People’s appetite for social media videos has gotten more intense than ever.
Among all the social media platforms, YouTube is a home for videos.
So, when it comes to expanding the reach and getting more eyeballs on the content, more and more businesses jump into the YouTube marketing bandwagon.
YouTube marketing enables businesses to reach new audiences effectively and nurture them with valuable content.
Businesses can be creative on YouTube by providing valuable content like explainer videos, tutorials, reviews, product videos, etc.
If you want to jump into the trend, the complete guide to YouTube marketing below can help you garner optimum results.
YouTube Marketing and How Powerful It is
YouTube marketing is a strategy to promote brands, products, or services by creating videos and uploading them on YouTube.
But, why YouTube?
As a part of video marketing strategy, YouTube is the biggest video-based platform and the second-largest search engine today.
It has more than 2,5 million active users. YouTube is also a home for many businesses and influencers to generate profits.
Over 80% of marketers agree that YouTube videos effectively build engagement and drive buying decisions.
Businesses that run video marketing grow revenues 49% quicker year-over-year than those that don’t.
A whopping 92% of sponsored video views come from influencers and individual creators on YouTube.
You may find more significant numbers on the internet that proves the effectiveness of YouTube marketing.
All in all, YouTube marketing will only give more good than harm to your business if you run it in the best ways.
We’ve pieced together some practical ways to start YouTube marketing, including some content ideas that can be your inspiration in the future.
How to Start YouTube Marketing
Starting YouTube marketing has never been easier. You only need to follow the basics and do a bit of video optimization.
Below we’ve pieced together practical steps to start YouTube marketing for your business. Let’s dive in!
1. Create a YouTube Channel
Before anything else, you need a YouTube channel to start a marketing journey on the platform. Creating a YouTube channel is as easy as creating other social media accounts.
You can create a personal or brand account that is manageable by multiple users.
If you have a Google account signed on to YouTube already, you need to click on the profile icon and choose to create a channel option.
You can continue by following the instructions to complete the process.
Meanwhile, creating a brand channel is relatively similar. You can continue by changing channel owners and managers so it can be managed by more than one account.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
Performing a marketing strategy on any platform requires you to understand the target audience.
YouTube has a wide range of users. Identifying your target audience allows you to create a better plan and choose the most suitable video concept and style.
You can thoroughly segment the target audience demographic and psychographic information to understand their characteristics, behaviors, and preferences.
Demographic segmentation requires you to segment audiences according to their age, gender, family size, education, and income.
Meanwhile, psychographic segmentation allows you to identify audiences based on their personality traits, attitudes, interest, and other lifestyle factors.
3. Get to Know Your Competitions
To know the competition in your industry, you should conduct market research. Talk to your team and find out your competitors.
Learn how other companies run their marketing efforts.
Take a closer look at how they approach customers, like their video styles and concepts.
You can also find customers’ feedback from the comment section or other online platforms like Reddit and Quora.
Knowing your industry competition and customers’ feedback can help you outperform competitors.
4. Learn from Big Channels
Find inspiration for your video content that will engage audiences and drive them to do the desired actions.
Video content is vital, and it must leave a deep impression on audiences.
You can get ideas from various resources, including big channels.
Popular channels have video characteristics and concepts that you may take as inspiration.
Some also take ideas from iconic movie scenes and famous people to make their videos iconic and stand out.
5. Create Engaging Content
After identifying your target audience, video concept, and style, you can now get the ball rolling.
Short videos are preferred to long videos. Now YouTube also has the Shorts feature. It’s always better to keep your video between 15 seconds to one minute long to get optimum engagement.
Also, a well-flowing story is key to keeping your audiences engaged and making them watch the video entirely.
To create engaging content, you must be straightforward and able to pinpoint the audience’s problems.
Add an emotional or humorous story and promote your product as a solution to audiences.
Moreover, use high-quality equipment, including the camera, editing software, and other supporting properties.
Quality equipment and professional editing skills are vital to make flawless and excellent videos.
