YouTube is a behemoth video repository with users posting 48 hours of video every minute resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day! An insane amount of video being posted with over 800 million pairs of eyeballs looking at it a month. So the question becomes as a business owner how do your videos reach your target market. Here are my top nine YouTube strategies to help your videos reach your potential customers.
1. First and foremost you need to define your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Who is your target market?
2. Use the YouTube keyword tool. The Keyword tool provides you with volume and keywords related to the terms you enter. I also suggest using the YouTube search function. Simply start typing in YouTube search your keyword and you’ll start to see YouTube automatically filling in the most popular search terms.
3. Title, Description, and Tags Oh My! The title should be using popular keyword terms related to your video. Don’t try to stuff popular keywords in the title that have nothing to do with your video. The title you use should be what you think your potential customers are searching for. In other words, put yourself in a potential customers point of view – what would they type in YouTube to find your business. For example, for my tutorial videos I add “How To” in the title because most folks will ask How To or How do I.
The description should begin with your business URL, and contain an actual description of the video, I recommend at least 2 or 3 paragraphs – and don’t forget your keywords! Lastly your description should have a call to action. For example – Read more, Come Visit, Let’s Connect, etc.
Tags should contain keywords or keyword phrases that are related to the video. YouTube will recommend a few, but that doesn’t mean you have to use them.
4. Thumbnails. Once upon a time you were able to guesstimate at which section YouTube was was going to grab a thumbnail, but these days it is totally random. If are not a YouTube partner, you have a choice of three thumbnails provided to you by YouTube. Select the one that adds the most detail of what your video is about. Think about this when deciding what kind of video you are going to do to to reach your target market.
5. Comments! Likes and Dislikes! If you get a comment on your video – whether negative or positive please answer it. YouTube is social media – keyword social! Your role here is to engage – if you get a thanks, say your’re welcome! If you get a question - answer it the best you can. At some point you will get a dislike – don’t freak out! It happens even to the most likable, popular YouTubers. All three of these elements – even the dislikes – do help in your video ranking.
6. Subscribers and Channel Owners. When you get someone who subscribes to your channel, check out their channel as well. You might like what you see and subscribe back. Leave a channel comment, nothing elaborate something like “Thanks for the sub, I appreciate it” or “great channel keep doing what your doing.” You could also ask of the owner if they could feature your channel on their channel page and you’d do the same. I’ve have made some great friendships this way. This also gets your channel out to a wider audience.
7. Captions = SEO. Captions are searchable! One of the most under-utilized feature on YouTube. Most ignore or rely on YouTube to do the transcribing for your video. Simply transcribe your audio portion of your video into a text file and upload to your YouTube video. Yes, it can be a pain if it is a 15 minute video, but it is worth the effort.
8. Annotations. Another great way to interact with your audience. You can display calls to action ex. Please Like, or Subscribe, or in more creative ways lead them to another video within YouTube to describe a product that they “clicked” on in the first video.
9. Promoting! You made a great video but no one knows about it except maybe your close friends and your mom. Embed your videos on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Add it to your customer newsletter and announce that you have a YouTube channel for business.
As you start to get comments and feedback from customers you can tweak your videos based on their recommendations.
What are your YouTube strategies? Post in the comments below!
