Who doesn’t use YouTube today? From children watching cartoons and teens streaming video games to adults watching food recipes and the oldies viewing news, it is fair to say that YouTube has taken quite a grip over its audience due to its easy-to-use interface, versatile content, and powerful algorithm.
Considering how huge the audience on YouTube is, this platform stands to be an ideal place to market your brand, its products and kick things up a notch. Wait, are you not familiar with the idea of branding on YouTube? Well, you’re in for a big surprise, as YouTube has been rapidly moving towards becoming one of the leading marketing spaces.
With the right planning, strategy, and execution, you can undoubtedly take your brand to newer highs with YouTube. However, you need to be aware of the tools and methods in order to use the platform to its full potential in the interest of your brand.
And we are here just for that! This guide covers all the major aspects of YouTube marketing, including all the tips and tricks to ace it. But before we get into the technicalities, we shall address some basic questions for a more thorough understanding. Let’s get started!
First of all, what is YouTube, and what is it known for?
YouTube is an online video streaming platform that was founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Due to its huge success right from the launch, Google acquired YouTube in 2006 and has been the parent company of it ever since.
YouTube is a medium that connects content creators and content consumers as it allows ordinary people to view the videos posted by others. The main purpose of YouTube is to upload, view, and share video content around any topic within the community guidelines.
YouTube is majorly known for its versatility, as there is content for anything and everything that you may type in the search bar, which tells us that there is an audience for everything.
Other than that, it is loved for its super simple user-friendly interface, intelligently designed tools and algorithm, as well as its ability to take any piece of entertainment, information, or even idea, for that matter, to a large number of people due to its extensive reach and shareability.
What is YouTube majorly used for?
People from all age groups, socio-economic standards, and corners of the world watch content on YouTube. It is the second biggest search engine ever and has a watch time of more than 100 hours in a single minute, and that’s quite an impressive range. But what do people usually watch on YouTube? What is it used for?
YouTube is majorly used for entertainment, education, and information. Since the consumption pattern is highly inclined towards these three categories, creators also tend to produce and publish content around these lines only. For the longest time, YouTube was only used to post, view, and share content that either entertains, educates or informs.
However, in the past couple of years, a major shift has been seen towards brand marketing on YouTube.
Confused? Allow us to elaborate. Social media marketing has been proving extremely beneficial for brands and businesses, and one by one, each platform is being occupied by brands to market their product or service, and YouTube is no exception. YouTube Marketing as a concept has grown exponentially in these years, which has given the platform a brand new purpose.
Now that we have covered most of the fundamental points about YouTube, it’s time to dive into the world of marketing that exists and continues to grow on YouTube.
So, what is YouTube Marketing?
YouTube Market is nothing but a segment under the vast umbrella of social media marketing. It is the process that involves YouTube as a medium to market a particular brand, its products, or services to a huge audience by applying various tools that YouTube offers.
YouTube marketing is an industry on the rise, as more and more businesses, whether big or small, have been marketing on YouTube. It is a simple way to promote a brand with video content through careful strategizing and application of the basic marketing rules.
YouTube Marketing has been adopted by several brands to reach more people, introduce their brand in the fresh digital world, create brand awareness, build a reputable brand image, promote products and services, and ultimately increase sales by boosting the conversion rates.
With all these aims in mind, brands create their YouTube channels, curate shareable and engaging content, and thoroughly promote it among the masses. This brings us to the next important question.
Does YouTube encourage brands to market on the platform?
This is a very valid question. Indeed, brands and businesses use YouTube for marketing and promotion reasons, but does YouTube agree with this concept? To answer this in a single word- yes. As a matter of fact, YouTube itself made a whole new segment available for those who wish to use the platform for marketing their brands, which is known as the YouTube Business Channel. This type of channel has access to more advanced features and tools, all meant for successful and effective marketing in real-time.
This means, not only does YouTube support marketing on its platform but also takes active measures so that brands can make the most out of it. Most brands use this business account to its full potential to reach a maximum number of users, create higher engagement rates, and create hype for their brand in the market.
