Marketing

5 Ways YouTube Can Help You Grow Your Business

YouTube can be a great asset to your small business video marketing strategy but this is often a social media marketing opportunity that gets overlooked. When thinking about social media marketing it’s easy to put YouTube in its own category. But it’s not just “content creators” that are making money on YouTube.

Video marketing for business can take on many forms, but leaving YouTube out of the equation is an easy mistake to avoid. Whether you start a channel, invest in internet video advertising, or use YouTube to help your SEO strategy, we want to help you consider new ways to use YouTube to grow your business.

There are many different kinds of YouTube videos and channels out there, and there’s always room for more. Whether you already have videos you’re ready to upload or are starting video marketing from scratch, here are some ways you can leverage YouTube marketing for your small business.

Incorporate YouTube into your social media strategy.

People generally don’t think of YouTube as a social media channel, but it is exactly that and so much more.

Repurposing every video you make on YouTube can help you grow a wider audience, make meaningful connections with more customers, share helpful and useful content that people want to share, and ultimately gather more leads you can nurture for future opportunities.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to be a professional content creator to run a YouTube channel. There are many different ways to approach YouTube and experience success. It ultimately depends on your goals for using this platform.

If your primary goal for utilizing YouTube is to get leads, your strategy will look different than those of the content creators and GoPro vloggers who have different goals than you.

(Read More: 5 Social Media Video Marketing Strategies to Help Grow Your Business)

Repurpose website videos on YouTube.

Savvy entrepreneurs understand the importance of video for local business marketing, but that understanding may not automatically translate to YouTube. Small business videos are incredibly effective digital assets that can and should be repurposed in a variety of ways—especially on social media.

If you take the time to create brand videos, testimonial videos, or product-related videos for your website or land pages, you’ll get more bang for your buck if you repackage and share those videos on YouTube. You can also create short marketing videos from your long-form content or use them for internet video advertisements.

The best way to do this is to plan on it before the videos are created. For example, if you hire a team to produce a brand video for your website, be sure to ask that the video be packaged for sharing on all of your social media channels.

Republish live videos.

Live streaming has exploded in popularity over the last year and social media platforms have made it easier than ever to publish live content. You can broadcast live on YouTube, save the recording, edit it, and republish it to your channel to live permanently.

But if you forget to save your live stream, you may lose it. Some social channels won’t automatically save your live broadcast so be sure you know how to do that before you begin.

There are third-party platforms like StreamYard that allow you to simulcast your live broadcast to multiple social media platforms. After the video is complete, you can download the recording and then repackage it for multiple other uses.

Video your podcast.

If you’re one of the nearly 900,000 people who started a new podcast over the last year, an easy way to build an audience on YouTube is to video your podcast. You’re recording a podcast anyway, it wouldn’t be that difficult to video the podcast as well.

Many podcasts go through a significant post-production process, so you may need to make a few adjustments in order for this to work seamlessly but it may prove to be well worth your effort.

Whatever you do, please do not simply upload the audio with a static image. Some people do that, and we’re not sure what kind of results they get. But YouTube is a video platform. So you need to give folks something to actually watch, not just a static image.

Improve your SEO with video links.

It’s widely known that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. So why in the world would you not want to leverage this platform for your small business marketing strategy?

Websites aren’t the only digital assets that stand to benefit from keyword strategies and organic search. There are numerous ways to use YouTube videos to improve your brand’s SEO. Adding links back to your website into your videos and the descriptions on YouTube will help increase your page rank.

Also, when you name the actual video file on your computer—before you upload it—be sure to name the file appropriately. If possible, use a relevant keyword. Just be sure not to upload 23273.mov because that will *not* help your SEO 🙂

Finally, the more helpful and useful video content you create, the more people will want to share that content, which will help your SEO score. So whether you create product reviews, educational videos, step-by-step instructional videos, unboxing videos, or comedy skits; be sure that your videos are rich with links, keywords, and are optimized for SEO.

Get Help.

A strategic process must be followed In order for social media marketing videos to work. It’s not as easy as slapping a video on Facebook and waiting for the likes to roll in.

From ideation, messaging, production, delivery, lead generation, and overall engagement you may need help with video marketing. Monitoring these metrics takes a lot of time and attention to ever-changing algorithms and other details that can skew the impact of your hard work.

If you are looking to outsource YouTube video creation or need a videographer for your small business, please send us a message today! We would love to help you brainstorm additional ways to create and repurpose video content on your website and across all social media platforms.

In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Instagram and Facebook for a closer look at the work we do and the clients we serve!