YouTube is a free video sharing site where over two billion users watch a billion hours of videos every day. The site is the second most popular site online (after Google.com) and is also the second largest search engine (Source: YouTube).
Despite its massive popularity, only 9% of small businesses have a YouTube Channel (Source: Brandwatch) so this far from being a saturated channel.
YouTube Channels
A channel is a member’s presence on YouTube. On their channel, be able to see all the member’s videos and anything the user picked as a favourite and anything else they want to share, like their favourite channels.
What to post
Video should be an important part of your content marketing strategy. It is a fantastic way to provide your customers with high-quality, informative, and entertaining content that keeps them coming back repeatedly. As YouTube is the second-largest search engine globally, so if you optimise your videos for search, it can also be a wonderful place to connect with new customers.
Videos should be engaging, both because you want to create exciting content for your audience, which will naturally pick up views and because good engagement metrics will improve a video’s search rankings (see below).
Educational Content
Increasingly, people are turning to YouTube to learn new things. Searches for instructional videos have grown 140% over the past 13 years, which means there is a growing opportunity for businesses to find new customers by publishing educational content related to their products. Educational videos are great for building trust with your audience and nudging them further down the conversion funnel.
Brand Stories
Inspirational videos that fit with your business’ identity are perfect for communicating your brand’s image and ideals to a broader audience. Aspirational videos should build a lifestyle around your brand and show customers that when they purchase your products, they are not just buying something, they are buying an experience.
Entertainment
Building a YouTube content strategy around fun videos that appeal to your audience’s interests is one of the most effective ways to capture viewers’ attention and focus it on your products.
YouTube Metrics
Once your YouTube channel has launched, you will want to track how it is performing. Here the most important metrics available in the YouTube Analytics:
- Watch Time. Amount of time spent watching your content.
- Traffic source. This shows how people find your videos by displaying the traffic sources and the views per source.
- Subscriber rate. How subscriber numbers change on a video-by-video basis.
- Audience retention. This shows the exact times when people stop watching your video. You can use this information to figure out where you lost a viewer’s attention and what may have caused them to leave, improving future videos.
First decide what the goals are for your YouTube channel and this will help you decide which metrics are the most important for your business. For example, if you want to know how your audience engages with your content, you can monitor watch time and see how many viewers convert into subscribers.
Promoting your YouTube Channel
Optimising Videos for Search
Staying on top of your YouTube SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is critical if you want to get your videos seen. 500 hours of video are added to YouTube every minute, so you need to work hard to stand out from the crowd.
Many different elements of your videos can impact how prominently they get featured in search results. Ensure that research the best keywords for each video and include these in your video description. A reliable source of keywords is YouTube search autocomplete.
The areas of a video to optimise include:
Title
Your video’s title should be concise, descriptive, and feature your target keyword near the start.
Filename
Include target keywords in the name of the uploaded file as this is a factor YouTube considers.
Length
YouTube algorithm considers longer videos to be of higher value, so aim to make substantial videos. However, always balance this with keeping the content interesting as watch time is another critical metric for search rankings.
Description
The description should give a detailed overview of your video and any include links to relevant resources. Your keywords should be used in the description, with a particular focus on getting target keyword into the first sentence.
Tags
Include your target keywords and relevant terms as tags on your videos. Tags also help determine whether your video shows up as a suggested video, so tagging competitors and channels making related content can be an effective use of the 500 characters available for tags.
Cross Promotion
Videos can be promoted on other social networks like Instagram (through posts and Instagram Stories), Facebook, or TikTok. Another option is to partner with other YouTubers to increase your content’s reach.
Engage with Your Subscribers
To make a YouTube channel successful, you should interact with your viewers to create conversations on your videos and get more YouTube subscribers.
You should respond to viewers comments (including negative ones), ask and answer questions, and like comments so users can see which comments are most important to read. Another option is to poll your audience to see what content they want to watch.
YouTube Advertising
It takes time to promote your YouTube channel organically. To speed things up you can also invest in YouTube ads to reach and engage with more viewers.
Before starting a YouTube ad campaign, make sure you have defined the audience you want to reach. Focus on understanding:
- Demographics. Define a specific audience based on demographics and language. For example, you could target 28-40 year old new fathers.
- Interests. You can select viewers searching for specific topics or define the video or channel where ads are to be shown.
- Location. The physical location of your audience i.e., country, region, city or postcode.
Once you know who you are targeting, set a budget and test different ad formats. Ads can be a great tool to build subscribers. As your number of subscribers grows, you can cut back on ad spends and focus on organic growth.