Now that we are clear on that let’s take a more detailed look at how you can use YouTube to give your brand a marketing boost.
Here’s how you as a brand can use YouTube:
Create brand awareness
Every business needs brand awareness, and YouTube can be the ideal platform for doing so, majorly because it is used by many people and promotes video content as much as possible. Visual content has been in trend for quite a while, as most people enjoy watching content instead of reading, especially when it comes to brands.
Visual content is more appealing and easy to consume, which is why your brand can create a significant amount of awareness by producing engaging visual content and publishing it on YouTube. In this way, you can increase brand awareness as many people will be introduced to it.
Increase the conversion rates
Once you have successfully managed to create brand awareness and build a reputable brand image through your content on YouTube, your next move should be towards increasing the conversion rates. As you may know, conversion rates matter to any business, as it is the sole purpose of any marketing and promotion strategy, because ultimately, when people engage with your brand by visiting the main website and buying from it, is when your brand will earn profits.
On YouTube, you can link your business website directly in the bio of your channel or even in the description box, which adds an element of convenience to the viewers.
Collaborate with other creators
One of the best parts about marketing on YouTube is that you as a brand get a chance to collaborate with so many creators, who will promote your brand and its products to their audience. This also means that you get a readily available target audience, provided you collaborate with a creator whose target group matches yours.
This type of marketing is called influencer marketing, wherein a brand collaborates with a content creator for paid promotions. The influencer, in exchange, has to promote the brand and its products in their content to influence the purchasing choices of their audience.
Promote with YouTube Ads
You may have seen so many brands promoting on YouTube in the form of advertisements. That’s right! YouTube Ads are a thing and have proven to be extremely successful in the brand’s favor. All you need to do is curate your perfect ad video, sign up with Google ads, choose your preferred target audience and publish the ad. Of course, you need to pay off the charges for the ads, depending on how big it is and how much you wish to broadcast it.
The best part about this is that you can effectively target your audience, as Google Ads allows you to choose basic aspects like the age, gender, location, and interests of the users you wish to target.
Stay in touch with your customers
You can use YouTube to maintain relations with your existing customers as well as build new relations with potential customers. Doing both is equally important, and YouTube is an excellent medium for it. By posting regular content, you can keep the customers informed about your brand’s current standing as well as future plans. With visual content, you can also communicate ideas effectively and in a more appealing and engaging manner.
Other than that, the comment box under each video is a space for your customers and viewers to express their thoughts, opinions, reviews, suggestions, and basically to interact with your brand.
In these ways, you can use YouTube to promote your brand, build awareness and brand image, collaborate with creators, and maintain interaction with the audience. That being said, let’s get to the technical part and talk about the major YouTube tools that you should be focusing on when marketing your brand on the platform.
Which tools and features should brands use and how?
Hashtags
If you are not aware of this, let me tell you that you can add hashtags to your videos on YouTube too! This is an excellent way to increase visibility because, on YouTube, hashtags can be searched. Meaning, if your brand offers skincare material and you add relevant hashtags to skincare, whenever someone searches for those keywords, your brand’s channel will be seen.
This means that whenever people look for something on YouTube if you have used relevant hashtags, their chances of landing on your channel will shoot up. In this way, more and more people will discover your brand and become potential customers.
Call to action
This is one of the most practically benefitting tools that you can apply to your videos. Call to action is a process wherein the channel literally calls people to take the desired steps in the brand’s favor. It is basically driving the audience towards a certain direction which leads to the goal of your brand.
For instance, if your brand offers healthy snacks, then at the end of the YouTube video, you can add a call-to-action by linking your website in the video and inviting people to take a look. In this way, the viewers are more inclined towards visiting the website, as the link is readily available and the products are just one click away.
YouTube Ads
As mentioned previously, YouTube Ads can be highly beneficial for any brand and is one of the most strategically designed tools of YouTube that can truly spike up the engagement rate of your business channel. Advertisements are meant to promote the brand’s image and persuade the audience into buying products from the brand through various means such as storytelling, celebrity or influencer endorsement, etc.
