The fact that people will readily share what is remarkable does not only open up the platform for brand promotion, it also provides a greater opportunity for your product to go viral (check my posts on viral marketing).
Everything your creativity allows for can be uploaded; (except lewd ones of course), you can use it to show off your expertise, share knowledge, market your products, connect with customers, colleagues and prospects. YouTube is unarguably the second most important search engine on the world and can be successfully used for promotion and driving traffic to your company pages. Here are some quick ideas to note when doing this;
1. Create remarkable videos
Uploading is free so you will have all kinds of things in there. How then will your video work in promoting your brand? Create remarkable ones. There are millions of videos on YouTube and only the ones worth seeing must not be ‘normal’. Remarkable videos are striking and worth a second look – in fact they are worth sharing with others. They are funny, rich, controversial or educating – they must be strong enough to encourage discussion, or word of mouth promotion. Remarkable videos are not only useful videos, but they also tend to appeal to large groups of people.
If your video manages to get viral, people will freely promote it for you and the only thing left for you is to reap the benefits.
2. Pay attention to your profile.
If you are hoping to use your YouTube page for your business, you need a robust profile page. This is the portion that your viewers will look at if they need to know more about your product so it pays to pay attention to it.
Similarly to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, an interesting profile is a must. If people like your videos, they will check your profile to learn more about you. When they see that your profile is boring, they won’t bother more with you. You can make your profile a bit informal but don’t make it as if it were the profile of a crazy teenager – you are using YouTube for business, right?
3. Include your business information in the video
Your logo and your website URL, contact details are your major branding weapons. This is why you must include them in the video. You can include them in the beginning of the video or at the end. It is best to have your logo and URL throughout the whole video because this way you will be gaining lots of exposure but if not, the beginning and the end of the video will suffice.
4. Sorry, you don’t need to get an expert
One of the inherent attractions of YouTube as a platform is the latent general acceptance of amateur videos. While most videos that have gone viral were not necessarily produced with high-end gadgets, you also need to ensure the videos have quality standards. Your videos need to have the basic standards of normal quality – clarity, no feedback, and a clear message. One of the greatest marketing campaigns via YouTube was the Will It Blend Campaign by BlendTech – their first video was $50 and it grossed advertising impact worth $90million.
Just make sure your videos don’t have crappy background sound and/or blurred pictures.
5. Promote your videos
If your videos will get viral, you need to consciously promote it. Use other video sites and every social media channel possible. You need to push your videos in front of as many viewers as possible. Sitting back to rely on viewers to find your videos will mean you were lucky – very lucky. Post links, pictures, comments inviting people to view the videos.
Commenting on other people’s videos or posting video responses and adding your links are ways of promoting your business and you should take full advantage of it.
6. Make your Videos Search-Friendly
While you need to get viewers to watch your videos, you need to make your videos friendly for search. You need to include your keywords in the filename, titles and description. You can also list as many keywords as possible.
Don’t get too ambitious that you will be classified as spasm.
7. Post in Series
Standalone videos can become a hit but it is best if you create series of videos and post them once a day/week. This way, viewers will know that there will be more and they will be coming to check. Even if you don’t create series, at least try to post videos regularly – this builds audience loyalty.
10. Keep your videos short
YouTube doesn’t impose limits on the length of videos it publishes but generally long videos are boring. 2 to 4 minutes is the best duration for a video but if required you could go between 1 to 6 minutes. Also put bandwidth into consideration especially if you have an offline target market in the marketmp. hen a video is longer than 6 or 7 minutes, this gets boring and not many people will watch it to the end (where your logo and URL are to be found). 3 to 5 minutes is enough to lay your idea, give some details AND tell viewers to visit your site for more.
Technology is a leveler and YouTube is a perfect example. It has given both large and small companies are using web videos to reach out to current and potential customers. This platform is perfect for small businesses to slug it out with customers of the big clients.
No complex arrangements. No big budgets. A video camera/ webcam, unbridled creativity, and the boldness to reach the world.
