With over 800 million unique visitors a month and 4 billion hours of video watched in that same time period, it’s clear that YouTube is a major force to be reckoned with online. With so many watched videos, online marketers would have to be out of their minds to skip this glorious opportunity to snag more share of the market. By creating videos aimed directly at your target market and then uploading those videos to YouTube, you could set a campaign in motion that drives tons of traffic and sales to your latest offers.
Succeeding With YouTube
Just because the numbers show that people are watching a lot of content on YouTube doesn’t mean that all the content on the video sharing platform is getting watched. There is a lot of very poor quality when it comes to the latest videos being uploaded, but as with anything on the Internet – if it’s of good quality, like cream, it will rise to the top.
Your job as a YouTube marketing hopeful is to create engaging videos that people will want to watch. Let’s look at a few of the techniques that have helped the latest YouTube experts succeed leading up to this point in time.
Share-Worthy
When you are coming up with YouTube marketing ideas, think of your average prospect and what type of video they would want to share with a friend on Facebook or Twitter. If you are marketing a veterinarian’s office, for example, you might want to film some pet owners with their cute pets. The trick is to evoke some type of feeling and to appeal to the humanity within people. Those are the types of YouTube marketing videos that always perform the best.
Be Helpful
It’s a natural tendency to want to push your latest offer as much as possible when coming up with YouTube marketing ideas, but don’t be so sales-driven. Instead, create YouTube videos that help your audience succeed with their goals. There are tons of videos online selling to people and they rarely do well. Make your video stand apart by providing expert advice or top tips that will help your viewers improve for best results.
Entertain
The only time you don’t need to provide help or advice is when you’re entertaining. If you can create YouTube marketing videos that make your audience smile, laugh or otherwise sit there with amazement, you will succeed. Use your imagination and try to envision YouTube marketing videos that your viewers will actually want to watch and you’ll get many more subscribers to your YouTube channel.
Easy on the Captions
YouTube allows you to add captions and neat effects to your videos and it’s natural to want to include more unique content into your YouTube marketing efforts. However, too much of a good thing is usually exactly that. If you must provide captions, one or two should do nicely. Any more than that and you’re only going to end up annoying your primary audience.
SEO Those Videos!
Many marketers get all caught up in YouTube video creation that they forget to optimize their videos correctly. Find out which tags your competitors are using and use those also. Put your keywords in your title, as near the front of the title as possible. Finally, create an engaging description that also includes your URL. If yours is a local business, include your address in your description and business name for better identification and so that those items show up in the search engines. If you don’t optimize your videos properly, your YouTube marketing efforts won’t pay off as well.
YouTube marketing is still a hot item amongst online marketers and plenty are using Google’s video site to sell their latest products and services and some are just making money off of the ads themselves. Start dabbling with your own videos, test what you think is working and never stop trying. With YouTube garnering so much traffic each day, it’s worth it to at least try to capture a large percentage of that traffic for your own use. As an online marketer, you should be looking for any way to get your name out there and to transmit your offers far and wide. As far as volume and opportunity are concerned, YouTube marketing is just about the smartest thing you can do going into the year 2013.
With so many videos uploaded each day, yours can quickly get lost in the mix. For that reason, be prolific but always focus on quality and, most of all, think of YouTube marketing as a fun activity. That’s how the experts do it and that’s how you should do it if you hope to emulate the gurus’ success.
