Video Marketing via YouTube

Video Marketing can expand the reach of your small business. Creating a YouTube channel for your small business is very practical to a multi-prong marketing strategy. Most importantly it’s affordable. Creating a branded YouTube channel is free. Your only expense would be if you decided to advertise your video via paid ads. I will discuss paid YouTube Ads a little later. For now, let’s talk about marketing strategy. A lot of effort and expense is spent attracting customers to our products and services. An alternate an more accessible strategy is to go where the customers are. YouTube has over 1.3 billion users and over 4 billion videos views daily. Needless to say, there are a lot of potential customers. Get in front of the traffic. That should be the goal of your social media strategy find the traffic and drilled down on your customer avatar to continually refine your marketing efforts.

Know, Like and Trust

Video allows potential customers to become familiar with the products and services you have to offer. Small businesses are also able to establish their authority and expertise. By demonstrating what you know on video, you gain credibility. If you are able to present your video in a unique or humorous way, you have the potential of going viral and getting tons of traffic. However, don’t worry if you don’t have a dynamic personality. You can still be successful. Personally, I hate being in front of the camera and the sound of my voice but the more you do something, the more comfortable you will become. Just be yourself and always include a way for viewers to contact you. The purpose of your videos is to provide good information and to help potential customers get to know, like and trust you.

Sharing Content across Multiple Platform

Videos can be uploaded or shared across all of your social media platforms. A good strategy would be to share the video on your Facebook page and embed on your website. If you are heavily engaged in content marketing you can re-purpose the content. The video can be turned into a blog post, infographic or podcast. This allows you to present information that allows your audience to understand across a variety of mediums and learning modalities. This strategy also allows content creators to maintain a content production schedule that is reasonable. Content creators can release the video on Monday, the blog post on Tuesday, the infographic on Wednesday and podcast on Thursday.  The great thing about this strategy is that you can release the different mediums across different platforms on different days.

Getting started

Getting started is very easy. Start by creating your YouTube channel. I have created a YouTube video which will walk you through the steps to get your channel up and running. You can watch it on here: Then it’s time to start making video content. Plan out two to three videos and at a minimum write out a list of bullet points you want to cover. Even, if you are an expert in your field do some research to have other sources to corroborate. This will also improve your credibility and social proof. I use screen recorder software as I plan to do tutorials and walkthrough. Screencast-O-Matic is a very affordable piece of software that allows you to edit the video and share or upload directly to Youtube channel.

If you are ready to be on camera, you can get started with your cell phone. The back office of Youtube has a video editor that will allow you to edit your videos. While a cellphone camera is acceptable, if possible you want to purchase a quality camera. Once I have concluded my research, I will update this article with affordable cameras that don’t compromise on quality.

Video Search Optimization

So you have created your channel and uploaded your first video now what? You want to optimize your video so that it can be found. For the best breakdown on Video SEO, please read Brian Dean’s epic post at backlinko.com. To summarize a few of the points in the article:

1. Google and YouTube Search Optimization is completely different. You do not want to use the same keyword research you use for a blog post. YouTube will be the primary research tool. Begin by typing in your keyword and looking at the suggestions that auto-populates. This tells you the exact keywords people are searching for.

2. Look at other channels that are currently ranking highly for your selected keyword.

3. Use third-party tools such as TubeBuddy or Tubular Labs. These tools  extensive resources to help you optimize tags and keywords and discover audience behavior and what is working for your competitors.

4. Remember a highly competitive keyword with a lot of content that ranks highly you may want to avoid. If you focus on a less competitive related keyword, you may move up faster.

Summary

In conclusion, video marketing is a very powerful resource that you can use to market your business. YouTube is an affordable solution and an invaluable prong of a multifaceted approached. Jef Scot provides solutions to small businesses in website design, web hosting, direct mail, and online marketing. We would love to assist you in growing your business. Please check out our Solutions page and use the discount code Business2018 for $50 off.