Videos have become the most preferred way by marketers to humanize their brand. By showcasing customer testimonials, product demos, interesting content, team members all for no cost at all – it has become a better way to build credibility and empower customers to make the right decision by allowing for them to become part of your brand.
Besides that, YouTube has empowered marketers to create their brand channels and share their content with a wide and growing set of audience. It has swiftly become the best content platform for many users.
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The Basics of YouTube Marketing
YouTube has gradually grown to become a content marketing platform for small and large businesses, content creators, startup and entrepreneurs.
YouTube is unlike any other social media channel, where their goal is to increase engagement, awareness and conversion. The platform acts to share content, work, products and services with the growing audience base.
People come to YouTube to watch and learn many things – from digital marketing techniques to cooking recipes, YouTube is a home for all. As a beginner to YouTube marketing, it is essential to remember that YouTube is a content hub rather than a marketing platform. The emphasis is on value creation and watching videos.
YouTube has 30 million visitors every day and its audience demographic includes kids from the age of 10 to adults in the age of 50. Important to know your target audience and me and that is where your YouTube marketing strategy will show results.
Strategies to improve your YouTube Marketing
YouTube is an exciting marketing platform. It is not exactly a social media platform and neither a content marketing platform either. What makes YouTube marketing so interesting and far-reaching is its ability to take the most important asset of the internet – the video and optimise it to reach the right set of audience, generate leads and drive traffic including growth.
So let’s look at some impactful marketing strategy ideas that you can use to improve your YouTube marketing plan.
YouTube SEO
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is what you can call the backbone of the internet. While the internet is vast, people who come on the internet need to find you and SEO helps you to that. YouTube’s search box is the second largest search box in the world. It is where millions come to find the product or service, and so optimising your YouTube SEO is crucial.
SEO helps improve your overall brand performance and helps you reach the widest audience. A beginner should know that optimising the metadata of your video for YouTube SEO is the first step.
Providing the right information to a potential customer means using the correct and relevant keywords. This means optimising your videos metadata title, description, tags, and screen cards, playlist, categories and thumbnails.
Keep creating relevant content
A growing YouTube channel is one that can keep creating engaging content that relates to your business. You can create advertisements, promotional videos, or you can create customer testimonials, reviews, how-to videos – that strike a chord with your customers.
Videos of the backbone of YouTube and engaging when done right. Leveraging videos for YouTube marketing is the best way to promote and market your products to find new customers, increase your brand awareness and drive sales.
Creating a quality video is not expensive and you can do it with a smartphone. Some examples of video content that you can use as a part of YouTube marketing is explainer videos, interviews, product demos, thought-provoking videos, user-generated videos and YouTube Live video.
Whatever, you do not forget to add a call to action and always remember that content is king.
Optimize your channel
The home of your business on YouTube lives on your YouTube channel, so when people watch your videos and want to see more of them, they can come to your channel.
Optimising your channel includes choosing an attractive channel name, eye-catching channel art, links to your business pages or website, links to your social media handles, YouTube cards and contact info.
Make sure that the name of your channel relates to what it is about and not some vague name. This will help people looking for your business find you much more easily.
For example, you are a real estate business and want to start a YouTube channel for real estate video. A channel name like “Rainbow Real Estate” as opposed to “best homes in the US” will be better suited and well optimized for users searching for Real Estate Businesses.
Your Channel art should reflect your brand values and be in sync with what you stand for. Your video thumbnails should have simple and clear titles that direct the viewer’s attention to what content they are about to watch.
Don’t forget to add a channel description which talks in-depth about what the channel is about and to further optimize you can add a featured video.
Monetize your channel
Many beginners in YouTube marketing often lose sight of monetizing that channel. Your focus from the beginning should be to monetize your YouTube channel.
While many find it not worth the effort, they are wrong. Monetizing your channel is effective as it generates sales leads through soft selling and value creation while also getting paid to do that. However, it’s a long run.
To monetize your channel as per new YouTube policies, you need 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours. Once you have all the subscribers and watch hours needed, you can request to be on the YouTube Partner Program and then YouTube will monetize your channel.
Monetizing a new channel also helps you to place your videos as ads in other YouTube videos, helping you reach a wider audience, connect with customers who might not be aware of you, and generate more brand awareness.
Cross market using social media
YouTube might not be exactly a social media platform, but it can leverage videos to be shared across social media channels. Videos you can engage with social media audiences and gather additional insights that help further optimize your marketing.
YouTube has made it easy to promote your videos across other social media channels. To share all you need to do to click on the Share button beneath your video.
As part of your YouTube marketing strategy, sharing videos on other social networks should comprise a call to action. Why did you make the video? Who is the target audience? What is messaging? These questions will be important when you cross-market your videos on different social networks, as your caption will specifically talk about that.
Share the link of your YouTube channel on social shares and use appropriate hashtags while posting to reach more people on that platform.
Concluding Notes: Why keep marketing on YouTube
Over two-thirds of the internet content is video. Video is here to stay, and it’s growing exponentially. If you are a marketer in the digital age, you cannot do away with video and video means YouTube.
So marketing on YouTube should have the priority in a marketing plan. YouTube search is the second largest in the world and being a Google company it means that the right audience can reach you all the time.
Optimizing your channel with relevant content and monetizing your videos — you will be able to engage, reach and convert through your marketing efforts, quarter on quarter.
Alex is fascinated with “understanding” people. It’s actually what drives everything he does. He believes in a thoughtful exploration of how you shape your thoughts, experience of the world.