YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. You can only enjoy the benefits of YouTube as a marketing platform if you adopt a clear, well-defined strategy. Some methods, such as optimizing your videos for search engines and running paid ads, are obvious, while others, such as influencer marketing, are less so. Article of Martin Gessner, founder of Focus on Force, will help you understand the most effective strategies to promote your content on the platform.
Why should eCommerce stores invest in YouTube marketing?
We can quote a score of metrics to highlight the performance of YouTube as a search and entertainment platform. Or, we can just say that:
- YouTube has over 1.3 active subscribers;
- the platform gets over 3 billion unique searches a month;
- over 5 billion videos are viewed every day;
- over 80% of 18 to 50-year-olds consume content daily on YouTube.
No matter what product you sell, chances are, your target audience spends a lot of time watching content on the platform. If your brand doesn’t have a presence on YouTube, you’re wasting a huge opportunity to expand your reach and promote your products.
This exposure is why many online brands and large B2C brands like Google, Red Bull, and Evian use YouTube as their preferred platform for selling to their audience. Most businesses today use CRM for optimizing customer engagement, and even CRM for small business can be optimized and synced with YouTube to manage and monitor your YouTube marketing strategy.
Let’s now look at some techniques to market your online brand efficiently and effectively on this platform.
1. Build your audience
The first objective of your YouTube marketing strategy is to build an engaged and loyal audience. You’ll only wind up with a handful of views and subs without an engaged audience. Hence, start by identifying your audience and understanding their needs. Having a solid audience-centric strategy is a good start.
- Base your marketing strategy around their most frequently asked questions.
- Create videos responding to these questions.
- Ensure that you respond to all the comments to your videos. Making your audience feel like they are being heard will help build engagement.
- Run frequent polls on your channel, seeking audience feedback on the content they would like to see.
- Once you have a sizable audience, focus on hosting frequent live streams. Live streams are an opportunity to engage and communicate with your audience on a one-to-one basis.
The overarching objective is not to build a list of leads and buyers but a community of engaged and loyal followers.
2. Create a calendar for your video uploads
You need to create a schedule and calendar for your video uploads as part of your YouTube marketing strategy for two reasons. First, it tells your audience when you’ll upload fresh content, and secondly, regular and scheduled uploads will help the algorithm rank your content higher in recommended videos.
As a rule of thumb, you can post new content once a week at a minimum. You need to remember that your audience is fickle. A long hiatus between uploads could lead to you losing them. Some of the most successful channels on YouTube usually post at least two episodes a week, along with short supplemental content from time to time.
3. Optimize your videos for search engines
If you’re wondering about the differences between search optimization on YouTube and Google SEO, the short answer would be “not much”. Like organic searches on Google, if your video doesn’t rank in the top five recommendations when you search for a topic, you won’t get too many views.
Do keyword research
To get into the top five results, you first need to look for keywords to use in your title and thumbnails. Start by doing keyword research on the topic of your video. That is the first step to getting your video found and viewed. Do your keyword research on tools like Serpstat and Google Analytics. Let’s say you’re creating a video on interior decoration.
Based on topics that attracted the most views and shares, you have five titles you can use for your video. In addition, some magical words always attract traffic because they are a part of organic searches. Video titles that include words like “explanation”, “tutorial”, “test”, or “How to” work well because they indicate search intent and are part of viewer search phrases.
Keep your titles short, build views, shares, and likes.
A study conducted by Brisby reveals that the top 20 titles on YouTube searches have short titles ranging from 44-48 characters in length. Keep the titles short and aligned with the keywords. Your video title is the first connection point between your audience and your content. A short title that piques the viewer’s interest will act as a hook to pull the audience in.
Optimizing your video for SEO on YouTube means implementing strategies aligned with the YT algorithm. You can push your videos as recommendations and rank your videos higher in topical searches. You can also make your content more visible to users who seek instructions.
The YouTube algorithm is designed to “push” videos that rank high on specific metrics like views and view time, and likes.
