Video marketing on YouTube and Instagram

One can easily see why video is so popular these days – it’s a versatile, easy-to-digest, and engaging content format. This fact gets validated as every day, the world watches one billion hours of YouTube videos!

Video marketing has now transformed from a marketing tactic to an entire business strategy. It’s the best way to roll up close to your audience. You can also opt for social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram for video marketing to leverage benefits for your business. Let’s explore!

Video Marketing on YouTube

If you are fascinated to begin video marketing on YouTube, you need to have an insight into it. Competitively, your content should be somehow unique, to stand apart as YouTube has over 50 million video creators regularly coming up with videos. Outreaching and engaging your core audience is also a tough task as the majority of the YouTube viewers didn’t like much of advertising, so there’s a great need to think carefully about how to elevate awareness about your brand aside keeping your viewers entertained.

Successful video marketing on YouTube sounds a bit challenging, but with the right approach, it bears sweet fruits. You should be focusing on three key areas:

• • Launch and optimizing your YouTube channel
  • Analyzing your target audience and your competitors
  • Marketing on YouTube with YouTube ads and influencer marketing

Here is a step-by-step guide for you to have a good grasp of getting started with video marketing on YouTube.

Step 1. Create a YouTube channel

Foremostly, Open a Brand Account on Google. The advantage of creating a YouTube channel via a Brand account is that multiple authorized Google Accounts can simultaneously log in. As there are several moving parts on a YouTube channel, so it will require at least one or two other people to help you to operate.

Step 2. Understanding your audience

To access numerous stats about your channel, the YouTube channel for business provides you the Analytics tab.

Check them out for gaining calculable judgment about your channel and audience’s behavior counting views, revenues generated, average watching time, and rate of interactions across the videos.
You can also find useful subscriber demographics data in the Analytics tab.

By observing the Watch Time and Demographics analytics and find information like:

• • Age of your viewers?
  • Location and time of your video views?
  • Common gender of your viewers?

If your assumptions about your subscribers are accurate, you are stretching to the right audience. But if your assumptions were incorrect, you should modify your video content and strategy to reach the audience you want.

A quick tip: Interact directly with your subscribers, create a poll, or post questions to sharply comprehend what your audience wants?

Step 3. Researching about your competitors

If you want to have an edge over the other businesses in your niche on YouTube, competitive analysis is highly considerable.
Search for the YouTube channels of your competitors and note the videos with the most and lowest views. Watch these videos to get an idea of content your audience likes and what not and use that idea to create your own video content. Moreover, read the descriptions of the competitors’ video descriptions to trace what keywords they use in their YouTube search optimization. Among YouTube’s search pages and suggested videos, to escalate your rankings, you can use the same keywords.

Step 4. SEO optimization to get views

If you want to get the most out of your YouTube video promo, you are required to have search optimization. Yet not to worry if the first few videos fail to attract lots of audiences. You can make your YouTube SEO near to perfection over time.

Few suggestions to help you out:

1. Select the appropriate title embodying the right keywords

Choosing an attractive title comprising the right keywords is the primal step in your YouTube video promo optimization ( you can use Google Adwords Keyword Planner). It will fetch you more clicks if you can use keywords matching to common search terms.

2. Create an interesting thumbnail

While uploading a new video, for creating a thumbnail of your video, you can choose a freeze-frame. However, we recommend strongly making your own customized thumbnail, as it’ll be distinctive and help your video to stand out.

3. Draft an engrossing video description

The description of your video should have a concise explanation of your topic, along with your website links, any additional links such as links to your social media accounts, and a heap of hashtags.

4. Asking the viewers to subscribe to your channel

Often, asking for the thing you want is the easiest way to get it. That’s why there’s a verbal call of action at the end of every YouTuber’s video to “Like, share, and subscribe”. Without any efforts, it actually works!

Step 5. Optimization of your channel to grab followers

Once you’re done with the video optimization, you’ll need to have the optimization of your YouTube channel. If you will render a coherent experience over your channel, you’ll be definitely gain more views, and those views will significantly get converted into subscribers.

