Creating a Successful YouTube Channel should educate just as much as entertain viewers. Most fully watched videos on YouTube fall under the range of five minutes long. Keep in mind that the best way to feature your product or service will be to demonstrate it at work. Marketing content stays fresh when presented in a variety of different formats. Experiment with creating how-to videos, conducting lighthearted interviews and product reviews, or even a vlog format that features your product.
1. Build a recognizable brand
At the outset of creating a new business channel, avoid the tendency to cover many topics within a single video. Creating content around a single topic or keyword will make it easier to optimize the searchability of your site. Once closed captions are added to the video, YouTube can more easily recognize focused keywords to identify the video. Designing an eye-catching thumbnail and cover page for your company’s profile goes a long way: in some cases, the thumbnail can be the only visual cue a viewer encounters before deciding to view your profile or watch your video.
2. Maximize the production value of your YouTube content
The popularity of 21st-century media “influencers” is in part made possible by affordable and portable camera and lighting equipment. However, when a business is promoting a service or product, production value is not just about using a good camera. It is about getting a team of professionals to ensure that your brand is represented professionally and consistently.
Once you have quality content that people want to engage with, consider monetizing your channel with ad content, and don’t forget to add links to your website or product to your video description. Weigh the options as to how you’d like to prioritize spending: if your business isn’t allocating resources to produce consistent (say, weekly) quality video output, the best marketing fit might be to produce a single video for use as a YouTube Ad. Another one-time option is to invest in featuring your content on the highly-trafficked channel of a YouTube “influencer” with a history of promoting products categorically similar to yours.
3. Optimize the impact of your YouTube following
If you’re able, build momentum for your channel prior to its launch by creating a backlog of content. Channels build a subscriber base by producing a reliable stream of engaging videos, and any new channel is naturally competing for attention with other channels that have existed for years. Be realistically optimistic about how frequently you are able to upload videos when you first start your channel. For the sake of maintaining viewers, it’s best to upload a bimonthly video over four months, during which time you can continue producing additional content, than rather to upload two videos per week and emerge empty-handed within a month.
Be sure to link your company’s other social media presences to your YouTube profile, and to populate those other social media platforms with your YouTube videos––if someone is familiar with your product through one media but not another, this can be a great way to educate them about your business.
With its massive user base, YouTube is a free platform to market your content in a self-contained way. It offers many options to bolster SEO through manipulating keywords in your video titles and video descriptions, tagging videos, or even uploading transcripts of your video ads, especially since YouTube is a Google-owned product. And nothing created on YouTube needs to stay on YouTube––your videos can expand to your website and other social media platforms, absorbing viewers for your entertaining, affordably-yet-professionally produced content along the way.