Best Tips for Using YouTube for Your Small Business

Introduction

With the advent of the internet, marketing has never been the same. The days of traditional marketing methods are long gone. That space has been filled by digital marketing. It only makes sense, as an increasing number of people are occupying the digital space and expanding their activities online.

Of course, for most brands, their target audience is more or less active on social media and the World Wide Web in general. Thus, it only makes sense to focus more on digital marketing as it is affordable and offers avenues for marketers to get creative.

Content Marketing

One crucial element of digital marketing is content marketing. It involves providing one’s potential audience content to propagate one’s brand, product, or service. The content does not necessarily have to be about the product, service, or brand. It does not even need to mention the product. If a brand provides its audience with useful and entertaining content, they will automatically want to know more about it.

Thus, creating and converting leads with content marketing is extremely easy, compared to more traditional marketing methods. This content can be in any form, whether images (memes, informational images, or slides of multiple images), blogs, GIFs, or even videos.

Video & YouTube

Videos and images tend to capture the attention of more people as opposed to blogs because the collective attention span of most people has drastically dropped due to the excess of content on the internet, particularly social media.

People want their information and entertainment condensed into a short GIF, video, or a few images. That is precisely why songs, movies, and documentaries are getting shorter and shorter over time.

If you want to make videos for your brand or small business to upload on YouTube, it is better to keep their duration short. Of course, condensing the content to fit into a short video will require good video editing skills.

However, there are various software/tools with amazing interfaces designed especially for those new to video editing.

Best Tips for Using YouTube for Small Businesses

To help you get the hang of using YouTube for your small business, here are some tips, tricks, and suggestions that you should keep in mind:

Create a YouTube Content Strategy

Before you start putting out content, you should have a comprehensive content strategy in place that will cover at least the first year of your YouTube channel’s calendar. Having a content strategy can help you avoid creator’s block, overcome creativity challenges, and navigate issues with the pacing of content.

To come up with a decent content strategy for your YouTube channel, you will have to research your target audience. 

First, come up with a model of your target audience. Are you targeting young people in a particular area? Are they college students or still in school? If they are in school, what would the ideal time for you to upload videos be so that the algorithm recommends them? If you are targeting a particular location, you will need to utilise the geo-marketing tools of social media platforms.

There are many aspects of a professional content strategy, which can only be identified once you have finalised your target audience. Even big brands have different campaigns that target different demographics.

2. Focus on the Keywords

People search for YouTube videos using very few words. Unlike Google Search, you will not see people typing in a lot of words on YouTube. Thus, you have to make sure that you include the keywords relevant to your content either in the title or the description.

Without keywords, your content will not fare well on search engines. Read up on SEO strategies as much as you can before you start putting out content. 

3. Think About Your Thumbnails

On YouTube, whether an individual clicks on your video or not is primarily decided by your thumbnail. If it piques the interest of your audience and is attractive, it will probably drive a lot of traffic on your channel.

On the other hand, if it’s bland, unattractive, and unoptimised, people will just scroll down past your video. More importantly, never make a thumbnail that is anywhere close to a clickbait, no matter how desperately you need viewers. It will tarnish your brand’s image in the market.

Moreover, it is disrespectful to your audience. Duping your audience for the sake of views will also result in a negative comment section. 

4. Interact With Your Audience

Most brands that have an active audience on platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram, end up losing them only because of one thing – the lack of interaction. If you have garnered some followers or subscribers, the only way to keep them around is to engage them regularly.

Not only does that please the audience by making them feel special but also acts as a notification that reminds them of your brand’s existence. For instance, if you like the comments in the comment section and reply to them, those people will receive notifications and will be reminded once again of your channel or presence on the platform.

Moreover, this will also paint your brand as one that has its feet on the ground. Most brands that do not interact with their audience or keep their comment section off on YouTube end up losing a lot of opportunities, and a lot of their audiences end up thinking of them as pretentious.

Conclusion

In any form or branch of marketing, the audience plays a pivotal role. It is a rule of thumb that you should keep your audience in mind while making each decision. Whether it is YouTube marketing or social media marketing, the end goal is to attract, grow, and nurture your audience.

If you do that well, you will be able to find a lot of leads consistently in that very audience. Moreover, it will give you an edge over the rest of the competition as your brand loyalty slowly grows.