With over 100 million visitors per day, YouTube is undoubtedly the biggest video domain in the world. More than 5 billion videos are streamed daily, and visitors spend approximately 1 billion hours watching their preferred content every day. These huge statistics make YouTube crucial in terms of being an effective marketing tool.
After Google, YouTube is the second most popular search engine out there. Whether you are looking for a recipe, a cute puppy video, an educational tutorial or a product to buy, it is all just one click away. From the perspective of its users, it is convenient, accessible, and time-effective considering that we now live in the age of the video!
Given all this, no wonder why so many e-commerce brands are investing in YouTube to reach their target customers. It certainly brings brand visibility and website traffic, but optimizing this platform for your business needs could be a bit complicated. Let’s take a look at how your e-commerce business can benefit from YouTube in terms of turning it into a profitable marketing channel.
The Importance of YouTube Marketing
YouTube marketing basically refers to creating video content to promote your business. This content could be used for publicity, information, or simply entertainment purposes depending on the brand and product. Most e-commerce businesses leverage video content to keep their audience interested and engaged in their overall message, and YouTube is definitely the best resource to do that.
With its many visitors, businesses can reach a variety of audiences with different demographics through YouTube. It creates a unique opportunity for connecting the brand with its potential customers on a level that none of the traditional marketing channels can achieve. As more and more web users claim they prefer video content during their purchasing process, it would be essential not to miss out on such an opportunity.
A YouTube Channel for Your E-commerce Business
While it may seem a bit complex, creating a YouTube channel for your e-commerce business is crucial when it comes to building brand awareness. With a solid video marketing strategy, your business can reach its target customers. You can simply create a YouTube account via logging into your Google account (a Google account is a must-have since Google owns YouTube). Make sure to use your brand account rather than your personal account. Once the account is created, the next step would be to fill in the “about” section. Do not miss the opportunity to add crucial information such as your store website link, relevant social media links, etc. After you add your company logo as your profile picture, make sure to put in a creative banner that pinpoints your business, service, and/or product for your brand’s YouTube channel.
After all is set and done, you are ready to build your e-commerce video marketing strategy. While building your strategy, there are a few initial questions that need to be addressed.
Who is your target audience?
Knowing your key demographic is important. People are different; they look for different things. Their needs, tendencies, preferences, interests, etc. vary from each other. Understanding your customer’s habits allows you to create more appealing video content when it comes to building and reaching your audience.
What is Your Message?
Now that you know who your target audience is, it is time to establish what you would like them to know about your product or service. Putting yourself in their shoes would help you address their needs. What is the product, how does it work, how can they benefit from it are the main questions to answer. Keep in mind that it is important to communicate the basis of your message within the first few seconds of your video to keep your audience interested.
Why Do They Need the Product?
Marketing 101 would tell us to create a solution to a problem. While creating video content, it is significant to explain to your target audience why they need your product. Make sure you address how your product can resourcefully fulfill the customer’s needs while emphasizing how much better it can do this compared to your competitors.
Call to Action!
The final question to answer would be to explain what the next step is for your audience. How can they purchase your product and what else is out there for them? Effective call-to-action links manage to increase your website traffic and brand awareness as well as boost revenue stream.
The Content
After consolidating a clear market strategy, the next step is to create and upload your video marketing content on YouTube. There are many creative ways to create content when it comes to promoting your e-commerce business. Depending on your overall strategy, you can choose your content type and implement them as you see fit.
Here are the types of content that have been proven to be effective in terms of e-commerce marketing:
How-to Videos
These types of videos can be used to demonstrate how your product or service can be consumed. You can give certain instructions to your audience which allows them to have a better understanding of what your product consists of and, more importantly, why they need it.Reviews and Testimonials
One of the most powerful content types out there is customer review and testimonial videos. What better way to promote your product than a satisfied customer? Influenced by other’s experiences, your audience will be more inclined to turn into buying customers. Another benefit of these kinds of videos is that some of the reviews can be used to compare your product to similar products out there in the market which would be quite useful to highlight your product’s features.While using this type of content, it is important that your customer reviews mention the way your product or service creates solutions to their problems. This way, the review will establish product value in regards to serving a specific purpose for your customers.
