How to Make YouTube Marketing an Integral Part of Your Growth Marketing Mix
With over 1 billion unique visitors each month, YouTube is a platform that every small business owner should consider as part of their marketing strategy. After all, most potential customers would much rather watch an informative video of your company’s products and services than reading a lengthy sales letter.
Not only is YouTube a great promotional tool, but you can also use the video platform to create trust, authority and recognition by creating a channel for your business.
Over 75% of people worldwide age 15 and up are on YouTube (part of over 2 billion monthly active users), making it the most popular website in the world after Google.
The potential of a huge audience is a great reason to market your business on YouTube. But shouting from the rooftops about your products without a plan won’t get you anywhere. That is why this article will delve into how exactly to make Youtube an integral part of your growth marketing strategy.
What is YouTube marketing?
YouTube marketing, essentially, is the practice of promoting a brand, product, or service on YouTube. It can involve a mix of tactics, including (but not limited to):
Creating organic promotional videos
Working with influencers
Advertising on the platform
Video marketing has gradually conquered our lives over the past few years, with YouTube being the primary driver behind this movement towards video-powered content
Consider these impressive statistics: There are 2.3 billion monthly active users worldwide, making YouTube the second most popular social media platform. Plus, according to a report by Think With Google, 68% of users watched YouTube before they made a purchase decision.
The fact that it’s a search engine owned by Google, with a larger search volume than browsers like Yahoo or Bing, among others, makes it clearly far more than just another social media network.
Why Marketing on YouTube Potentially Can Be Part of Your Business’ Growth Marketing Fundamentals?
YouTube content can be a powerful weapon for your digitally-focused growth marketing efforts, bringing new visitors to your website. When consumers interact with content that addresses their needs, they are more likely to stay around and become customers in the future.
For example, on Colgate’s US channel, you can find animated tutorials with tips on maintaining your oral hygiene. So if a buyer starts engaging with their videos, they may end up buying those goods sooner or later.
Moreover, by creating videos for different growth marketing funnel stages, you help subscribers and shoppers make the right purchase based on their needs, and addressing various pain points and purchase considerations.
But before we share some tips and tricks to get you started with your YouTube marketing efforts, let’s first examine why Youtube might potentially be a worthwhile tactic for your business’s growth marketing efforts.
How to Use YouTube Video Marketing as Part of Your Growth Marketing Strategy
How to set up a YouTube channel for your business and start creating effective marketing videos.
Video platforms have become a powerful way to market your business online. The YouTube community specifically has developed into one of the most dominant in the social media industry: YouTube searches are second only to Google, and the platform sees over a billion unique visitors every month.
Is YouTube marketing the appropriate growth marketing tactic for your small business?
When you look at the numbers behind YouTube, the potential benefits are immediately apparent. However, YouTube isn’t the right channel for every business because the platform is massively competitive. Not only is it the second most popular website in the world (even beating out Facebook), there are hundreds of hours of video content uploaded every minute.
With all of this competition, it’s easy for your video marketing efforts to go unnoticed, especially if the quality of your content is low. Video is one of the most engaging content types out there, but it can be expensive and time consuming to produce the level of quality that YouTube audiences are accustomed to.
But that should not by any means deter you from producing video content; while it’s sometimes tough to attract audiences on YouTube, it can still be a great platform to host your videos. What’ more is that these videos can then be easily shared across your other social media channels, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Benefits of YouTube video marketing
Creating a YouTube marketing strategy has proved to be a powerful way for companies and advertisers to reach audiences. The platform allows brands to reach diverse audiences and build a loyal following. Many startups and growth-focused businesses have helped to build and develop massive audiences by become a leading source of news, entertainment, current events, informative content, and much more that helped to put their business in the top of mind of potential customers whose problems they are looking to solve.
With that being said, YouTube video marketing can provide some great benefits for your small business when properly executed. Some of the benefits of YouTube video marketing include:
It reaches new audiences: Leverage YouTube's recommendation algorithm to find new audiences. This may be the most powerful way to reach people who might otherwise never interact with your brand. If they like your content enough, they can share it easily on social media. In fact, sharing video content has become a popular online pastime.
It helps to improve SEO: Boost web traffic with YouTube's automated transcript generator for the opportunity to drive powerful SEO results. YouTube offers multiple fields in which to include SEO keywords and phrases. From video keywords to descriptions to transcripts, there are plenty of opportunities for you to optimize your video content and get more eyes on your brand.
