We all know how powerful YouTube can be as a marketing tool. However, we are often asked a range of questions by clients –
- How can we really boost sales with YouTube?
- Isn’t it expensive to make a good video?
- Surely YouTube is really for teenagers and the massive global brands. How can it help my small business?
Do these questions sound familiar to you? We thought we would do a short blog article that tackles them. We’d like to encourage you all to use YouTube as part of your content strategy. It does not need to break the bank and it can make a difference to your business, whatever its size.
The first step is to build a YouTube channel for your company or brand. This is very important because it gives you a stage, a ‘homepage’ from which to present and collate all your videos.
The next step is to build up a collection. One aspect many people forget is that their channels can contain videos created by others, not just their own. It is your opportunity to share other valuable videos with your followers. In fact, the more variety of content you share on your channel, the more interested followers will be. Think of it more as a video blog!
Make a video. This is obviously not as simple as it sounds however it is not as difficult as many presume it to be. We all have the ability to create interesting and free videos just from our phones – and the picture quality is excellent! Think carefully about your brand and the message you want to get across. Remember, you are not making an advert. You are creating a video which lets customers see you, hear you and get to know you. And ‘you’ means your company brand, not you personally.
Once your video is ready, post it online via your blog or website news page, and embed the video. Do likewise on Twitter and Facebook. Spread the word about your video so that as many people will see it as possible. If you have a weekly email shot to customers, send them the link in an email update too. It is also worth releasing a press release. Not about the video, but about the content of the video.
For example, you are a fashion retailer so have created a tutorial video about shopping on a budget. Your blog, news articles, social media posts and emails will all be about ‘Shopping on a Budget’ and will include the video. They shouldn’t be communications informing people that you have ‘just made a new video’.
Remember to caption, tag and label your video well, using clever choices of your top keywords that are associated with the video content.
Finally, if you have budget, you could invest in some FB adverts or banner adds if you want to.
If you work to spread the news of your video around, there is no doubt it will be viewed. And the more you do it, the larger your viewer audience will become.