6. Optimize YouTube SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in YouTube videos is necessary to make your video discoverable in many ways.
YouTube SEO deals with on-page elements, including titles, tags, descriptions, and hashtags.
Research potential keywords that can boost video searchability.
You can employ long-tailed or branded keywords to compete with bigger competitors.
Create your video title keyword-friendly and make it as natural as possible.
Also, put your keywords on the video description, tags, and hashtags.
Other elements you must consider are video thumbnails and closed captions.
Video thumbnails must be enticing to drive audiences to click on your video.
Meanwhile, closed captions are recommended as they can improve video SEO and drive more viewers.
A recent study reveals that YouTube videos with closed captions drive 40% more views than those without.
7. Make a Post Schedule
It takes more than one video to build a well-performed YouTube marketing campaign.
To make your video performance-optimized, you must post content regularly.
Thus, you should create a posting schedule to help you manage your channel.
Pen down video content ideas that may be fit for your channel.
It’s important to note that your video shouldn’t be too promotional.
The videos you post on your channel should be valuable and helpful for audiences.
As a brand, valuable content is key to maintaining relationships with prospective buyers and gaining their trust.
You can create a weekly or monthly schedule to remind you when and what to post on your channel.
8. Use YouTube Advertising
If you want to reach new audiences, YouTube advertising is an option you should consider.
You can reach new audiences who have never been exposed to your content.
YouTube ads can read your target audiences, even those you have yet reached.
Moreover, YouTube ads allow you to define what kind of actions you want people to take.
In terms of pricing, YouTube offers flexible pricing that works for any budget.
It lets you pay if audiences watch your videos for 30 seconds or entirely.
You can also customize to pay if audiences click on the call-to-action.
You can gain long-term benefits with a broader reach, including gaining leads and raising brand awareness.
9. Consider Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has been rising over the past few years.
Even big brands like Adidas, Motorola, and Pepsi consider influencer marketing to boost sales.
You can hire well-known YouTubers to do endorsements or product placements.
Choose influencers with enough knowledge about your industry and relevant to your product or service.
Moreover, check their followers and engagement rates before hiring influencers for your brand.
The more followers and engagement rates they have, the more you need to spend your budget.
Some may consider negotiation, so you should attempt to get a lower price.
10. Analyze and Adjust
Like any other social media platform, YouTube has an analytic page you must check regularly.
It contains vital metrics to define whether your video is performing well or poorly.
A well-performing YouTube video should receive a high view count, play rate, engagement, click-through rates, and conversion.
If you find those metrics showing poor numbers, you should adjust your content.
Some optimizations you should consider to outperform your videos are designing eye-catching thumbnails, writing compelling copies, running an A/B test, and sharing videos in optimal sizes.
11. Use YouTube Marketing Tools
To help you get the best of YouTube, you can leverage online tools to assist you through the whole process.
For instance, TubeBuddy is a marketing platform to help you optimize your YouTube SEO.
Social Blade is a tool that offers incredible research features to study influencers and competitor channels.
You can also use Sendible or Agorapulse to manage your channel, schedule posts, and promote them across social platforms.
There are many more YouTube marketing tools with various capabilities on the internet, such as Keyword Tool, YouTube Studio, and Napoleonic.
YouTube Marketing Ideas for Your Business
It has always been challenging to create content from scratch. You must be creative to come up with authentic ideas and concepts.
We’ve pieced together some YouTube marketing ideas for your business to make things easier.
You can incorporate these ideas to provide valuable content to succeed in your YouTube marketing.
1. Introduction Videos
An introduction video can be in the form of a live-action or animated video. You can introduce your brand, product, or services to audiences through high-quality videos or motion graphics.
Introduction videos should be compelling yet concise so audiences can take information as quickly as possible.
If you want to introduce your brand, focus on highlighting your vision and mission to target audiences.
You should also state why your brand, product, or service is better than others.
2. Company Culture Videos
If you want to approach audiences more interestingly, consider creating company culture videos.
It’s a creative way to show your company to the world.