Drive traffic to your website: With YouTube marketing, you can build an audience by generating compelling video content, which in turn drives viewers to your YouTube channel, and ultimately to your business website. After seeing your video content, viewers may head to your website to discover more content, learn more about your brand, or purchase your products.
Effectively showcase your products and services: YouTube is an excellent place to display products that are available in your online store, create instructional content involving your products, and answer common questions. Showing your product in action may encourage viewers to click over on your website and ultimately make a purchase.
Building A YouTube Marketing Plan As Part of Your Growth Marketing Playbook
If it’s your first time using YouTube for marketing purposes, you need to consider what you want to achieve through your video content. Here are a few things to consider:
Define your YouTube Marketing Goals
Even though YouTube started as a social media channel, the way marketers approach it resembles content marketing. The core of the platform is its video content and how people consume and engage with it. The average viewer watches to gain something from it, be it knowledge or entertainment.
So before you start investing time in your channel, name what business goals you want to meet. For example:
Do you want to bring more people to your website?
Would you like to increase brand awareness?
Do you aspire to target a younger audience?
Of course, these objectives can change down the road and may often run concurrently, but these points represent an excellent starting point.
Determine your Target Audience
How well do you know your buyer personas? A general rule is that the more you find out about your target audience, the better video content you’ll make for them.
If you don’t have an ideal customer profile(s) for your business yet, this article provides tips on how to go about creating one.
Provide Relevant Content
Analyzing your personas will also enable you to plan the right type of videos for your audience. Here are some of the most common video types:
Commentary
Product Reviews
How-to/Guides
Lists (e.g. Top 10)
Q&A
Educational & Self-Help
You can experiment with different types of content based on your needs. You can also build a YouTube growth marketing funnel with suitable content for each stage of their customer journey. For instance, if you’re a product-led business, you can upload customer testimonials to attract viewers in the consideration stage and turn them into customers.
Leveraging SEO is key to maximizing the growth marketing potential of your Youtube channel
So as already mentioned, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Optimizing your videos and channel for SEO can move your content higher in rankings and bring new customers and subscribers to you through organic means via YouTube search.
So how can you benefit from YouTube SEO? Here are a few tips.
Add Relevant Keywords
First off, putting the right keywords in the written parts of your content is an excellent method to show Google your core themes and topics. You can start your keyword research using tools like Ahrefs and Google Trends or by checking relevant searches through YouTube’s autosuggest.
Once you find the keyword you’re looking for, try to include it naturally in your video title and description. Avoid stuffing your content with those magical words, though, as this is considered a bad practice and moreover can incur major penalties from search engines moving forward. This, in turn, can hurt your performance, domain authority and general credibility moving forward.
You can also add keywords from your niche market to your channel description in a similar way. Thus, you show Google which content topics you cover and get a boost for similar searches.
Use Tags & Categories
When uploading a video, add keywords with high relevancy to your topic as tags. You can also include long-tail keywords to help the platform link this video to similar themes and get higher rankings for relevant searches.
Then, moving to the “Advanced Settings,” you can also add your video into a broader category – e.g., Music, Science & Tech, etc. – to enhance your reach even more.
Add Captions
These components will not only be vital for your viewers, making your content accessible and more digestible but will allow your keywords to be put in the spotlight in another venue. Captions help YouTube “read” your content better and deliver it to the right audience at the right time.
One way to enable them is through automatically generated transcriptions on YouTube, but keep in mind that sometimes they can be inaccurate. You can manually edit the captions to get better results, but this will probably be time-consuming, especially for longer videos.
To get a more accurate transcript made by humans, you can also utilize a service such as Rev.com and upload the output straight to your video. If you want to attract people who speak different languages, you can also add subtitles.
Customize your Thumbnails
Thumbnails are the preview images of your videos. The better your thumbnails look, the higher the chances they’ll get clicks.
So instead of maintaining YouTube’s automated options, you can create custom thumbnails that describe the topic of each video. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can also get creative in the process, adding extra elements, such as arrows, text, and your brand logo to your thumbnails to stand out.
Plus, when optimizing your YouTube videos, you can also see them displayed on Google search results, which can turn into a fantastic opportunity for you!
Different YouTube Advertising Types
Here is a list of video ad options on Youtube:
Skippable In-stream Ads
This video ad appears before, during, or after other YouTube videos, and you can select its exact placement. The user can skip it after 5 seconds. If this happens, you won’t get charged. Instead, you’ll pay when viewers start to engage with the ad actively.
