YouTube is one of the most powerful digital platforms for brands – engaging potential customers and showing people what your business has to offer them. Not only will it allow people to see what you have to offer, but search engines will also rank videos that are relevant to people’s search terms. This gives you a huge opportunity to target your potential customers.
This works especially well for local businesses. A YouTube channel with regular, well-produced, well-titled, and relevant content will get that business great placement within local search engine results.
While the concept is easy, creating the content and producing the video might not be. Producing the right YouTube content depends on a few things:
- Do you have an exciting, engaging personality that will make people want to watch you speak?
- Does your business have interesting products or services that can help make your viewers live easier?
- Can you create entertaining content that has a purpose?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are ready to start publishing YouTube content.
#1 | Start a web-show
Are you a plumber looking to show people you know your s%*t (pun intended)? Then maybe you bring a camera into some of your jobs on a weekly basis to show them how you work your magic to stop a leak or unclog a backed-up pipe. If you do this once a week you can create a stream of content on a variety of topics that help people avoid or overcome plumbing issues. If your videos have useful relevant information, people will look at you as an “expert” opinion and most likely come back to you if they have another plumbing issue.
#2 | Develop your keywords
You can create all the YouTube videos in the world but if no one can find them, no one will watch them. It is extremely hard to create a video that is organically viral on its own (after all that’s why companies hire marketing firms and production houses). You can, however, make sure that Google, Yahoo, and Bing can grab your videos and plop them into their search results by putting relevant keywords into the title, description, and tags.
#3 | Keep them entertained
In all of our experience scripting, directing, filming, and marketing videos whether on TV or the internet, we have found that most of the time people just don’t really want to watch anything that doesn’t impress them at least a little bit. Even if you are filming a video about plumbing, if you are boring, you will lose them quickly. Think about the TV personality Mike Rowe, from ‘Dirty Jobs’ – he takes jobs that people typically would not be interested in and highlights some of the more extraordinary aspects of them while whipping out witty one-liners to keep people engaged. He adds humor and education to a normally dry topic.
#4 | Stay small, they like it
Many small companies are consumed with trying to seem larger than they really are – well this is actually counterproductive. As Gary Vaynerchuk explained in his book ‘The Thank You Economy’, today’s consumers are interested in being treated as an individual, not a statistic. They want to be loved, wooed, and cuddled into buying something. Touch their heart, and they won’t have a problem spending their money with you. This goes for your videos too. When creating content, talk to the person watching your video like you are talking to them on a personal level. This will pull them into your video and engage them on a level that giant companies pay millions of dollars to do.
#5 | Include a call to action
Literally. Ask your viewers to do something. Ask them to subscribe to your YouTube channel, “like” your Facebook page, or add their comments below your video. A call to action is a great tool to ask your viewers to do something for you. But a rule of thumb, whatever you ask them to do has to be an easy task; otherwise, they will lose interest quickly.
So to recap, YouTube content should be on every business’s marketing “To Do” list. It’s an extremely effective way to show your potential customers that you are interesting, you care and you have something that will improve their lives.