You can ask employees to participate in your video showing how they handle work and customer requests.
One of the most famous examples is from Google, where they show how their office looks and how employees work there.
3. Behind-the-Scene Videos
Behind-the-scene videos are great for showing the credibility of your business.
It is also a way to gain trust among potential buyers and customers.
Behind-the-scenes videos allow audiences to see production, delivery, and other processes included in your business.
As you provide your business’s kitchen, audiences can take a clearer picture of the product quality.
4. Testimonial Videos
More than 70% of marketers see an ROI improvement between 50-500% from testimonial videos. The improvement also includes conversion rates.
Testimonials from other customers can greatly influence prospective buyers to make final decisions.
You can create testimonial videos or encourage your customers to create one.
Positive testimonial videos act as trustable and genuine information to pull in new customers.
5. Tutorial Videos
Tutorial videos can be handy for audiences as they know how to use the product they want to buy.
Especially if your product or service has features that audiences need to become more familiar with, tutorial videos are necessary for them.
Besides, tutorial videos help audiences to know your product and brand better.
They are a source of information that can help potential buyers get a clearer picture of how your product works.
6. Shorts
You can create 60-second videos on Shorts.
The short-form video feature helps you boost engagement and brand discovery. Plus, short-form videos are relatively more time-efficient to make.
You can add text or subtitles to make the video more accessible.
YouTube Key Metrics to Measure Your Success
Understanding key metrics on YouTube is vital to measure your marketing success.
Some key metrics you must understand are engagement, impression, click-through rate, and watch time.
You must know more key metrics to analyze your video performance on YouTube.
Below we briefly provide explanations of each YouTube key metric that every marketer must know.
Engagement
Engagement shows how many comments, likes, dislikes, and shares your video generates over a specific period of time.
Comments allow you to know your audiences’ responses to your video.
Like and dislike lets you identify what topic resonates best and worst with your audiences.
Meanwhile, the share metric shows how many times users share your video to other platforms.
Impressions Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR measures your video’s ability to drive people to click and watch your video upon seeing it on their homepage, trending section, or recommended section.
You should compare CTR with the average percentage viewed and average view duration to identify whether viewers really watch your video after clicking on it.
Traffic sources
It provides information on how viewers found and watched your video. It can come from external referrals such as other sites and social media.
Viewers may also watch your video from YouTube referrals, such as the search bar, recommended section, and homepage.
Watch time
Watch time signals the total time viewers spend watching your video.
YouTube boosts videos and channels with higher watch time in their recommendation section and search results.
Average View Duration
Average View Duration calculates total watch time divided by the total number of video plays, including replays.
Videos with high average view duration mean they engage viewers longer.
Average Percentage Viewed
This metric shows the percentage of the average viewer who watched each video.
Higher percentage signs positive results, which means your video can hold people’s attention longer.
Besides, YouTube will award videos with high average percentages with better rankings on search results and recommendations.
Subscriber Growth
It shows how your subscriber rates grow over time. It gives detailed information on subscribers’ locations and which videos gain or lose subscribers.
It also lets you see which topics resonate the most with your subscribers and audiences.
Demographics
This metric allows you to understand your audiences. You can see their age, gender, and locations. You can make better content or an overall YouTube strategy that fits your audiences’ characteristics.
Unique viewers
Unique viewer refers to the estimated number of viewers who watch your content over a specific time.
It also allows you to calculate the actual number of your audience.
YouTube’s key metrics are essential to understand. It’s the only way to analyze your video and channel performance and growth over time.
Key metrics also enable you to spot problems and find better approaches and ideas to succeed in your YouTube marketing efforts.
Over to You: Yes or No
If you want to take your video marketing campaign to the next level, YouTube is a must-used channel.
YouTube allows marketers, business owners, or individuals to generate more significant results from their marketing attempts.
They can reach a wider audience, generate leads, improve brand awareness, boost sales, and more. All in all, YouTube marketing is a strategy that is suitable for all-size businesses to gain long-term benefits.
