Digital marketing encompasses many different things. Your website, blog, social media accounts, and more all play an important role in reaching the right people at the right times. Though YouTube is not as popular among businesses as Facebook or even Twitter, it is a powerful tool that can benefit almost any business of any size, regardless of industry or niche. Here, you will learn more about how YouTube works and what you can to do leverage it to your benefit using efforts like YouTube SEO.

YouTube is a Google-Owned Platform

If you’ve been considering the idea of utilizing YouTube as part of your marketing plan, there are two very important things you must keep in mind. First, YouTube is a social media network. It gives absolutely anyone the ability to record and post a video, and others can share, like, or comment on that video collectively. Second, YouTube is part of Google’s massive empire. Google has owned YouTube since 2006 when the search engine giant purchased it for a staggering $1.65 billion. This means that when it comes to optimizing your YouTube channel, you’ll want to follow many of the same SEO practices as you would for your website.

People around the world watch more than a billion hours of YouTube content every day. There are nearly two billion active users, and of these, only about 16% are from the US, which further proves the network’s reach. Since Google purchased YouTube, the two have worked hand-in-hand to provide a better overall experience for internet users around the globe and their 3.5 billion collective daily searches.

Marketing with YouTube

There are two different ways you can market your brand on YouTube.

• Become a YouTube creator. YouTube creators are the people behind the videos people watch around the world. They are influencers, demonstrators, entertainers, and others who spend their time making, editing, and uploading videos to be searched and viewed by the masses. Depending on your industry, you could make videos of your own. With the right SEO, people will find your YouTube channel just like they find your website, and before you know it, you’ll have thousands of subscribers.
• Become a YouTube advertiser. As the two billion active YouTube users watch their favorite videos, they will occasionally see advertisements. Advertisers pay YouTube to show their ads to viewers during videos much like they pay Facebook or Google to show advertisements to their users. Recently, Google added the ability for marketers to specifically target people who recently searched for a related product or service with their ads, which vastly improves reach, ROI, and conversions.

Many of the people who leverage YouTube to their advantage do both things. Not only do they make their own videos, but they also pay YouTube to display their “commercials” during others’ videos.

Benefits of Adding YouTube to Your Campaign

Aside from extending your reach to more people, there are several other benefits associated becoming a YouTube creator for your business.

• Demonstrating a product. Videos do something text and pictures can’t: they allow you to show your audience exactly how a product works. If you have limited distribution channels, this is by far one of the best ways to get the word out, and it’s especially beneficial for businesses like toy manufacturers and clothing designers.
• Making your brand the authority in your niche. A YouTube channel also gives you the option to create a solid reputation as an industry expert. Some of the things you can do in this regard involve making short how-to videos, giving your viewers tips on how to get the most of their product or service, and even providing links to other creators’ videos that may provide the same information from a different perspective.
• Saving your own bandwidth. Let’s face it – website bandwidth can get expensive, and high definition videos can take up a lot of space and eat up a lot of your bandwidth, causing your entire site to load slowly. When you become a YouTube creator, you can embed your YouTube videos into your website to avoid this.
• Solving common problems. Imagine creating a list of FAQs, but instead of posting them on your website in text, you make a video, instead. You can demonstrate the solutions rather than just explaining them, and this is sure to improve the overall customer experience.
• Announcing sales or other events. Sales and other events are fantastic for getting some attention for your business, but they only work if people know about them. You can record your most successful events and edit the best clips into a short video.
• Giving your brand a personality. A brand with personality is a successful brand, and once again, YouTube is the best way to accomplish this goal. If your bakery, for example, only uses organic eggs from free-range chickens, you can take a trip to the local farm – and take your viewers along with you. This shows your personality and helps you become more relatable to your target audience.
• Building a community. Finally, thanks to viewers’ ability to comment on your videos, YouTube is an excellent place for community building. Using YouTube as a sharing platform is vital to your success. Consider a once-weekly vlog (video blog) at the very least and add in a few other videos that show new product launches or even footage of your happy customers.

The benefits of YouTube are far-reaching, and with the right knowledge, a decent camera or smartphone, and the ability to relate to your customers, it’s possible to build your brand more than you ever thought possible just by making YouTube videos.

As you can see, there’s much more to YouTube than meets the eye. Some of the most successful YouTubers of all time have made millions of dollars just by doing what they love to do best, and you can use it to your advantage, too. You might not become a millionaire, but there is a 100% chance that you will extend your brand’s reach, whether you choose to become a creator or an advertiser.