Take The Plunge: Get Started With Marketing on YouTube

If you’re not using YouTube to market your business, you should be. Consistently one of the most popular websites in the world – 8.5 BILLION monthly visits – YouTube is a dynamic, unrivaled way to engage with your customers and increase your audience.

The video platform presents a unique opportunity to get the word out about who you are and what you do, but it also supports and promotes your other marketing efforts with YouTube’s parent company, a little business known as Google.

Marketing your business on YouTube is easier than you might think – read on for our top tips to make the most of your efforts.

Seven ways to make YouTube marketing work for you

Offer something your audience needs: We know you love your business, but just like your other social media channels, if you want YouTube to work for you, you need to offer people something they want to watch. If your videos are nothing but commercials for your business, viewers are going to treat them like commercials and either skip them or make a run for the refrigerator.

Take some time to think about what your customers want from your business and give them a sample. If you own a restaurant record your chef cooking their favorite at-home recipe. A photographer could offer simple tips to look your best in cellphone photos. Or a travel planner could share the top ten things to do in her favorite cities. Your videos should be the content your audience wants to watch – not the commercials they want to skip.

Get a channel and use it: YouTube offers a range of opportunities to put your business’s brand on the platform. Adding videos is obvious, but it doesn’t end there. A YouTube channel will give you a number of ways to personalize YouTube to market your business.

Once you have a channel, take advantage of the opportunity and add a compelling description, intriguing channel art and don’t forget to complete the About section, where you can add a link to your website and your email address.

Get Discovered: It is not going to come as a surprise that the videos you add to your channel are the best way to showcase you and your business. Whether you make them yourself or hire someone to do the work, they will be an investment in time and energy, if not money.

Take the time to make that investment worthwhile. Just like with everything else you do online, keywords are king when it comes to search. For each video you upload, think about the title and description. Choose a keyword and use it in both to get the maximum amount of exposure for your video.

Each YouTube video also has a thumbnail, a static image that previews the video. It can include text as well as more than one image and functions as a hook to get your potential audience to push play. Spend some time crafting the perfect thumbnail for each of your videos – think of it like a movie poster promoting your next great film.

Just like Instagram, YouTubers can also search by interest. Take advantage of the opportunity to get discovered and use tags in your videos to help them find you.

Playlists: YouTube makes it easy to organize your channel with playlists. You can use those playlists to organize your videos, sorting them into whatever categories make the most sense for your business. Your playlists can evolve as your business does with new categories added regularly.

Ask for engagement: Just like your other social media channels, a big part of the allure of YouTube is the opportunity to interact with others. Asking your friends and followers to share your videos will garner more views and spread your message. You also want to ask them to subscribe to your channel; once they have done so any new videos you add will show up in their YouTube feed.

Don’t set it and forget it: Marketing on YouTube is not a one-and-done proposition. Like everything else in your life, you need to nurture it if you want it to grow. At least twice a month, you should plan to add new videos, monitor your comments and review the branding on your channel.

Cross promote: Now that your YouTube channel is ready for prime time, take the time to share it. Add a YouTube follow icon and link anywhere you promote your other social channels, including email and your website. Imbed video players on your site that link to relevant videos on YouTube. And don’t forget to tell the followers on your other social media platforms about your YouTube channel.

Check out what happened when we took our own advice

Now that we’ve told you what you need to do to get the most out of YouTube, we have a confession. There’s an old story about a kid whose dad makes shoes for a living. Yep, you guessed it. Our own YouTube marketing was the cobbler’s child and it needed some love.

We took the time to follow our own advice on YouTube and transformed it into a marketing channel worthy of one of the top advertising agencies in Austin. Now it showcases what we do best: harnessing analytics with creativity. Check it out here – and we’d love it if you would like our videos and subscribe to our channel.

Ready to find out more? We’d be happy to schedule a free consultation.