The rise of social media platforms and the adaptation of technology in our daily lives is rapidly changing the way businesses and consumers communicate. YouTube, a popular social media platform, is slowly becoming the medium of communication for businesses to connect and interact with their target audience. Friendly reminder, If you’re curious to know how much money YouTubers really earn, you can check out our YouTube earning calculator to see for yourself.
It’s vital for companies to focus on the opportunities they can gain from marketing their products and services through YouTube. Other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can also be used to market products and services. Unlike YouTube, these platforms limit your marketing innovation and creativity since they lack illustrations that are engaging and memorable.
Businesses have to realize that YouTube is the second biggest website worldwide. Following this, companies can take advantage of the popularity of YouTube by continually creating content in connection with their business, products, and services. If done effectively, businesses can generate more leads by increasing their website’s traffic and engagement.
Read on to find out how to use YouTube for marketing your business. If you’re already familiar with the basics of YouTube marketing, then check out our Comprehensive YouTube SEO guide.
Why YouTube?
Understanding why YouTube has excellent potential for generating leads by driving more traffic and engagement to your website is essential. The fact that YouTube is a social media platform for users to interact, and share their content with people worldwide. Marketers can use this opportunity to increase brand recognition by attracting the attention of potential customers on YouTube.
Another factor that marketers should keep in mind is the popularity of YouTube. Everywhere you go, there’s a chance that someone within that country, knows what YouTube is. Statistics also show that YouTube has approximately 1 billion registered subscribers.
Moreover, there are also other statistics to back up the effectivity of YouTube for marketing your business, such as the viewing hours. YouTube shows that the total viewing hours of users per day could add up to over 1 billion hours. And that’s only the registered viewers. YouTube videos also benefit from viewing hours that come from unregistered users.
In addition to this, some of the YouTube content creators have found their way of getting a hefty sum of money from producing video content. Most of these content creators are earning thousands of dollars each month.
The Reach of YouTube
YouTube has a widespread reach in terms of the range of each users’ age and their mobile devices. Further, according to thinkwithGoogle’s statistics, YouTube has a stronger impact compared to television networks. Bear in mind that most people, nowadays, own a smartphone due to the innovations of technology and the Internet of Things.
Apart from smartphones, consumers can also access YouTube through tablets, computers, televisions, and notebooks. Forrester Research also found that over time, consumers below the age of 32 subscribing to a pay-TV service will decrease by half. In turn, the number of users using YouTube for entertainment and education will most likely increase.
From a promotional perspective, marketers have to realize that they can increase brand recognition due to the variety of the audience present on YouTube. However, for marketers to appeal to their target audience, they’ll need to plan and create an effective youtube strategy that caters to a specific niche or audience.
The Benefit of Using YouTube
One significant advantage of using YouTube for marketing your business is that it’ll cost you nothing to upload videos on your channel. However, marketers should also keep in mind that there’s always a disadvantage for every advantage. One problem of using a cost-free social media platform for marketing your business is uncontrollable ads.
Bear in mind that you’re marketing your products and services through video content on YouTube for free. Promotional materials of other businesses will always pop-up as an ad that’ll last for 10 seconds or more right before your video starts and somewhere during the video.
One major disadvantage of these uncontrollable ads showing up right before a user’s video starts is that they can be ads from competitors. Another problem that these ads pose is that they are utterly irrelevant to your marketing campaign. Examples of these are, ads for creating a website during a rap music video, power tool ads while streaming a live cooking show, etc.
Another disadvantage of using YouTube is that marketers don’t have full control of customizing their YouTube channel and videos. Marketers find it better to have their brand and designs match their YouTube channel for better brand recognition and user experience.
Nevertheless, the most significant advantage of using YouTube for marketing your business is that it’s cost-effective. In addition to being cost-effective, companies can also extend their reach to consumers of different ages, interests, and nationalities. Thus, disregarding the disadvantages won’t have a negative effect on your YouTube channel as long as you have an effective strategy.
Create an Effective YouTube Strategy for Video Content
Creating video content that’ll appeal to the consumers on YouTube will take plenty of time to plan, prepare, and edit. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, only take a couple of minutes to create written content with images. Creating content and getting content published with YouTube takes longer. However, setting up a YouTube strategy will help speed up the process of creating content.
