Starting out on YouTube can feel intimidating, but is a useful and necessary part of a successful digital brand. Videos can be a great way to connect with your target audience and give them a personal idea of what your digital brand is all about. This will increase your conversion rate and jump start your success.
A Digital Branding Guide to Starting Out on YouTube
It will be important that you know your digital brand inside and out before you start your YouTube journey. Really knowing yourself can help you to conquer the first question of creating a YouTube video: what sets you apart?
What Sets You Apart?
As a brand, you need to consider what your value proposition is. This is what will set you apart from your competitors, from people who are trying to make it in a similar niche. You have to be able to promise a unique and relevant benefit to your viewers in order to stand apart from the crowd.
You may already have what makes you different set aside for use in your current advertising, which will make a useful contribution on YouTube, however, when you’re starting out on YouTube there are certain differences you need to keep in mind.
When creating your YouTube content you need to know who your target audience is, what their problems are, what unique benefits you can provide to them, and why your benefits are better than your competitors.
Basically, you just need to remember that your YouTube video needs to stay focused and on message. The best thing you can do for your brand is to remain consistent across all channels you’re on.
The Always On Approach
As a brand, you can’t just be obsessed with creating a viral video. You will need to adjust to the YouTube strategy of ‘always on’. Adopting this approach will generate more followers and views because your content will always be relevant. This will make it more likely to be commented on and will make it so that your audience will be interesting in coming back for return views and conversions.
When starting out on YouTube, you can use the Simply Measured Social Analytics site to keep track of your video views. You can track your views over time and gain a better understanding of what you’re doing that working and what isn’t. You’ll also be able to figure out how better to change your videos in the future.
Hero
This is the kind of content you use when you want to aim it at a large audience. This is your showstopping content. When you use hero content it’s because you want to pull in casual viewers and get your brand noticed.
Hub
This type of content is more specialized. It’s used to bring you closer to your target audience and with people who are already interested in your products and services. This is where you put a new spin on industry trends or create hype for a new product line. Hub content is for your true enthusiasts.
Hygiene
Your hygiene content is the material that people will be searching for. Usually, it’s your product reviews, how-to’s, and tutorials. This is where your audience will interact with you the most through their comments.
Video Promotion
Video content has a great SEO value, something you need to remember when starting out on YouTube. Google is always getting better at finding the more relevant and informative content, and there has been a noticeable shift towards favoring SEO.
Video is the third tab on Google’s homepage search bar. It also pulls in videos from everywhere, not just YouTube. This means that Google search will find the videos you’ve embedded in your website.
SEE ALSO: How to Improve Your Blog Posts With YouTube Videos
With video ranking so high, you’ll want to make sure that your videos are well-optimized for search engines. Google is not able to recognize your videos without assistance, just like with your images. You have to help it to understand your video’s content.
This can be done by paying attention and optimizing correctly. You’ll need to use your title tag relevant keywords, video length, engagement, comments, and user reactions to your benefit. Every box in your video’s information needs to be filled in.
Social Media Marketing
The video content that you create is versatile and can be repurposed too many ways to only leave on YouTube as a full video. Just think, your one video can be broken down into snippets, stills, GIFs, slideshows, quotes, podcasts, transcripts, and audio recordings. You need to fully utilize this unique content.
Additionally, you need to make sure that your videos always include a call to action. Encourage them to like your video, comment on it, and share it if they liked it. You can even ask them to like your Facebook group or sign up for your email list.
It should go without saying at this point that your brand should already be active on social media channels. Put yourself out there on sites like Facebook and Twitter so that you can leverage your presence and promote your videos as well as gather feedback. Facebook, in particular, is making their video marketing fast and easy, so you should definitely consider utilizing this option in your digital brand marketing.
Promotion
Whatever videos you post on YouTube should also be incorporated into your company website. Use your YouTube channels to promote your website and vice versa. This is your opportunity to remind people of the perks of connecting with you online.
If you’re looking for a great deal to promote your videos and content, you should also consider keyword advertising through Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. This is a paid for service, but can really help you out if you’re just starting out on YouTube. Keyword advertising will boost the visibility of your videos and make sure you really get noticed during your early days. Just because you’re new doesn’t mean you can’t get views.
YouTube Advertising
YouTube can be used for marketing in more ways than just posting your video. It has over a billion users and is constantly growing, consequently motivating YouTube to offer marketers and business owners better opportunities to get noticed by their target audience. To put it simply, YouTube ads.
When you’re starting out on YouTube these ads can be simple. You won’t need an over the top movie budget or a visionary director to get the results you want.
There are two types of YouTube ads you can use, skippable and non-skippable.
- Non-skippable YouTube ads will force people to watch your entire ad but it can only be 15-20 seconds long. These ads also tend to get a bad rap because there’s no way to opt out of watching them. You’ll get better engagement but you’ll also get a higher video abandonment rate.
- Skippable YouTube ads don’t force people to watch them past the first five seconds and have no maximum length. They tend to have a more positive user experience, but only have a required 5 seconds of watch time so you need to get your most important information out there right away.
Your ads need to be all about relevance. If your ad relates to the video following it, then its more likely to be effective. You can make this process easier by doing keyword research and searching on YouTube to see what keywords are already popular in your desired niche.
Fitting Video into Your Marketing
YouTube videos will help your brand rank higher in SERPs, convert searches into leads, and increase the time spent on a webpage. This is why small businesses can’t let themselves be put off by the idea that video marketing is expensive or needs to be fully polished to be useful. Your videos can be incredibly simple and still get millions of views. This basic video has over eleven million views.
Video marketing is powerful and will improve your customer experience, especially if you’re a strictly online brand. Videos can help your customers to better understand your products which will lead to higher conversions.
Final Thoughts
Youtube is a great tool for your digital brand. Starting out on Youtube can feel intimidating, but doesn’t have to be if you just remember what makes you unique. focus on what your target audience is searching for, answer their questions, solve their problems, and you’ll be able to find success with your brand.
Do you have a YouTube channel? If not then what’s stopping you?
