Sometimes we forget that not everyone is buried in online marketing like we are. In fact, most people aren’t… it boggles the mind. Did you know most people aren’t professional SEOs? Makes sense; if they were, we wouldn’t have jobs, but it’s that whole “circle of I” syndrome we keep talking about.
Anyway, we recently received a reader question from a beginner in social marketing. For those of you who are inundated with the stuff, we’d love to see your additions in the comments.
Reader Steve wrote:
I’m new to marketing online and the social stuff seems overwhelming. I’ve read videos are a good way to go for marketing, and after I saw your video Managing & Monitoring Your Social Networks, I was wondering if you might have some insight and tips you could pass my way. Is YouTube really a good place to look at, and, if so, how do I get into videos? Any help you could give would be great.
That’s a great question Steve. We hope this answer helps.
Using YouTube As a Marketing Platform – Should You? Shouldn’t You?
There’s certainly value in using established strategies for online marketing – a fully optimized website, landing pages, PPC ads, and whatnot. However, marketing online is much like marketing in the physical world – it doesn’t do any good if you’re marketing to empty seats. You have to go where your target market is.
– And where can the target markets be found for most industries? On a number of social platforms.
Let’s face it – we’re in a social world. We want to communicate with each other, with businesses big and small, with friends, strangers and the world at large. Big brands and small businesses alike benefit from utilizing the social arena, as long as they’re wise in their efforts.
As we’ve said before in many posts, using social as a marketing tactic only works if you have the right social platform. The same goes for YouTube. Because of YouTube’s popularity, it’s possible to draw your audience to the videos you upload, but you have to plan your strategy out first. For example, before you ever post your first video, it’s a smart idea to draw an outline of your expected goals for using YouTube, as well as how you plan to get there:
- What will your videos be about? What specific topics will you cover?
- How will your videos help people to:
- Build a personal connection with you
- Fix their point of pain
- Learn, have a better life/job/business/family, or otherwise enjoy watching
- How do you plan to draw traffic to your YouTube account?
- Will you provide links from your site and/or blog?
- Will you be sharing your videos in your blog?
YouTube is far and above the most popular online video website today. Harnessing its potential alone could boost your existing internet marketing strategies enough to greatly increase your bottom line. Use it carefully.
With that said, let’s cover four basics of video marketing:
1. Creating Professional Videos
Your videos can be you simply talking about the benefits and actions that pertain to your business. Perhaps you could pick an interesting topic that leads people to become interested in what you do. If you’re creating a video that has you talking, however, you’ll need a few things:
- A room with a nice look (your office will do)
- Proper lighting (a dark video will get less views)
- Quiet acoustics (to avoid abundant echo)
- HD quality web cam (these are quite affordable)
- Good quality microphone (also affordable)
If you’re not capable of doing so, ask a friend or colleague to help you set up, or hire someone to make videos on your behalf. Remember that the content in your videos is more important than their quality – but quality matters, too, so do your best. Compare your video against others in your industry to make sure it is bright enough and has clear sound before posting.
If you’re creating how-to videos and walkthroughs like the one mentioned in this article, you’ll need:
- Quality screen recording AND editing software (we used Screenflow, for Mac). The ability to edit is important, obviously, but many screen casting products don’t offer this ability.
- Quiet acoustics
- Good quality microphone
Other tips for video creation:
- Add text pages into the video with attractive backgrounds for a nice touch, adding a little bit of “slideshow” feel
- Use annotations sparingly, if at all – if your voice and the few text pages won’t get the point across, neither will additional annotations
- Include links to your site and other videos in descriptions
- Include only relevant terms in your tags – don’t spam YouTube with non-relevant information
- Create video replies to other parties’ videos
Note: It might take several tries to get one video right. Don’t get discouraged. The first video we put out on YouTube took over 15 times before we got one we were (mostly… we’re perfectionists) happy with.
2. Create and Design Your Company’s YouTube Channel
Make sure your channel has a good background and picture. By clicking on “My Channel” and then “Edit Channel” (in the upper right corner), you can change how your page looks.
Connecting the dots:
Consider your YouTube channel to be an extension of your website. Where is your logo? Add the links to your site. Fill out the “About Me” section. Try to carry through with business colors throughout for continuity. Finally, make sure you include your other social networks (if any), so people can continue the conversation outside of YouTube if they wish.
3. Brainstorming on Ideas for Content
Talk to your staff and business partners about what might get attention on YouTube. Also, look at the videos that get the most views and make sure your videos have content that can compete with those.
Here are 4 ideas that will help generate a buzz:
- “How To”: Explain to your audience how to do something. You need not give away the farm; just share some basics about your industry.
- Humor: Anything that gets a laugh gets attention and may potentially “go viral.”
- Reviews: Review other sites or technologies, or even speak about news events and give your opinion.
- Unique Content: Come up with something unique or an original angle on an existing trend.
4. Be Active
To generate activity, you must first be active. That is the only way to get more views and start a buzz about your YouTube channel.
- Comment on other related videos
- Message subscribers and friends of your page – keep the lines of communication open
- Be polite, and avoid shameless self-promotion
- Reply to messages and comments as often as possible
- Use your other social connections wisely to share uploaded videos – use unique comments (i.e. don’t use the same words with every social post)
Be Prepared and Be Patient – Video Marketing Isn’t Instantaneous
Unless you hit the jackpot of video marketing, you aren’t going to become an Internet sensation over night. Be prepared to invest a lot of time until you get your viewership numbers up, and be patient with how long it takes.
