how do you effectively use YouTube for video marketing?
You’re about to find out…
Step 1: Establish your goal
Quite like anything in the world of marketing, you need to assign a goal to everything that you do.
Your goals will no doubt be along the lines of:
- Brand awareness
- Drive leads
- Improve SEO
- Increase conversions
But the problem that most businesses make is that they try and create a piece of content that will achieve all of these goals in one. Unfortunately this is not the way that marketing works. Every content you create will achieve a different goal so first step is to understand what your goal is.
As with all social channels, YouTube is a place to attract people who may not have heard of you before, so if we’re talking goals then YouTube will typically fall under brand awareness.
I’m not saying you can’t use it for other goals, but if you take a look at some of best brands killing it on YouTube, their videos are all focused on video content that is focused on building a community, rather than a video that’s centred around selling their product or service.
Take a look at this Innocent Drinks video for example. It was released during the Rugby World Cup and it’s a spoof on how brands capitalise in on current affairs to try and sell their products.
Why does it work?
- It’s comical
- It’s relevant while poking fun at trying to relevant
- It casually features the product without being over-salesy
- It’s shareable
- It’s the video to build brand awareness
Step 2: Create videos your audience cares about
So now you’ve established your goal, it’s time to get creating your videos. Although you will be using YouTube to build up brand awareness, you still need to find a good balance between creating content that’s entertaining and creating valuable content that your audience cares about.
Therefore your videos should be:
- Engaging
- Entertaining
- Valuable
- Useful
- Answer the needs of your audience
So the very best type of videos to create on YouTube for businesses, tend to be ‘how-to’ style content.
For example, Six Pack Shortcuts has built an incredible 3,654,977 subscribers and all of their videos revolve around teaching their viewers how to do something:
Whether it be ‘how to get ripped on a budget’, ‘how to make fat burning coffee’, ‘how to lose body fat’ — they know exactly the kind of content that their audience wants to watch and that’s how they’ve built their brand awareness.
Step 3: Do keyword research
Next step is to upload your video to YouTube. When you do this, you’re going to want to do keyword research so that your audience can find your video. Your keywords need to be relevant to your video content, and you should strive to use keywords that will benefit you the most.
Top tip: If you take a look at KeywordTool then you’ll find an option to specifically search for YouTube keywords!
Uploading a video is fairly simple. YouTube will ask for the title of your video, a short description and the keyword tags. So for example, we created this video to explain what a mobile app video is:
As you can see, we’ve targeted a long-tail keyword: ‘Mobile App Videos’ and used it in the title, description and then tagged it, along with other appropriate keywords.
By creating a video that specifically answers our audiences questions, and using the right keywords on YouTube, we are far more likely to attract a person who is likely to use our service in future.
Step 4: Use annotations and cards
Annotations are basically clickable links that you can insert into your videos and this is a great way to drive people back to your site to help create more leads. So when you’re planning your video content, make sure you consider what you can use as a CTA.
So what’s a card?
Cards are basically the fancy version of annotations. It’s the same idea in that you can include clickable links into them, but they look a lot more smoother and professional.
If you check out this video you can see that the card pops up as a ‘more info’ button, the viewers can then click it and more information will appear, so the viewer can decide whether they want to click it.
This can be especially helpful if you want to promote a lead generation content piece like an eBook.
Step 5: Choose an enticing thumbnail
Make sure you don’t miss this step. Choosing a thumbnail is important because as much as we don’t like to admit, we all judge a book by it’s cover!
The very best thumbnails are:
- Engaging
- Minimal but relevant to the video content
- Enticing
If you check out the Red Bull YouTube channel you’ll see how to do it right. You get a glimpse of what the content is about and every thumbnail entices you to click on the video to watch more:
Step 6: Cross-promote
Promoting your video across other channels can really help your video marketing efforts on YouTube.
We’d really recommend you come up with a great promotion strategy and some of our tops tips include:
- Write a blog and include it within your post
- Email your database that sends a link back to your video
- Upload it to your social channels
- Outreach to relevant influencers and ask them if they would share it
- Write a guest post surrounding the content of your video and link back to it
- Pay to advertise your video and YouTube channel
By posting your video across other channels, it will help get more views to that particular video and build up more exposure to your YouTube channel.
Step 7: Keep on top of your analytics
The final step is to keep on top of your analytics as this will help you create better videos in the future.
YouTube offers insights into all of the videos you upload so that you can see how many views you’ve received, who is watching, from where, how long a person watched the video for, and audience retention.
Takeaway
Using YouTube to market your video will certainly help build more brand exposure. The important takeaway here is that you need to be creating awesome video content that is relevant to your audience.
Once you’ve got the foundations set in the form of a great video, you’ll find it a lot easier to market to your audience.
Ready to learn more about YouTube? Check out some of our most popular posts:
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