Following are some tips to optimize your YouTube channel:

1. Complete your YouTube profile

• • Fill up ample details relevant to your profile, involving:
  • A bio-data, embracing much of keywords
  • A catchy banner image (2560 x 1440 pixels, max 2MB)
  • Links to your official website and social media profiles
  • Official location and contact details

On your YouTube profile, you can also add a list of Featured channels. Such a list of featured channels will ultimately add value to your page, as it will provide easy access to all your subscribers to various other YouTube resources in which they probably show interest.

2. Organize your videos into playlists

YouTube videos organized into playlists, continue to autoplay until the end of the playlist, helping to keep viewers on your channel for longer, incrementing the average watch time. Thoughtfully frame your playlists. Make sure there are coherence and logical progression of ideas from the previous video to the next. This will tend to prevent the people from skipping elsewhere to another channel.

3. Translation in various languages

Above 60% of views of a YouTube channel instigate outside the YouTuber’s’ residing country, according to YouTube. By adding subtitles to your video content, you can increase the effectiveness and expand your reach.
If this seems costly, not to worry, from your fanbase, you can actually crowdsource free translations. You’ll be just required to turn on community contributions for your videos.
Further, confirming the translations is also easy. A Google-translated approximation of the translated text is presented by YouTube’s interface so that you can ensure the translation is apt and sensible. This won’t offer the superior quality every time, but it’s a good beginning to globalize your channel.

Step 6. YouTube advertising

If you have got the funds, aside from running your channel, you should go for YouTube advertising. There are six types of YouTube ads:

• • Skippable video ads
  • Non-skippable video ads
  • Display ads
  • Bumper ads
  • Sponsored cards
  • Overlay ads

In future posts we’ll talk about advantages as well as the disadvantages of each format. Meanwhile, you can learn about all the specs by checking YouTube Ads official page. The key to YouTube marketing is to produce relevant and engaging video promo that makes viewers forget that they’re watching an ad. Hence, keep everything brief, engrossing, and highly-focused.

Step 7. Seek to work with an influencer

To exhibit your products on YouTube, one of the great approaches is working with an influencer. Stretching to an influencer’s in-line audience can result in great returns: For instance, Warby Parker’s partnerships with YouTube and Instagram influencers substantially grew their brand to worth $2 billion.

Step 8. Evaluate and reorganize

After you’ve developed your business’s YouTube channel, you’re posting video content periodically and establishing partnerships with influencers and other producers in your sector. You are all set—but you aren’t done here!
Constant observation is required for maintaining and flourishing your YouTube channel. Duly check the YouTube Analytics when you publicize a new video for the following factors:

• • Considerable variations in the number of subscribers
  • New or diversifying audience demographics
  • Sources of traffic and video playback locations.
  • Device reports – mobile, desktop, etc.

As said earlier, the best way to learn exactly what your audience perceives of your videos and your channel at large is to read the comments.

Video Marketing on Instagram

A step ahead of Youtube video marketing is video marketing on Instagram. When promoting your YouTube channel and its content, Instagram can be utilized to gain the best of its advantage, as Instagram is prominently accentuated for displaying photos and video clips.

For creating and maintaining an Instagram following for your business account, you should utilize Instagram as a tool to share video promo and photos about your company, brand, and your products/services as well.

For example, an Instagram message can illustrate the thumbnail image from your new video accompanied by a text message while promoting a new YouTube video. This stimulates people to watch over your new video. It should also include a hyperlink directing towards the YouTube video.

Paid Instagram advertising can also be used. The only vital thing you need is time dedication to set up and manage the account and frame unique video content for your followers. Adopt a collaborative approach for video marketing and messaging on Instagram, in-line with other platforms so that it meets the expectations of your target audience.

Now is up to you. Try, explore and always measure results. And don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly digest e-mail about video marketing content creation.

PS If you ever thought about outsourcing this work, please check this article from our partners, which talks about the professional employer organizations (PEOs).