Before you get upset and decide YouTube isn’t for you, look back at the videos you’ve done in the past and the number of views, likes, dislikes, etc. you’ve received. If some have far better results than others, try to do more that are similar. Finally, remember that building your business so you could worry about things like social marketing took time, too.
Steve, we hope this blog post helps answer some of your questions. –And again, if you’re a YouTube veteran, we encourage you to post your tips and links to in depth articles you’ve written or read, in case Steve and other readers would like to know more. If we get enough, we’ll update this post with a list of further reading.
Until next time, happy marketing!
24 Responses
I think your best piece of advice from this is to be patient. Almost everything you do on the internet, be it videos, blogs, podcasts, livestreams, etc., requires patience. YouTube stars have been born overnight, but they are few and far between. Being patient, and consistently creating and posting content will do wonders for your rankings and views. If you make one (or even five) videos and you have very few views, don’t give up. Keep on creating quality content, and you’ll get the views you’re looking for.
Thanks for your input Richard. A lot of people are not patient, but that’s the number one downfall of small business. They don’t have the time nor the funds to wait…
awesome post here thanks for sharing
YouTube is an awesome way to drive traffic thanks for sharing 🙂
Youtube is a widely growing platform and the third most visited website in the world. All types of marketers including affiliate marketers, CPA marketers etc. are taking it to Youtube. So it definitely serves as a great marketing platform.
This is very best news. As per my knowledge just i know about the YouTube, which is useful to promote our business into internet marketing now i got more information here. Really , i never heard this valuable information on YouTube. Thanks to share this valuable information.
YouTube is one of the best and largest Video marketing website. Video marketing gives more popularity if you share your videos in social media sites.
This has got to be the most unique and brilliant idea to find a job out there today – the chocolate bar resume. Your work experience and assets are written where the nutritional facts would normally go,resume sample
Thanks for sharing great tips on how to create high quality videos. In my opinion, A good place, professional camera and a good script is necessary for making good quality videos.
Sometime I find that impatience works better than patience. Don’t just go stagnant when you post up your videos, commenting on other people’s videos that are related to or similar to yours can net you some free and easy views and possibly some impressions on your business later.
Great tutorial but you didn’t go into detail in the part I feel may be the most important, video optimization. Without an optimized video title, description, tags, and even file name you’ll end up way behind a lot of others. Content is king but I’ve gotten thousands of views on lower quality videos using only optimization compared to a couple thousand on higher quality videos without optimization (and then I optimized them and they started getting a few more views).
Thanks for your input, Mike, and for adding value for our readers. Optimization is, of course, an important part of any marketing. However, we do try to keep our articles within a reasonable length… and when you do that, you end up leaving some things out!
Again, thanks for taking the time to comment!
Article length is always a curse, but then again leaving a little out here and there also gives you room to discuss the missing elements on your comment which we all know google adores. Always a silver lining right?
Indeed 😉
Me likeeeeeeeeeee as a freind would say.;-)
Nice job Gabs! Ya know I’m going to comment on this topic! I would make a few suggestions about content and this is not to say the info here isn’t sound and a good plan.
1. Don’t look at your content look at what is working and how people are engaging with it. If you aren’t getting engagement then…. it’s not working! Look for what is getting views and theme around that using keywords in tags and Title. If you can’t position than look to get into the relavant video results (tags are important match tags on ranking videos)
2. The damndest things work on YouTube so … look for ways to get viral…your marketing video isn’t likely going to do that. If you can’t make the video than look to advertise on videos targeting your audience
Thanks Mr. T, I knew you would make it around when you caught wind of this post lol. Always nice having you drop in and give us your wonderful words of wisdom. 🙂
I definitely need to get my feet wet in the video arena. I’m doing audios on one of my blogs, but I’ve been procrastinating with respect to videos. Thanks for the tips!
Once you get the first one out, it gets easier. Which reminds me we are due for a new one lol… thanks for reminding us. Please keep us updated on yours 🙂
Thanks so much for the post.Really looking forward to read more. Want more.
YouTube is a great way to promote your business, products or services online. You can be as creative as to develop your own series of ‘how to’ videos or even create simple promotional videos to help market and promote your brand name.
Yes, Shamelle that’s correct. The possibilities are endless… thanks for your input!
Glad to be back and read new post, Indeed planning is really essential when engaging into any kind of online business marketing and as being mentioned that social media marketing dominates. Anyways, the author of this post strongly pointed out that in order for it to work it must be a right social networking platform by knowing your targeted customers. Video marketing strategy can be an effective approach when optimized properly and could possibly give solution , information to what your target clients is; in relation to what services you provided. Good to know you’ve listed important list of action to be taken when making your video marketing strategy.
Hey Thanks for these tips, perfect timing, as next week I’m starting my video series, just invested in a nice Camera, and extended the office to add a studio/digital room.
Touching the camera topic, Investing in a camera that produces good quality video, not just pays off, but gives a professional image of your business, I tried one video on a low quality camera, never again, if you’re going to do something, you do it properly as its your brand, and image at the end…right?
Will defiantly be using some of these tips.
This was a very helpful guide towards youtube. My company’s been thinking of adding more youtube videos but has no idea where to begin. We’re thinking we could offer how to videos (we’re a tech hosting company) and that’ll maybe bring more customers.
Thanks for reminding me on the video marketing advantages. I have not found the time for youtube video production yet, but I have planned to start for a long time. We have just bought a new house, and I have to remember to keep on of the room as office and video studio. I have looked at son greenscreen solutions for video backgrounds, and by using 3D studio max I might get a decent bacground going 🙂