How to Use YouTube for Business Marketing

Digital presence and digital growth are important for all businesses, big and small. Your potential customers are always looking for better solutions. It is thus essential to plan your marketing so your customers can find you. It would be best if you looked for intelligent and cost-effective ways to grow your business. You can leverage YouTube, the second largest search engine, to market your business. YouTube will not only increase your reach, but it’ll also help you establish your brand in the niche over time. So let’s find out how to use YouTube for business and marketing purposes.

Why Should You be Present on YouTube?

1. Audience

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, after Google. It is the 3rd largest & most visited website after Google and Facebook. So, the chances of your business getting discovered are as big as on Google and Facebook.

2. SEO Benefits

YouTube’s content combines with the power of Google to give your business an SEO boost.

3. Content Longevity

The content life is very brief on social media platforms. But Youtube will help you establish your brand over time. The content will be evergreen for years to come.

4. Passive Income

Focus on the content which is valuable and engaging for your viewers. YouTube and AdSense will reward your efforts. It can also be a passive stream of income for your business.

There can be many technical and strategic benefits of Youtube for your business. The most important thing to avail of those benefits is to get your content strategy in place. The rest of the success of the marketing plan will follow.

Is YouTube the Right Platform for Your Business?

Yes! It works for every business!

Are you confused if YouTube is the right platform for your business or not? Can you not decide the kind of content you should get started with? Here is a quick checklist to jot down your initial content buckets:

What is the top 1 topic I can teach with my expertise or about my product?
What are the 2 issues I can talk about with my clients?
What are the top 3 blogs/books about my niche/product that I can summarise in a video?
What are the 4 things I learned about the niche while setting up my business/product?

You can refine these ideas later. But this is a good kick start for planning your content buckets and studying the content demand.

How Can you Leverage YouTube for Business Marketing?

1. Use YouTube to increase the authority of your brand

Improve SEO

The authority of your website increases with good SEO. YouTube, with the right marketing strategy, improves the SEO of your business. Thus, increasing the authority of your business and enhancing result rankings on Google.

To grow your way to YouTube, you can consider some of these pro-tips.

Pro tips:

Partner with other website owners to embed your video in their content
Associate your domain name, SEO keywords, and YouTube links
Share and promote your videos on other social media platforms
Make your video content consumption more inclusive. Use subtitles, text, video illustrations, audio cues. This will make your content more engaging. You’ll add value for different audiences with different learning styles.
Upload your webinar recordings. Appear as a guest speaker in authoritative, industry-leading webinars or podcasts.

2. Create perfect YouTube Thumbnails

Importance of Thumbnails:

Thumbnail is your first communication with your viewer. Tell a story in your thumbnail to capture the interest of your viewer. Make them curious and interested to explore more about the video content.

Compelling Thumbnails:

Compelling thumbnails increase the chances of users clicking on your video. This will make your YouTube channel more recognizable. Thus, thumbnails must be in coherence with the video’s content and title.

Elements of thumbnails:

A short description or sentence with relevant images in the thumbnail is essential. These will help people understand what your video is about. An exciting title, well-designed, and well-thought-out thumbnail are vital to hook the user. These elements tell the complementary story of your video. Thumbnails are like the book covers.

Pro tips:

Use standard YouTube video size for thumbnail: 1280×720, 1920×1080
High-quality images are a must
Use JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, or TIFF formats for thumbnails.
Use 16:9 aspect ratio.
Adhere to consistent look and style to all your thumbnails
Use emotions in your thumbnails with faces
Use description and images to tell a complementary story in the thumbnail.
These should be coherent with the video title and topic.

3. Subtle Sell through Soft Pitching

Asking your viewers to buy your products is not an effective youtube strategy at all. Soft selling is a better approach to pitch your business and services to your viewers.

Inbound Marketing:

The core idea of inbound marketing is to teach, help and create value for your audience. This type of marketing strategy will help you build your brand and drive sales.

Pro Tips:

80% of your content should be value-added content, and 20% of the time, you can pitch the hard ask for your audience.
Mention resources and things that you think holds value for your viewer
Offer your audience something as a freebie or a free e-book as soft pitches in your video.
Don’t send them off the platform with display cards on screen while you are pitching them something. Instead, you can mention the link in the description and redirect them to check it out later.
Use CTA (call to action) by the end of the video to redirect them to the relevant resource.
Add links for your socials in the description.
Add links to the resources you pitched in the video.

4. Collaborate with Influencers and other brands

Potential of Collaborative videos

For better organic reach, collaborative videos are viral among content creators. These videos are also popular choices among viewers for their credibility.

Reach a bigger Audience

Brands, influencers, and content creators collaborate to bring relevant content to audiences. The collaborative content will help both collaborators to tap into each other’s audience.

Cross-promotion through collaborations

The cross-promotion will be an added benefit for both you and the partner brand or influencer. It will also help you build your brand by making you look good through credible associations. Few tips on how to make these collaborations a win/win situation for you, your audience, and partners are:

Pro tips:

Ask your audience who they want to watch and what topics you should cover. For a small subscriber base, you can trend jack on topics in your industry.
Ask the experts to get their suggestions and feedback
Find relevant brands and influencers in your niche to collaborate. Irrelevant content and influencers might not be healthy for your brand.
Target brands and YouTubers who hold credibility and are more powerful than yours
Collaborate with influencers and other social networks

5. Use Data Design Future Strategy

Youtube Analytics

YouTube analytics gives you a sense of what content will perform best with your audience. It also gives you a good understanding of what your audience appreciates. You’ll get the idea about what kind of content will work best to pitch your services and products.

Pitching your business based on data

Use only 20% of your content to make a hard ask from your audience. But before that, make sure you have provided good value in the video. The value you have already delivered in the video will back up the selling pitch of your services. You can streamline the video production with a video production proposal template.

Protips:

Don’t use generic opt-ins to promote something.
Be specific according to the type of content and audience you are targeting. Use data for this.
Use Youtube Analytics to get information about your audience demographics. The data will help you come up with the best strategies.

How to Use YouTube for Business Marketing in a Nutshell

To stay true to your brand, it is crucial to align your content and marketing accordingly. For a quick review:

Use YouTube to increase your brand’s authority. Embed YouTube videos on your website or other websites.
Use YouTube to enhance SEO for your offerings.
Incorporate different learning styles in your videos
Promote your brand with Affiliate marketing on Youtube
Create engaging thumbnails
Keep your services and product selling subtle in your YouTube content
Collaborate with influencers and brands for valuable content and to increase your reach

80% of your content may not get people to buy your product or subscribe to your services, but it will keep you on the platform while your brand adds value in so many other ways. You can control some parts of marketing your business on YouTube (e.g., through your content, SEO). You need to put some effort into other parts—for example, outreach, collaborations, cross-platform promotions. Then there are parts you can’t control at all. For example, Whether people will download your product or not or if they’ll follow you on other platforms or not.

You can create a yummy and delightful recipe for marketing your business on YouTube. It is by getting a good grip on things that you can control and what you should control. Create interesting, engaging, and quality content. Use creative thumbnails. Hook your audience by offering them value. This all will lead them to buy your products and services without hard pitching.

Cyrus Nambakhsh

Cyrus is a serial entrepreneur, product-led-growth expert, a product visionary who launched 7 startups. He has built scalable platforms to help businesses and entrepreneurs. Contact: [email protected]