YouTube is the biggest and most popular social platform that enables users to upload, view, rate, share, add to playlists, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. It offers a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos.
It’s the second biggest website in the world which of course means enormous reach and immense chances for increasing awareness of your business, driving more traffic and engagement, and generating more leads.
Youtube is incredibly engaging and beneficial for many types of businesses. Creating a YouTube channel for your business offers a centralized platform for your audience to view and engage with your videos. So, this provides a great opportunity for your business to garner potential customers and possibly create a video to go viral.
Viewers can easily share your video on other social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter so you can reach even more people. Your video can become viral if viewers find it entertaining and continuously share it across social media. This creates a cost-effective way to promote your business to potentially millions of people.
So, in this post, we will explain why and how to use YouTube to promote your business.
Why YouTube?
Before we get into the why’s and how’s, here are some valuable statistics that will help you understand why YouTube is such a huge platform for businesses:
• YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, as well as the second biggest website, with over 1 billion registered subscribers.
• People watch 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day.
• YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds on mobile than any TV channel or cable TV network.
People of all ages, from all over the world, love watching videos online. Which, of course, is one of the biggest benefits from a promotional point of view. A good YouTube strategy can help you reach more people and boost your overall results.
But, where do you begin?
Create A Youtube Strategy:
Think of video content when creating your Youtube strategy and make sure to optimize it accordingly for higher rankings and maximum results.
YouTube can be more time-consuming than other social networks; after all, it’s one thing to write an update and create images versus consistently creating new video content.
To start with, what do you want to achieve with YouTube and video marketing? What are your exact goals? For example:
• Improving brand awareness and engagement
• Generating more leads and conversions
• Driving more traffic to your website
• Improving sales
Knowing your objectives will help you create the right videos for your channel, videos that will achieve your goals.
What Types Of Videos Can You Create?
Whatever kind of videos you want to make, choose content that you can develop and create regularly, and find ways to grow your business.
However, it’s not that hard to create quality videos any more – in some cases, you don’t even need a camera. And when it comes to the types of brand and marketing videos that you can create, there are several choices for different stages of the sales funnel.
Managing Your Youtube Channel:
If you haven’t used YouTube for business yet, you might be amazed to find out that there aren’t that many management tools – at least, not like other social networks.
However, especially as you grow, a management tool becomes a must as it helps you trace your comments and respond to them, as well as monitor mentions of your brand.
One of the reasonable things about it is that you can monitor and manage all of your YouTube comments in one place – and that includes responding to them. Plus, you can pre-moderate comments and decide when and what to publish, and you can save common replies to react to comments more immediately and efficiently.
Moreover, you can serve as part of a team and collaborate with others on responding to comments. And last but not least, you can monitor your business name on YouTube and make sure to catch any videos or other mentions of your business so you can act as quickly as possible.
Use Tools To Help You Create Video Content:
Video creation for business is more accessible than ever as there are several video marketing tools to help you create videos with stock footage, audio, and voice-overs.
You can now create pretty much any kind of video you can think of, with a tool: funny video, animated video, live-action videos, and even stop motion videos.
There are numerous tremendous options for tools, such as:
• Slidely Promo, for live-action videos (i.e. using stock footage).
• Wave, for live-action videos (you can easily create the same video for any social network, to help you repurpose your video content).
• Vyond, for creating animated videos.
Don’t Forget About Search Engine Optimization:
As already mentioned, YouTube is one of the biggest search engines in the world but if you expect people to be apt to find your videos via search, then you need to optimize your channel and your videos for the YouTube search engine.
When it comes to SEO, there are various elements you need to consider:
• Your channel keywords: select keywords that represent your business and your video content to help YouTube understand what your channel is about.
• Video headline and description: Use relevant keywords in both your headline and your video description – this too helps YouTube understand what your video is about.
• Video tags: Like your channel keywords, you need to add relevant tags to each of the videos you post to ensure higher visibility.
• Watch time: The more time people spend watching your videos, the better your SEO. YouTube will promote videos that people watch for a longer time, rather than videos that are opened and closed quickly (it’s very likely assuming that those videos aren’t as good or they aren’t delivering on what they promised in the headline and description).
• Engagement metrics: YouTube also cares about how much engagement (comments, likes/dislikes, shares) your videos are getting – the more, the better!.
• Subscriber numbers: YouTube does push bigger channels, but that’s not all; it also looks at how many new subscribers you get immediately after viewing one of your videos.
To properly optimize your videos and find good tags and keywords to use, you can use tools like TubeBuddy – a YouTube-certified YouTube management tool, with several video SEO features, like tag suggestions, best practice audits, and keyword rank tracking for YouTube.