When was the last time you saw a video on YouTube? I bet you’ve seen one today. YouTube is too huge and too popular for marketers to ignore.
If you don’t have a YouTube channel, now’s the time to start one.
If you have a channel and you never got it off the ground, now’s the time to take action.
This article will take you through the process of setting up your YouTube presence, listing steps, tools, and important tips to get you started and moving forward.
1. Define your goals
If your goal is to become a YouTube star, you might be a bit late to the party: it’s really hard to get noticed these days — too competitive. Stardom will take years of hard work to achieve because of the number of channels users have to choose from.
Even back in 2014, when I was reading about YouTube celebrity bloggers, one quote really stood out to me:
“We think, if we were coming to YouTube today, it would be too hard. We couldn’t do it.”
That’s not to say, however, that you cannot achieve other, more tangible goals on YouTube. It’s an excellent venue for business owners and marketers.
Here are three achievable goals that make more sense than fame from a business perspective:
1.1. YouTube for reputation management
Here’s one thing about reputation management on Google: You’re never finished.
Even if your reputation is fabulous and you love every single result that comes up in the SERPs for your business name, you may still want to publish more content around your brand.
YouTube is the perfect platform for reputation management. YouTube videos rank incredibly well in Google, especially when it comes to low-competition navigational queries that include your brand name.
Furthermore, YouTube videos almost always get that rich snippet treatment (meaning that Google shows the video thumbnail, author, and length of the video in the SERPs). This means you can more easily attract attention to your video search result.
That being said, think about putting videos on YouTube that:
- Give your product/service overview
- Show happy customers
- Visualize customer feedback (for example, visual testimonials beautifully collected and displayed in a video)
- Offer a glimpse inside your team (show people behind the brand, publish videos from events or conferences, etc.)
1.2 YouTube videos for improved conversions
Videos improve conversions for a clear reason: They offer a low-effort way for your customer to see why they need your product. Over the years, there have been numerous case studies proving the point:
- An older study (dating back to 2011) states that customers are 144% more likely to add products to a shopping cart after watching the product video
- Around 1 in 3 millennials state they have bought a product directly as a result of watching a how-to video on it
- This Animoto survey found that almost all the participants (96%) considered videos “helpful when making purchasing decisions online”
- Wistia found that visitors who engage with a video are much more likely to convert than those who don’t
That being said, YouTube is a perfect platform to host your video product overviews: it’s free, it offers the additional benefit of ranking well in Google, and it provides additional exposure to your products through their huge community, allowing people to discover your business via native search and suggested videos.
1.3 YouTube for creating alternative traffic and exposure channels
YouTube has huge marketing potential that businesses in most niches just cannot afford to ignore: it serves as a great discovery engine.
Imagine your video being suggested next after your competitor’s product review. Imagine your competitors’ customers stumbling across your video comparison when searching for an alternative service on Youtube.
Just being there increases your chances of getting found.
Again, it’s not easy to reach the YouTube Top 10, but for specific low-competition queries it’s quite doable.
Note: To be able to build traffic from inside your YouTube videos, you need to build up your channel to 10,000 public overall views to qualify to become a YouTube partner. Once approved, you’ll be able to add clickable links to your site from within your videos using cards and actually build up your own site traffic via video views.
2. Develop a video editorial calendar
As with any type of content, video content requires a lot of brainstorming, organizing, and planning.
My regular routine when it comes to creating an editorial calendar is as follows:
- Start with keyword research
- Use question research to come up with more specific ideas
- Use seasonality to come up with timing for each piece of content
- Allocate sufficient time for production and promotion
For keyword and question research I use Serpstat because they offer a unique clustering feature. For each keyword list you provide, they use the Google search results page to identify overlapping and similar URLs, evaluate how related different terms in your list are, and based on that, cluster them into groups.
This grouping makes content planning easier, allowing you to see the concepts behind keyword groups and put them into your roadmap based on seasonality or other factors that come into play (e.g. is there a slot/gap you need to fill? Are there company milestones or events coming up?).
Depending on how much video content you plan to create, you can set up a separate calendar or include videos in your overall editorial calendar.
When creating your roadmap, keep your goals in mind, as well. Some videos, such as testimonials and product reviews, won’t be based on your keyword research but still need to be included in the roadmap.
3. Proceed to video production
Video production can be intimidating, especially if you have a modest budget, but these days it’s much easier and more affordable than you’d imagine.
Keeping lower-budget campaigns in mind, here are few types of videos and tools you can try out:
3.1 In-house video production
You can actually handle much of your video production in-house without the need to set up a separate room or purchase expensive gadgets.
Here are a few ideas:
- Put together high-quality explanatory videos using Animatron (starts at $15/month): Takes a day or so to get to know all the available tools and options, but after that the production goes quite smoothly
- Create beautiful visual testimonials, promo videos, and visual takeaways using Animoto ($8/month): You don’t need much time to learn to use it; it’s very easy and fun.