If you ask a marketer about the best ways to promote your business, they will undoubtedly list YouTube marketing as a top priority strategy. Being the second-largest search engine after Google, showcasing your products or services on this platform seems to be the most practical
the thing to do.
Chances are you have stayed up all night, at least once, binge-watching the videos of your favorite YouTuber or hopped on to watch some of the biggest internet conspiracy theories. And that itself is the best thing about YouTube – there’s always something for everyone. With more than a billion users, no business is beyond the scope of marketing on YouTube.
Do you sell home-made cupcakes? Upload time-lapse videos of you making them, and you will soon witness a tremendous increase in fan following and sales. But it will be extremely unfair if we ignore the competition aspect right from the start. Yes, with more than 50 million content creators ruling the platform, YouTube can be a competitive arena – but it’s a child’s play if you know the right tactics.
To assist you with just that, here’s a comprehensive beginner’s guide that will help you initiate a YouTube marketing strategy to win hearts and, more importantly, boost sales and revenue. Let&’s dive right into it.
Get to Know Your Audience
The whole point of marketing on YouTube is to spread awareness of your brand and aid a customer in the purchase decision-making process. For that, you need to find who your audience is and what they like watching about.
We recommend you to research more about YouTube demographics for this purpose. For instance, if Gen Z viewers are your target audience, you’ll be better off creating short-form content. Also, keep in mind that our attention span has dropped to just 8 seconds. This means anything bland or indistinctive will lead the viewer to slip to their dream world. To not let such mishaps ruin your engagement rates, try using a robust YouTube video editor that lets you experiment with audio and video effects and tonnes of transitions.
Create an Effective YouTube Channel
Yes, creating just another YouTube channel won’t do the trick. You need to optimize it and include as much information as possible. For starters, make sure your channel’s About section is complete and attractive. For that, you must have,
- An eye-catching description about your business.
- Your email address and physical address.
- Your other social media links so that viewers can maintain a connection with you, even if they are off YouTube.
Additionally, to maximize your brand exposure, you need to brand your channel. Start with your channel icon and channel art images, and don’t forget to include watermarks on each of your videos – you don’t want someone to steal your brainchild.
See What Your Competitors Are Up To
Your competitors, who made it to YouTube before you, are abundant sources of inspiration. You can check out their content and get inspired by the ones that the audience loved and, more importantly, hated. This will help you understand how not to create content and save you the hassle of investing in the wrong videos. You can also check out their comment sections and take note of the viewers’ video requests and list them in your content calendar.
Look at their about section, descriptions, and titles to see how they use keywords and power words to make them irresistible. Here’s a quick tip. Your introduction matters a lot when it comes to engagement. If you start with a boring intro, many of the viewers will close the video, even if you hide a gem in the mid part. For that, use an intro maker like VideoCreek that will glue your audience to the screen.
Create a Content Calendar
Although many might argue that consistency is the key in the YouTube realm, many influencers in the platform have a different opinion. Instead of going behind the number of videos, be strict about the quality of videos you produce.
Your viewers may forgive if you skip a week, but they might be long gone if you publish something mediocre. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a content calendar. A content calendar is a great system to keep your efforts consistent – not to mention its benefits of staying organized.
You can also release special content on days like Christmas and Halloween and melt your audience’s heart in the process. Having a calendar also means that you will be fully aware of when and how you need to gather specific production resources.
Learn How to Optimize Your Videos
YouTube is a search engine, second to Google, and when it comes to SEO, both (almost) work the same way. Here are some YouTube SEO pointers to get you started.
- Craft a clickable title with power words and include relevant keywords.
- Make your description as keyword-rich as possible.
- Create a thumbnail that’s hard to resist.
- Include subtitles (aka captions) in languages your target audience will appreciate. Plus, YouTube bots are known to crawl captions to understand your video intent.
These are the SEO aspects that come under your control. The view time, engagement rates, and the number of subscribers are critical factors as well. Fortunately, there are some tricks you can utilize – especially end screens. End screens can enable you to serve viewers with more of your content, soon after a video ends. To tempt users to continue watching your content, uninterrupted, you need to finish your videos with a bang. For that, you need to create a convincing YouTube outro as, statistically, the ending of your video will be the most remembered part.
Analyze, Adapt, Repeat
Just like any of your marketing efforts, your YouTube channel deserves to be scrutinized in terms of results. For that, you can use YouTube analytics, which is incredibly intuitive. You can analyze each video’s click-through rate (CTR) and see whether their thumbnails or titles require an update. You can also use it to identify the form of content your audience loves the most and hate and use those findings to shape your future production. Your comment section is equally crucial as analytics. Listen to your audience, respond to them, and be aware of their needs and wants.
Final Thoughts
YouTube is a video hosting platform that lets you upload videos for FREE. If you try to list down “the top reasons why a brand shouldn’t market on YouTube,” your list will be empty for the foreseeable future, how hard you try. That’s because it is a beloved platform by billions of people, and marketing your products where everyone is will help in maximizing brand exposure. Video marketing is the hottest game right now, and the biggest sin you will be committing is not embracing it.
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