Using YouTube To Market Your Small Business
You have branded profiles on Twitter and Facebook, but what are you missing by avoiding YouTube? Much more than your marketing teams realize.
If you think YouTube is full of kitten videos and clips from old comedy shows, you’d be partly right. However, it’s also one of the most powerful tools in a company’s marketing armory. Despite being the world’s largest streaming service and second-largest search engine, YouTube is often overlooked as a social media platform. This is a shame because YouTube offers immense scope for promoting a brand and attracting new customers.
Tuning In
YouTube is regularly used by an estimated 85% of online adults, with five billion videos viewed every single day. This equates to around 1 billion hours of footage consumed on a daily basis! Many of these are hosted in proprietary channels – exclusive platforms within YouTube where companies or brands can gather all their content together and build audiences. Many people would argue that creating this material is the hardest aspect of all, particularly with the declining popularity of hero videos (such as a seated interview with a senior employee). In fairness, these videos are still better than nothing, and an engaging delivery can help to personalize a brand while adding sincerity to any claims.
Bearing in mind that the rise in global viewership has experienced a tenfold leap since 2012 it would be foolish to ignore.To impress modern audiences and successfully enhance a brand’s reputation, it usually takes more than a talking head with a few graphical cutaways. People are egocentric and highly sophisticated. Of course, the Holy Grail of any corporate YouTube campaign is the prospect of going viral, with people sharing and commenting on a video en masse. But that is a spurious goal and almost can’t be created. It’s all down to how viewers feel. Often viral videos require a combination of drama, humor and surrealism – think of Tom and Giovanna Fletcher announcing a pregnancy by dusting down an old Sega Mega Drive, or Fenton the dog running riot in Richmond Park. YouTube isn’t really intended to host traditional advertising, despite the ‘click to skip’ ads that help to fund it.
Thinking Outside the Video
Although tutorials and demonstrations can be good for manufacturers, service providers should consider behind-the-scenes tours or webinars. Nobody expects YouTube videos to be cinematic masterpieces, but they must have a degree of professionalism in terms of clear audio and relatively steady camerawork. Try to incorporate the company logo, and conclude with a call to arms action including contact details. If creativity isn’t your forte, media agencies may be able to recommend ideas and concepts; they can even produce the video for a higher fee.
Having spliced any footage together with a package like Lightworks or Videopad, it’s then necessary to create a YouTube channel to host the completed content. This must be done in the company’s name, which might involve creating a new account through YouTube’s parent company Google. While each YouTube channel has its own URL, individual video clips can also be embedded into external websites. Embedding videos ensures content is hosted on YouTube’s servers rather than your own, for a high-quality viewing experience free from buffering.
SEO Success
A YouTube video provides an ideal opportunity to maximize SEO, by incorporating title keywords and utilizing the 120 characters of tags set allocated to each clip. Concise descriptions and closed captioning are other ways to squeeze in keywords and search terms, while promoting the videos on rival social media platforms will help to drive traffic to the channel and achieve superior ranking results. Finally, YouTube Analytics provides detailed audience analysis, and these demographics can also be used for targeted PPV advertising. The present and future is streaming. If you are still unconvinced then set aside an hour and take a journey through YouTube; then ask yourself: how your company can join the party.