YouTube Marketing For Small Business

As a small business, you must continually think of ways to get your products and services in front of as many people as possible, all without breaking the bank.

Leveraging YouTube for your small business can be a cost-effective way to grow it, if used regularly as part of your marketing strategy. Here are the top benefits that YouTube can provide to your small business.

1. Tap Into YouTube’s Massive Audience

Online video marketing is growing with over 4 billion videos viewed daily. If you use YouTube for your small business, you can easily reach your audience, both by creating videos and advertising on other people’s videos.

• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 3rd most visited website worldwide, behind only Google and Facebook respectively.
• 1 billion people visit YouTube each month globally
• 100 hours of video are uploaded every 60 seconds to YouTube
• According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable network

Video-streaming platforms like YouTube have become so big you’re guaranteed to find a group of people who will become your raving fans and customers, as long as you educate, entertain and provide solutions to their problems.

2. Marketing On YouTube Will Help You Get Found On Google

Due to Google Universal Search, videos, images, news, books and local searches are blended together in Google’s search results, so as to provide the most useful information for people searching.

You might have noticed that videos are appearing more often in Google’s search results. This shows that Google considers video to be as important as text-only pages.

You can take advantage of this by writing high-quality articles on your site and creating complementary videos in YouTube. Doing this will build backlinks to your site, meaning you get found on Google more often by people searching.

By utilising YouTube as part of your marketing strategy for your business, you’re also increasing the authority of your website. The more authoritative your website is in Google’s eyes, the higher all your pages will rank in the search results.

Fun fact: Over 60% of searchers click on the first 3 results on Google, and over 90% of all Google searchers click on the first 10 organic results.

4 Top Tips For Using YouTube To Increase The Authority of Your Website

1. Get other website owners to embed your videos on their websites

Every time someone embeds your video in their website, it counts as a vote in favour of your video. The more people who embed your video, the higher it will rank in the search results, as Google gives more authority to websites that have great content, which is updated regularly.

2. Associate your domain name with your YouTube channel
Associating your website with your channel will tell YouTube that you are the official representation of your brand on YouTube. This results in more relevant video results pointing to your business when someone searches for your brand or terms relating to the services you offer.

3. Get your videos shared on social media platforms
Social media metrics are a factor taken into consideration by Google when ranking pages. If you can create high-quality videos that entice others to share, you’re signalling to Google that you are producing content that is valuable to your target audience.

4. Give your audience more options to consume
Providing your audience with a variety of ways to consume information – including text, video illustrations and audio cues – will increase the overall engagement your videos receive, as you are catering to different learning styles.

3. Your Content Never Dies

Using YouTube for business can help you to re-purpose content you’ve already created without the need to spend a lot of time or to invest in expensive equipment.

Re-purposing content you have already created is an effective form of content marketing, as you can reach an audience that will love that particular type of content.

4. Grow Your Audience Worldwide

This is one of the biggest benefits of using YouTube for business.

Consistently creating video content opens the door to new visitors who would never come across your business any other way. Through YouTube, you can reach a worldwide audience even if you only speak one language.

If you’re a native English speaker, you’re at an advantage, as it’s difficult to capture the huge English-speaking markets (30% of all YouTube views) if you can’t write or produce excellent content.

In addition to this, if you include closed-captions on your videos, you can also reach new audiences as you are catering to people with different needs.

Research now shows that videos with closed-captions receive 4% more views and subscribers than those without.

Fun Fact: 80% of people who prefer to watch video with closed-captions enabled don’t have hearing impairments.

5. Build Your Email List in YouTube

Another benefit of using YouTube for business is the ability to build your email list as you continue to provide valuable, engaging content.

Use software that allows you to embed your sign-up form directly into YouTube videos. A video can be stopped temporarily for a viewer to enter their email address and subscribe to your list, before they continue.

Using this approach makes it easier than ever to build your email list, whilst providing engaging video content your audience will love.

6. Your Audience Will Promote You and Buy from You

Videos with a personal touch help to increase conversions. People buy from those they trust, and that trust is built by you relating to them on an emotional level.

Research now shows that, for professional services and general companies, if you are driving traffic to a landing page with a video of a person in the company speaking about the product or service, it can dramatically increase your list of leads and sales.

7. Target Your Audience with AdWords for Video

With Google AdWords for Video, you can get laser-focused access to your audience by advertising on videos your audience are more likely to watch and search for.

The biggest advantage of AdWords for Video is that you’ll only pay for engaged views.

An engaged view occurs when a viewer watches your ad for at least 30 seconds. In other words, if your video ad is skipped, you won’t pay anything.

The biggest benefit of AdWords for Video is the potential to grow your audience through ‘earned views’.

These views are free and are earned when someone who chooses to watch your video ad, then goes on to watch one or more videos on your YouTube channel within a 7-day period.

If someone watches 2-4 videos on your YouTube channel, they are far more likely to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

In Summary

As you can see YouTube is a viable platform for growing your audience and business in a number of ways. If you invest the required time to learn the main components of the platform, YouTube will show itself to be a worthwhile addition to grow