Live FAQ Videos
More and more people are tuning in for live YouTube videos. Live stream videos create this intimate communication between your business and your audience. This type of content is essential since it allows potential customers to interact with you in real-time. You will be able to answer frequently asked questions as well as addressing audience comments. This unfiltered back-and-forth communication encourages your audience to participate, share, and react while ultimately having a clearer understanding of what your product or service is.The Competition
Like most other businesses, the world of e-commerce is huge. There are millions of stores out there, and the number keeps growing day by day. Granted, you need to keep track of your competitors and their YouTube marketing strategy in order to succeed in your e-commerce journey. Make sure to conduct an analysis of your competitors in terms of their subscription numbers, their video’s view count, the content of the videos, and how their audiences are reacting to them, and the frequency of their new video uploads.A thorough research usually includes an effective SWOT analysis. If you are not familiar with the term, SWOT basically means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Understanding your competitors’ strong points and what they excel in, as well as their vulnerabilities and inadequacies, would be essential to your business strategy. It also gives you an advantage to know what opportunities are waiting for your competitors and what has the potential to harm their business out there in the market. The main purpose of a SWOT analysis is to give you an edge and shape your business structure in line with the internal and external factors that you have come across during your analysis.
The YouTube marketing comparison does not necessarily have to be limited to your direct competitors. There are many brands using creative content for their businesses which can influence your marketing strategy.
The Optimization
YouTube mainly works like any other search engine. Just like Google, YouTube aims to deliver the best relevant content to its audience. While doing so, it uses its own algorithm, so it is essential to understand what key points YouTube factors in.Watch time is one of those key points. How many minutes your audience spends on your videos is one of the things that YouTube takes into account. Therefore, it is essential to keep your audiences engaged and interested until the end.
Make sure you research keywords that your target audience searches for and use them in your video description or even the title if it fits. Since YouTube is unable to actually watch your video, these keywords help its algorithm to associate your video’s relevance to regularly searched terms. Speaking of which, make sure you limit your video description to a minimum. YouTube allows descriptions to be 1000 characters maximum but only displays approximately the first 100 characters, so it is better to use the first few words effectively and catch your audience’s attention right away.
Remember to create a custom thumbnail for your videos. If no custom thumbnail is applied, YouTube randomly selects a screenshot for your video. This screenshot is not always the most optimal picture and it could be of poor quality or something that you would not prefer your video to be associated with. Not only that but also, it gives a more appealing and professional appearance to your video.
Not everyone is an expert when it comes to implementing these optimizations. Do not be afraid to use YouTube SEO tools that are available out there on the web. These tools can be quite effective when it comes to aiming for high rankings and clicks. They could also help you keep track of your YouTube channel’s performance, other relevant statistics as well as improve creativity, productivity and so on.
Promote Your Videos
It is unreasonable to expect to build an audience just by waiting around. Especially if you are new to the game and do not have any existing portfolio, there are ways to promote your e-commerce YouTube channel on different platforms. One thing to remember is always to keep SEO in mind!While creating the video content, it is important to understand Google’s role in all this. It is no secret that Google is the number one search engine on the web. When a user is searching for a particular product, Google displays video snippets from YouTube on top of the other results on the search result page. The communication between these two online platforms ultimately brings more and more traffic to the website that created the video content.
This is one of the main reasons why your YouTube videos need to be referred to on your website and other social media platforms that your business has. Make sure to link your videos on blog post pages, Twitter/Facebook posts, Instagram stories, podcast channels, etc.
Having an email list is always a plus. You can share your video through that email list with a message that is appealing to your existing and potential customers.
Another helpful way to share a YouTube video on your website is to embed it. People are more likely to spend their time on your web page when there is video content. Do not miss the opportunity to increase your click-through and conversion rate by doing so. All in all, inbound marketing where you cross-promote your video content on your website and social media platforms is the key.
While it may take some time and patience, with a strong brand image and a solid video marketing strategy, growth is unavoidable. Be open to change and keep up with the latest trends. Monitor how your target audience is reacting to the trends and adapt your business strategy accordingly. It is crucial to remember that YouTube is one of the most important marketing channels out there for your e-commerce business, and such an opportunity should not and cannot be missed!