Promoting Your Business On YouTube: A Short Guide

YouTube isn’t just for watching cat videos and cooking tutorials. There are several uses for the platform related to education, entertainment, news, and much more. One of the lesser known uses of YouTube is to use it as an effective marketing tool for your business. These are a few tips and tricks for marketing through Youtube.

Gain A Following

The first and foremost rule of any social media account is to try and reach as many followers/subscribers as you can. Using websites such as YouTubeStorm can set your channel on the path to exponentially increasing subscribers, allowing your business to be marketed to a larger number of people. 

A great advantage to using YouTube (and other social media platforms) is the potential of your content going viral. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is used to describe content (videos, audio recordings, posts) that is repeatedly shared online at a very fast rate.

If you are successfully able to create a video that goes viral, which also contains a reference to your business; you are effectively raising awareness of your business’ brand. Given that there are over 2 billion YouTube users, your brand has the potential to reach consumers globally. 

Market But Don’t Advertise

In traditional media used in advertising (Newspapers, Radio, TV, etc.), a business is expected to create an advertisement to market the products and services it offers. Although you can easily use the same video used in a TV ad and just transfer it to a YouTube channel, it probably won’t get as much reach as other content available on the platform.

The better method you can use is to create content related to your business and base your channel on that. For example, a cafe can market its business by creating videos about the different types of coffee, and the method of preparation.

People watch a wide variety of content online, and with a little creativity, you can find something that is connected to your business somehow. The viewers will enjoy your content and keep coming back for more. This will be helpful because they are continuously creating a mental association between your business and the product.

In the example of a cafe, a coffee lover does not always want to make their coffee, or may not have all the equipment needed. If they are within the area of the cafe, they will remember that your cafe serves the style they are interested in trying, and may indeed visit. 

The Comment Section

Social media celebrities will all tell you that you should always ignore the comment section because it is full of “internet trolls”. However, it is a great source of unfiltered data about your viewers.

Go through the comments on your videos (and your rivals) as a form of market research on consumer behavior and their preferences. It may not be the easiest or most accurate research method, but it is certainly useful. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Anything you post online these days can benefit greatly from being optimized for search engines. The basic idea is that you should be creating content that will be easier to find when using a search engine such as Google or YouTube, which are the leading search engines globally. 

YouTube’s Algorithm

Search engines use an algorithm to help them decide which content to drive more traffic towards. For example, on YouTube, this algorithm decides what type of videos to recommend to its users, and which channels to suggest to them.

It also decides which videos to play next if the website’s “Autoplay” function is used. For exactly those reasons, it is beneficial for business owners on YouTube to optimize their content for SEO. 

Although it sounds very technical, it is a relatively simple concept to apply. Also, content that is easy for search engines to analyze is easy for viewers/readers to digest, and is generally considered of high quality. Understanding the specific algorithm that YouTube uses will help you get ahead of other channels. 

Captions

One very easy method to get your YouTube channel optimized for search engines is to add captions to your videos. The automatically generated captions rank lower in YouTube’s algorithm because they consider it automatically created content, and thus of lower quality. 

Keywords

A very basic concept that you must be able to master in order to fully utilize the potential of SEO is keyword rankings. Keywords (in an SEO sense) are words that people can use to find your content. For example, the words “Italian”, “Pizza” and “California” may be part of the search phrases a person would use when in search for authentic Italian-style pizza when in California.

You should try to think of more elaborate ways that people will search for you, that is, more keywords. Your content should be using the same language that your audience does so that they can search for it easily. 

You should continuously be updating your keyword list, to keep your content up to date and relevant. Also, trying to narrow down your keywords to those that are specific to your content is important. 

YouTube is an excellent way to market any type of business, whether it is online or not. With a little effort, you can reach a large number of people and increase your brand awareness. Marketing through YouTube requires knowledge of basic SEO concepts and principles, which can easily be applied to content created for your YouTube channel.