YouTube, now the second most visited website in the world, has significantly revolutionized peoples’ content consumption habits while creating immense marketing opportunities for brands and businesses everywhere. However, in order to take advantage of these opportunities, marketers should first understand how YouTube marketing operates, and to what extent it can serve as an effective marketing channel. By understanding the mix of tactics that can be used successfully on YouTube, marketers can learn to apply these strategies and harness the immense potential of this leading social media platform.
According to Emeritus, YouTube marketing is a strategy that involves a mix of different tactics aimed at promoting products, services, or brands. This multifaceted approach entails the creation and dissemination of promotional videos on a company’s YouTube channel, collaborating with YouTubers, and utilizing the platform’s advertising options, among other strategies. Because video content has a remarkable ability to capture and sustain the viewers’ attention spans, YouTube is known to captivate individuals across all age groups. This and other advantages make YouTube the ideal platform to promote a brand or business and generate awareness about its products and services.
YouTube Marketing Basics
The strategies above are also recommended by Hootsuite. According to the world’s first social media management platform, YouTube marketing can feature a mix of strategies, including:
- Producing promotional videos on the company’s YouTube channel;
- Collaborating with YouTubers and influencers;
- Advertising on Youtube.
Hootsuite advises marketers to create content that genuinely fulfills the needs of the brand’s target customers. While this may appear straightforward, it is vital to discern between what customers want and the assumptions marketers tend to make about the customers’ wants and needs. Moreover, it is important to make sure that the videos created on the company’s YouTube channel actually reach the target audience. YouTube acts as a search engine, so optimizing the content to fit YouTube’s algorithm is now a vital step, just like Google SEO. By addressing these issues, marketers can make sure their YouTube marketing strategy is up to date.
Producing Promotional Videos on YouTube
According to SendPulse, producing promotional videos on the company’s YouTube channel features five main steps: creating a new channel on YouTube, finding the target audience, conducting a competitive analysis, creating the videos, and uploading them to YouTube. Marketers can start by creating a brand account and a new YouTube channel. Before embarking on actual video creation, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the brand’s YouTube demographics and analyze rival brands and businesses. Marketers can then start to create video content and optimize that content for YouTube’s algorithm. The final step is to make a schedule and upload the videos on YouTube according to that schedule.
Collaborating with YouTubers
The community of YouTube influencers, also referred to as YouTubers or “creators,” is experiencing substantial growth with each passing year. According to Hootsuite, YouTube itself has reported a remarkable 50% year-over-year increase in the number of creators earning over $10,000 annually. However, before collaborating with YouTubers, marketers should make sure they understand their target audience and establish clear goals. They should also adhere to the rules set by YouTube and by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and use hashtags like #ad or #sponsored when needed. Moreover, marketers should also make sure to choose influencers that share their brands’ values.
Advertising on YouTube
According to the platform itself, using YouTube Ads can simplify the process of attracting new people to a brand’s channel. Marketers can make sure their brands will experience an increase in the number of purchases, subscribers, website visits, and other valuable engagements by simply advertising on YouTube. There are numerous types of YouTube Ads, including in-feed video ads, skippable in-stream ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, display ads, bumper ads, and overlay ads. Marketers should keep in mind that each type comes with unique advantages and that some may work better than others for a particular brand.
Top Advantages of YouTube Marketing
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and it has billions of active users. By using YouTube marketing, marketers can tap into this massive audience and significantly expand their reach. Moreover, YouTube is also an ideal channel to create visually compelling content. Videos have a unique power to engage and captivate viewers, allowing brands to convey their messages in a more immersive way. YouTube marketing also comes with other important advantages, such as targeted advertising, improved brand visibility, SEO advantages, user interaction, potential virality, and monetization prospects.