- View count. The number of times the video was seen. A higher view count implies that many viewers found your content relevant and interesting. From an SEO perspective, you need to promote your videos on your social platforms and website to attract higher views.
- View time. Do most viewers watch a bulk of the video, or do they bounce away within 30 seconds? If you can get 50-60% of your viewers to watch the video to the end, you’re doing good. If YT analytics tells you that your 5 minutes has a 60% bounce rate after 1 minute, you need to revise the content at that point. You may add a hook, like an offer, or restructure your video to keep the viewer engaged and watching.
- Likes and dislikes. This figure gives you a good idea of audience sentiment about your content.
- The number of subscribers, favorites, and shares. These numbers tell you if your content is engaging and relatable.
These metrics are by no means the only ones you should monitor. However, they will give you a pretty good idea of the factors that affect your content’s search performance.
Tags and descriptions
One difference between SEO on Google and YouTube is in the use of tags. While on Google, tags stuffed with keywords are treated as spam, tags are an important ranking factor on YouTube. YouTube uses tags on videos to identify the content of the video and index the videos correctly. The tag content is also a ranking marker for selecting recommended videos.
Like Google, YouTube is also a search platform. Hence, the SEO techniques that apply on Google are also relevant on YouTube.
4. Channel description content
The details you put on your YouTube account are your introduction to your audience. Detailed descriptions alert the YouTube algorithm about the content you post. They give your content a better chance of appearing in searches for your desired keywords. There are two types of descriptions on your channel that you should pay attention to.
- YouTube channel descriptions. This is the text on your channel’s About page. The more detailed the information, the better your viewers will understand what your channel is about and what they can expect from the content on your channel. The content here should entice the viewer and give them a reason to subscribe to your channel.
- YouTube video descriptions. These are the thumbnail text below each video. It helps your viewers find relevant video content and convinces them to watch it. Apart from text, it can also contain links and extra information relevant to your video.
Do extensive keyword research as part of your YouTube marketing strategy so that your video shows up in the viewer’s search. Make your videos searchable on both YouTube and Google. Remember, Google search lets you choose between text, images, and video content.
Pro Tip: аs of 2021, significantly more YouTube traffic comes from suggested videos than from user input in the search bar. A granular description of your video will enable YouTube’s algorithm to figure out what it’s about. Description plays a significant role in making your videos searchable and increases the chances of recommendation.
Leverage this knowledge and combine it with YouTube analytics to identify other videos your audience is watching. That will allow you to use similar language in your descriptions to reinforce connections and make your video appear as a suggested video.
5. Create content to monetize your eCommerce store
YouTube is all about video. To promote sales for your eCommerce business, you need to create content that captures your relevant audience at each buyer journey stage. The three primary stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Awareness. You can create awareness of your eCommerce brand among your relevant audience by explaining who you are, what you do, and how your band can solve their problems.
- Evaluation. Video content for the evaluation stage focuses on telling the audience why your products would be a better solution than your competition. The content for the evaluation stage answers questions the buyer is asking themselves while evaluating multiple options.
- Decision. The content at this stage focuses on converting the lead into a customer. This content triggers a purchase decision in the mind of your audience.
Let’s look at how to create relevant content for each stage of the purchase journey.
Awareness
The easiest way to build awareness of your eCommerce brand is to create “How to” videos. Let’s say your eCommerce brand is a consulting business for online fashion businesses. Scaling Retail is one such business run by Syama Meagher. She runs a series of how-to videos like this one on how to open your online fashion store.
A video like this works great for a consulting firm. However, what if your eCommerce business is a retail company selling fashion wear? How about creating videos that highlight the trends for the season, or how to match your tops and bottoms? You’re educating the customer and creating brand awareness in one stroke.
Evaluation
Once the customer is aware of your brand and products, the next stage is evaluation. At this stage, the customer compares your brand and products against other brands offering similar products. The video content at this stage requires content that informs the customer how your product and service are better at fulfilling their needs than those of the competition.