Marketers have to write up a plan to identify the goals they want to achieve with their video content. For instance, creating compelling content to increase sales, drive more traffic, and improved user experience are just a few of the goals you should take note of. Keep in mind that setting goals can help marketers create the appropriate content for their business channel.
When creating daily content to share with your target audience and future subscribers, you have to maximize the creativity of your visual content. Keep in mind that businesses have been using visual content to market their products and services for a long time. Thus, producing a striking marketing video is vital to meet your target audience’s high levels of expectations for engaging content.
Creating Quality Videos
One of the challenges businesses are facing that’s keeping them from using YouTube to market their business is they continuously need to create videos. Although creating videos is easy, creating quality videos that’ll appeal to the interest of your target audience and future consumers isn’t.
Businesses need to keep in mind that it’ll depend on their type of brand before they can produce quality marketing videos. However, if you want your business to gain stronger brand recognition, you should consider making different types of videos that can highlight your business. Here are a few examples of videos you can create for your YouTube channel.
Documentaries
A video documentary allows businesses to connect deeper with their consumers by showing their history and the path they’ve taken to improve their processes. Since video documentaries are part of a content marketing strategy, your documentary can serve as an influence for potential consumers to buy your products and services.
Further, you can also show your customers and potential customers the process of creating your products or utilizing your services. Building a trustworthy image for your business about how everything is done using video documentaries helps build credibility.
Animated Videos
Animated videos provide consumers a fun and entertaining experience that’ll make them want to watch the video. Although the upsides of animated videos are big, creating animated videos can be challenging, especially if your marketing team doesn’t have the skill or personnel such as graphic artists and animators.
Aside from the experience your customers get, using animated videos can also show your target audience that you’re the type of business that’s fun and energetic. Consumers will always turn their heads to companies that are entertaining because they feel more valued as customers.
Educational and How-to Videos
One of the reasons why users spend so much time watching YouTube videos daily is to learn. For this reason, creating how-to videos about how consumers can use your products or what else they can do with your services is a fresh and excellent idea. Keep in mind that educational videos should also be entertaining to keep your viewers from getting bored.
How-to videos also serve as instructional videos for first-time customers to help them maintain the quality of your products. For example, if you’re a watch company, you can create an instructional video showing your customers a step-by-step process on how to clean and maintain the watch.
Since we’re in the era of advanced technology, you can also educate your customers about your services through screen sharing. Screen sharing allows you to display what’s on your computer or laptop screen on your videos. The benefit of using screen sharing is that you can pinpoint all the information you’re going to be sharing with your consumers.
The essential part of creating education and how-to videos is your voice. Simply sharing information with your customers without speaking renders the videos useless. Further, showing your customers how things are done without any explanation can lose their interest. Thus, they’ll end up looking for how-to videos from other business channels.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is a crucial part of using YouTube for marketing your business, especially if you want consumers to find your videos via search engines. Optimizing your channel by inserting the right keywords that represent and highlight your company can let YouTube know your channel’s purpose.
Further, your quality videos should also have a video headline and a brief description to let YouTube, other users, and potential customers to know what your video is going to be about. Another vital factor that you have to strengthen is your consumers’ watch time. YouTube will automatically promote videos that have a longer watch time through ads.
Another contributing factor for the search engine optimization of your YouTube channel is the engagement metrics. Engagement metrics comprise of shares, comments, and likes and dislikes. Each of your videos will have different engagement metrics. However, these metrics can also show users that your videos are credible and worthy of watching.
Takeaway
Producing video content that can show consumers your products and services isn’t something new, as evidenced by the TV ads we’ve been seeing since 1941. However, using a platform such as YouTube to market products or services through content, is a more recent trend. Aside from getting tons of savings on TV airtime, you can apply the necessary SEO strategies to your videos to better attract potential customers.
Keep in mind that before you create quality marketing videos to attract potential customers and to entertain loyal customers, you have to produce an effective strategy. Your strategy can help you identify your goals, thus, helping you achieve them through your videos over time.