For businesses to thrive, owners must have some form of digital marketing strategy. However, with all the available online tools, business owners often find themselves at a loss as to where and how to begin. Some are putting precious time and money on strategies that aren’t too effective instead of focusing on tools that work for other businesses.
Not many people know that YouTube is actually a viable tool and can even be their business lifeline. You can create a YouTube channel from scratch and promote your business to an unlimited number of people. Better yet, you can do this without investing too much of your hard-earned money.
Why YouTube is powerful
YouTube has 1.8 billion users monthly, but the number only covers users who watch videos while logged in. The figure will be higher if you account unlogged watchers. Just a few social media platforms have the power to draw this much attention, making YouTube a powerful online tool.
In fact, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google; it’s also the third most visited website after Google and Facebook.
As people spend hours on YouTube every day, it’s very likely that a large segment of your target market is there. Using YouTube as part of your digital marketing strategy is going to be the most practical, and perhaps the cheapest, course of action.
Establishing your YouTube channel
The first thing you need to do is, of course, create a YouTube channel. It may sound easy, but to most people, this is a tough hurdle. What will I name my channel? What will the content be about? While the channel’s name can take on your company’s name, the content creation is the most challenging part faced by business owners, or even regular people, who plan to start a YouTube channel.
Over one billion YouTube videos are watched daily—how can your videos be part of that statistic? What makes YouTube popular is that it has become a venue for people to showcase their creativity. People love to watch content that is fresh, creative, and interesting. With all the diversity on YouTube, your channel must target a niche and create content for that specific group of people.
Here are some tips on how to establish your online presence on YouTube:
- Benchmark other channels: If you’re not sure about what type of YouTube channel you want for yourself, check out what other businesses and personalities are doing. Red Bull is one of the best examples of a company making it big on YouTube. Its channel features the active lifestyles of athletes, racers, and adrenaline rush junkies. The channel embodies energy which is what Red Bull is all about.
There are other YouTube channels where you can get ideas and learnings. Channels can be owned by a company or a personality.
- Have a clear goal: Your end goal is to convert the views into traffic onto your company’s website. Therefore, to stir the interest of viewers, the videos you create must be related to your company and the product or service being offered.
- Think about your target audience: Like any marketing strategy, think about your target market while developing the story of your YouTube videos. Research what interests your prospective viewers and what makes them stick. Then create contents based on such information.
With a YouTube channel, your business can gain a lot of leads. There’s so much potential here—you can reach millions of people by creating targeted videos that are fun, interesting, and creative.
Advertising on YouTube
Creating videos incur costs, especially when you hire people to do the videos for you. For businesses, this is classified as advertising costs. Somehow, these costs must show results in terms of website traffic, leads, and ultimately is sales numbers.
Therefore, if your YouTube videos are not going viral, or not reaching a certain number of people, then you’re probably just wasting your money. That’s why your next concern after video creation should be increasing your video views.
Good thing, there are several ways to increase YouTube views. People usually gravitate to popular videos with high view counts and channels with many subscribers.
Aside from buying YouTube subscribers, you can also do the following:
- Cross-promote your videos: Talk about your videos on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Even celebrities promote their latest projects on multiple social media accounts to reach as many people as possible.
- Use hashtag and tags: With these YouTube features, it will be easier for your videos to appear on search results. While understanding the YouTube algorithm is difficult, these tools allow video creators to be more competitive.
- Post regularly and stick to a schedule: This way, your subscribers will know when you’re going to release a new video, and they can tell their social circle about it.
- Add subtitles: Not all people that visit YouTube understand your language. With subtitles on your videos, you can reach more people, helping your business’ global growth.
These are proven ways to increase the number of your YouTube subscribers. You can also create playlists and use annotations. In the end, everything will boil down to the quality of your contents. If you must, hire a social media team that will handle your online promotions, including your YouTube channel.
Huge corporations are not the only ones who can advertise on popular websites. Even small and medium enterprises can create a digital ad campaign and take advantage of YouTube and other online tools. Once you include YouTube in your marketing plan, you’ll be surprised at how it could be your business lifeline.
Date: May 7, 2019 / Categories: View Tactics, / Author: Rich Drees