The best way to show your potential customers that your product is superior to that of the competition is to show them what you’ve got! Customer testimonial videos are the 5-star Amazon reviews of the SaaS industry. Customer testimonial videos and videos based on repurposed content from your white papers work well at moving the customer towards conversion.
Conversion
At the bottom of the sales funnel (BOFU), the audience is ready to decide and consider your products as a solution to their issue. This is where you tackle and resolve their last-minute reservations.
At this stage, your wide net of leads is whittled down to a small number of hot prospects who know your name and the value proposition of your offerings. These prospects are already interested. All you need to do is nudge them towards conversion gently. Customer testimonial videos and videos based on case studies work well at this stage.
This is also the stage to show demo videos that showcase your products in real-life situations. You’re giving your audience a feel for your product before they buy it from you.
Note that the customer needs at each stage of the funnel are different. Hence, you need to address those needs with specific content videos.
6. Work with influencers
Collaborating with YouTube influencers enables you to reach out to a much larger audience than your subscriber base alone. That would give your brand greater visibility and boost your sales. However, keep in mind that the influencer you sign up with should have an audience they can persuade to give your product or service a try.
You won’t be just marketing your products to the influencer’s audience, but even to everyone who performs an organic search to reach the influencer’s channel. A point to note is that YouTube influencers build their audience based on the trustworthiness and transparency of the products they promote. That helps them build a loyal audience.
For example, David K. Liu runs a career advice YouTube channel called THE 99. The channel dishes out actionable tips and information for average people who want to become successful in Salesforce. It only makes sense that he promotes brands that align with this goal; as he did with Focus on Force, below.
Although the video talks about Salesforce certifications, and how many to get, he brilliantly markets Focus on Force’s services which are Salesforce certification study guides and mock exams in the first half of the video. Hence, creating more value while promoting a trustworthy brand to a loyal audience.
Nevertheless, while collaborating with influencers can gain your brand visibility, credibility, and sales, it’s also essential to keep in mind the metrics you’ll use to evaluate the effectiveness of your collaboration. While YouTube offers end to end analytics for all your marketing efforts, here are some additional metrics you can use:
Unlike TV or radio commercials where you first pay to create the video and then pay for every impression, once a YouTuber creates a video for your products, that video stays on their channel, often permanently. You pay the YouTuber once, but you get multiple impressions and views for perpetuity because YouTubers rarely delete content from their channel.
7. Run paid ads
Running paid ads on YouTube is another excellent way to increase your brand’s visibility. However, keep in mind that advertising on YouTube is unlike running PPC or paid social media campaigns on Google and other social media. It comes with specific creative constraints and more options. Take time to acquaint yourself with these guidelines before ideating and scoping your ad.
Let’s take a look at some paid ad options and features for your YT campaign.
Audio Ads
Google allows you to create audio ads. However, if you’re just starting with paid ads, it’s better to start with a few video ads until you establish your brand voice.
Video discovery ads
Video discovery ads are placed on the YT homepage, on search results pages, and as recommended videos based on user search. For instance, a search on YouTube on how to tie a tie yields this result:
When a user clicks on the video, the video page will feature a banner ad on the right-hand column.
True Video In-stream ads
These are the most common type of ads on YouTube. The advertiser only pays for these ads when the user views them for a minimum of 30 seconds. These ads are skippable and are easy to customize for a wide variety of content.
Once you’ve created your marketing video, you can create your video ad campaign and upload the video ad on YouTube.
Wrapping Up
YouTube is an ideal platform to create awareness and drive sales for your eCommerce store since it offers the dual benefit of being a search and entertainment platform. It is a platform frequented by your relevant audience, no matter what product or service you sell.
Creating a YouTube marketing strategy for your eCommerce store can drive more traffic to your site and increase your revenues. Follow these tips, and you’ll see great results.
Good luck with creating and executing your eCommerce marketing campaign on YouTube.