Non-skippable In-stream Ads
They work similarly to the former video ad, but the user cannot skip them. They last less than 15 seconds, and the payment is based on the CPM (Cost Per Impression) monetization tactic.
Bumper Ads
These are short (6-seconds) non-skippable ads that play before a video and are available with CPM but at a lower cost than other ad formats.
Discovery Ads
These ads promote your YouTube videos on top of the search results – desktop and mobile – or next to other videos. They appear with a yellow label marked as “Ad,” and you usually pay per click.
Display Ads
You can find these regular banner ads at the right corner of your screen outside the video player. For certain players, you can also find these ads under the video. They come in different formats and sizes, and they work only for desktops.
Overlay Ads
These are the overlay banners that appear at the bottom of a video. They are also solely for desktop.
Masthead Ads
This type is a premium addition that place the ad at the beginning of the homepage. These are not just for your target audience but aim at a broader reach as billboards do.
YouTube remarketing
YouTube remarketing, also known as YouTube retargeting, uses a combination of YouTube channel data and Google Ads targeting to help your business engage with people who have already interacted with your YouTube channel. With this form of digital advertising, you create an audience list in Google Ads based on different YouTube actions, including:
Viewing specific videos
Subscribing to a channel
Liking videos
Landing on a channel’s homepage
Once you have your audience list, you can serve those people ads on YouTube or in Google’s other ad networks. You do have to meet Google’s audience size requirements, however, for your ads to show. Each network requires a specific number of active users for your ads. Currently, as things stand now.
Google Search Network: 1000 active users
YouTube: 1000 active users
Google Display Network: 100 active users
Gmail: 1000 active users
When you create your audience list, Google Ads will tell you if your audience is large enough for its requirements. If you don’t meet the requirements, consider looking into other targeting methods until you have a large enough audience for remarketing, or focus on growing your YouTube channel through paid or organic methods.
Youtube Video Ideas That Can Jumpstart Your Growth Marketing Strategy
To this point, we have examined the various ad types, marketing tactics, and optimization tactics that are needed to make YouTube functionally efficient. However, the reality is, that in order to produce effective marketing videos for your YouTube channel, you’ll need to create engaging content.
While what sort of video content to create depends on the nature of your business, what your competitors are doing, here are some content ideas to consider as you’re making videos that generally work across a number of different industries:
1)Listicles: In any format, lists are a popular content type that can be both entertaining and informational. They set a clear expectation of how much time and effort will be required from your audience to consume the content, as well as how much potential value there is to be gained. Longer lists provide more value but require more time, while shorter lists exhibit the opposite. Experiment with both to see what your audience prefers.
2) How-tos: Instructional, step-by-step video guides detailing how to use a product or solve a common problem can be very effective. Not only can they help existing customers find answers to their questions without having to seek customer service, they’ll help prospective customers learn more about your products or services, too.
3) Behind the scenes: Offering a behind-the-scenes look at your operations or staff can help humanize your brand and give customers insight into your business. They’ll get a feel for your work culture, learn how products get made, meet the people behind your services, and more. This type of preview video can help make people feel like they’re a part of your business’s story instead of just being another customer.
4)Product videos: Video allows customers to get up close and personal with your products without having to enter the store or make a purchase. This affords them the opportunity to learn what exactly your products have to offer and decide whether they’re right for their needs.
5) Testimonials: As effective as you may be at marketing and talking about your products, consumers will often place more trust in the opinions and sentiments of other customers. Testimonial videos allow you to use past success stories to promote your brand and sell your stuff. You could even offer a discount in exchange for your customers’ participation to entice them to record testimonials.
YouTube Marketing: A Necessary Part of a Growth Marketing Mix
With this guide, hopefully, you have enough YouTube marketing tips for your business to use to make a successful strategy. Keep in mind that if you are a new or growing business and feel that YouTube can be a prime marketing channel, it will take you some time to gain views and subscribers and general all around awareness.
So, it is essential to be persistent and have patience during those times. If you follow the above steps closely, there is a strong possibility that you will have the upper hand over your competitors.
If content is king, then YouTube may be a great way to go.
If you want help with your YouTube marketing, why not reach out to us for a growth marketing consultation? Our growth marketing experts will not only take a look at what is possible for your business to leverage Youtube for your business but also look at your all-around business strategy to see what might be in order to generate consistent growth.