Your brand can stitch a story that suits your brand’s purpose and core value propositions, which will create hype in the market and increase demand over a period of time.
Live Streams
YouTube allows its channels to live stream, which is usually much longer than the uploaded videos. So, how does it help your channel? Well, since live streams are longer, they increase the watch-time of your channel, and this plays a huge role on YouTube. You see, your channel needs at least 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months in order to enable YouTube monetization.
This means your brand can receive funding from YouTube just for posting content. But then again, you need to make sure that your viewers actually show up for the streams, so you need to schedule them at a viewer-friendly time and around interesting topics.
YouTube Analytics
This is, by far, one of the most underrated yet essential tools offered by YouTube. So, the YouTube Analytics tool is nothing but a plethora of all the data, facts, figures, and statistics that you may want about your channel. It gives information such as the time at which most of your subscribers are active, the viewer duration of all videos, engagement rates, click-on rates, profile visits, website visits, and so on.
This information can prove highly useful to understand your growth or fall, find reasons behind it, and make the necessary changes and modifications which lead to an improved brand image over time.
These are the most useful tools, particularly for brands and business channels on YouTube. Now we have reached the last segment of this write-up, and as promised in the beginning, it will be all about the most valuable tips and tricks that can up your YouTube brand management game.
Here are the final tips that will give your brand an upper edge on YouTube:
Design clickable thumbnails and titles
The thumbnail and title of your videos play the most significant role in determining the viewership and engagement under your videos. Why? Because whenever a viewer is surfing through YouTube, the first thing they see is your thumbnail and title. He/she will click on the video only if these two elements interest them.
Therefore, the best thing is to create a simple yet attractive thumbnail, which clearly explains what the video is about. Use high-resolution images and readable text fonts to ensure clarity. Other than that, keep your titles interesting by adding an element of surprise, or even a simple, straightforward, clickable title works.
Use SEO-generated titles and descriptions
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is one of the most critical elements of your video that can make or break your brand’s visibility on YouTube. SEO is a system that involves the usage of the most searched and looked for keywords.
After thorough research, these keywords are identified and then smartly placed in the title and description of the video. The videos posted by your business channel receive a better search engine ranking. This is probably one of the most important factors because no matter how well stitched your video is or how powerful your brand is, it will not be viewed if it does not top the search engine results.
Stay relevant and trendy
For any brand, marketing on any platform, staying in touch with the current trends is the key to successful branding and marketing. In the case of YouTube, a major proportion of the users belong to the GenZ and Millennial groups. They are also the major buying group today. Therefore, being noticed by them is important.
And the best way to do this is by participating in trends or setting trends yourself, as both these generations are super trendy and respond very positively to trends. So, when your brand produces videos and incorporates trends in them, it can easily grab the attention of potential buyers.
Publish high-quality content consistently
The quality of your videos is directly related to the brand’s reputation. It may sound tacky, but it’s a fact that viewers tend to think highly of a brand when the production quality is good. If you have the budget, you should definitely consider investing in high-quality video and audio equipment.
Also, high-quality content does not just mean using expensive equipment but also thoughtfully planned, written, and curated content pieces that add value to the viewers. Your brand’s value will grow when the content you offer is valuable too. And lastly, consistency happens to be cheery on the top as it really helps get the algorithm to support.
These expert tips will certainly help in building and sustaining an audience for your brand, even in the long run. With that being said, we have now reached the end of this guide, and at this point, we just have the ultimate question to be answered.
Conclusion – Is YouTube the right place for your brand?
Only after knowing about YouTube as a platform, its purpose, available tools, and features offered, and the right way of promoting the brand can we answer this final question. And the answer is yes! YouTube is the ideal place for any brand to develop and grow its audience, which will eventually become customers, provided you use all the tools the right way to deliver high-quality content consistently.
We hope this guide helped you get a more profound understanding of how YouTube works and how your brand can make it work in your favor.
