How to Use YouTube Videos for Impactful Marketing

Though still underused by larger firms, YouTube marketing is one of the tools that has allowed small businesses all over the world to market their products successfully and grow as a result.

Using the YouTube platform for its marketing potential requires some understanding of the site and its audience. When done correctly, however, this kind of marketing can be an incredibly useful tool in your business's marketing strategy. Here are the top four tips you need to know to use YouTube for promotion and marketing.

Whatever You Do, Don't Make Ads

One of the biggest mistakes many small businesses make when they first start out on YouTube is making videos that similar to traditional television advertisements. Unfortunately, YouTube is driven entirely by what people want to see, and almost no one is interested in watching an obvious ad. Instead, your videos should offer real value and content to their viewers.

Try to make your videos as informative as possible. If your business sells home improvement tools, for example, you might consider giving step-by-step tutorials for various home projects, showing how your tools can help in the process.

If your videos teach people valuable information for free, they'll be much more likely to buy your product. You can also do review videos about your products from people who have used them before, as with these Success Path reviews, which will still have a great deal of value to your audience.

Make Evergreen Videos

Some YouTube marketers try to ride trends to increase their video views and audience engagement. However, this is very hard for smaller businesses to do effectively. Instead, you should focus on creating videos that will still be relevant five or even 10 years in the future. A long-term strategy like this will help you get consistent traffic from YouTube for years to come.

Encourage People to Subscribe

One of the great strengths of YouTube from a marketing perspective is the feature that allows viewers to subscribe to video creators they like. Building a subscriber base should be a large part of your YouTube strategy, as it will build your audience, give you a chance for repeat marketing, and even help new viewers find your videos. Simply asking viewers to subscribe at the end of your video will actually generate a nice uptick in subscribers while taking only a few seconds to do.

Use Keywords in Your Title, Description and Tags

Just like on Google, people have to find your YouTube content before they can view it. This means that you'll need to do some basic YouTube SEO in order to maximize your viewership. Luckily, SEO on YouTube is fairly simple and non-competitive, as most people don't know how to do it correctly.

The basic way to optimize a video for search is to select one or two long-tail keywords and include them in your video title. Next, add those and other relevant keywords several times in your description, which should be a long and well-written piece of content. Finally, add all of your keywords and anything else you think might be relevant to your list of video tags. This will give your video a solid chance of ranking for your keyword. It should also move up the search results as it gains more views.

Successful YouTube marketing is more art than science, but with a little practice, you'll be able to use video content to drive a passive and consistent stream of traffic to your offers. Be sure to also produce high-quality videos, as poor production quality will drive viewers away from your videos before you even have a chance to get them engaged.