Every day, YouTube users watchover a billion (yes, with a B) hours of Youtube videosand yetonly 9% of small businesseshave started their own channels. As YouTube usage continues to soar with90%people saying that they discover new brands or products on YouTube, the opportunity is just getting bigger for businesses who are ready to jump in.
In this post, we’ll share how to set up a fully optimized YouTube channel for your business, and how you cancreate compelling video contentto engage current customers and attract new ones, too. Abasic video marketing strategyon YouTube will help you build your brand’s identity, showcase your products, and connect with your audience in fresh and exciting ways.
Setting Up a YouTube Channel for Your Business
To create a YouTube channel for your business, you’ll need to be logged in to the Google account you want to use to manage the channel.
Having a Brand Account to run your channel, instead of a personal channel, can help you scale because down the line you can add other users to a Brand Account using their Google accounts—no more sharing the login information to your personal email.
Here’s a quick overview of the steps to set up a new Brand Account for your business’ YouTube channel.
1Visit YouTube while you’re logged in to the Google account you want to use to manage your Brand Account, and head to theYouTube Channel Switcher.
2You should see your personal account, any Brand Accounts you currently manage, and the option to create a new channel.
3When you click on 'Create a new channel', you’ll be taken to a screen to create a new Brand Account. Give your new Brand Account a name, and click ‘Create’.
4Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of a YouTube channel for your business.
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Customizing Your YouTube Channel
Okay, so now that you’ve set up a YouTube channel for your business, let’s take some time to get it looking its absolute best.
Here are a few easy steps you can take to give your channel a more professional look and make sure that your customers know how to find you online.
Channel Icon
By default, your Channel Icon will be linked to your Brand Account’s profile photo, so to change it, click on your profile photo or the ‘customize channel’ and you will be redirected to the channel customization page where you can change your profile icon.
Channel art
Adding channel art is a great way to show off your brand’s personality and create a more visually engaging YouTube profile. Your Channel Art should be under 4MB and at least 2048 x 1152 pixels, although YouTube recommends going with 2560 x 1440 pixels for best results on all devices.
YouTube will give you a preview of each image you load, to show you how it will display on multiple devices. You can also edit the crop of your image.
Details and Description
Click on the customize channel option and go to basic info to edit your store’s details.
Under description, give a brief outline of your store, products, and mission. Keep any core keywords for your store in mind, and make sure to use them in your description to help people find you when they search on YouTube.
Be sure to include your contact email as well. You should also include links to your social media profiles and your store, since these links can be set to appear over your Channel Art and will be highly visible to your audience.
On the bottom right corner of your banner image, you’ll find a section titled ‘Featured Channels’ where you can feature other YouTube channels that are owned by your brand or managed by your employees. While this section may not be useful to you yet, once you expand your YouTube presence it will definitely come in handy.
Attracting More Customers with Great Content
现在你的频道是准备好了,是时候start thinking about your videos.
Video can be an integral part of your content marketing strategy. It’s a fantastic way to provide your customers with high-quality, informative, and entertaining content that keeps them coming back again and again.
Plus, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, so if you optimize your videos to be found in search, it can also be a great place to connect with new customers looking for what you offer. With that in mind, let’s explore how you can use video to build an audience for your brand.
Here are some of the different types of content your business could be using.
Educational Content
More and more, people are turning to YouTube to learn new things. There are500Mviews of learning-related content on YouTube every day which means that there is an expanding opportunity for businesses to capture new audiences by providing educational content around their products.
Videos that teach new skills are great for building trust with your audience and nudging them further down the conversion funnel. I recently came across a solid example, courtesy ofRetro Supply Co.
They sell retro effects you can use in Photoshop and Illustrator, including brushes, fonts, and more. On theirYoutube channel, they focus on teaching viewers how to use Photoshop and Illustrator more effectively. Sometimes that means a step-by-step tutorial that involves using their brushes, and other times it’s teaching tricks likekeyboard shortcutsthat could help anyone, regardless of whether you use their products.
Another great example comes fromSnowboard Addiction. They have built up over 278,000 Youtube subscribers在他们的频道by teaching people how to improve their snowboarding skills.
Not only do their videos help people level up their snowboarding, the how-to content introduces Snowboard Addiction to new audiences via Youtube search.
In terms of alignment with their products, you couldn’t ask for a better example. Snowboard Addiction sells training products and videos to help you improve your snowboarding skills, so there’s a natural progression from “interested viewer” to “happy customer,” thanks to their video content marketing on Youtube.
Brand Storytelling
When it comes to creating compelling video content, few things are more effective than great storytelling. Inspiring videos that fit into your business’ identity are perfect for communicating your brand’s image and ideals to a wider audience.
These types of aspirational videos should be geared towards building a lifestyle around your brand and showing customers that when they purchase your products, they aren’t just buying a thing, they’re buying an experience.
还装有已成为一个领袖arena witha diverse arsenal of YouTube contentthat builds an identity of adventure, exploration, and adrenaline around their line of action cameras.
From helicopter skydiving to a fireman saving a kitten, their videos showcase the many ways that their customers can use their products to embody the GoPro tagline: “Be a hero”.
Entertainment
Building a YouTube strategy around fun videos that cater to your audience’s interests is one of the best ways to capture viewers’ attention and focus it on your products.
Vat19, an ecommerce gift shop that specializes in offbeat products, has built an impressive online empire with engaging and highly targeted content. Their YouTube strategy focuses on building absurdist comedy sketches around their wide selection of novelty gifts to introduce new products to their audience. They’re currently sitting at over 8.36 million YouTube subscribers which means that this approach is definitely paying off.
Their most popular video is “The Original Kinetic Sånd by Brookstone”. The video uses a funny scene of soldiers in combat using Sånd to make a map. The video definitely diagresses from a traditional video ad format and looks much more fun, making the CTA at the end encouraging enough for viewers to buy the kinetic sand that much more appealing.
While their sense of humor may not be for everyone, their videos are undoubtedly effective. Their kinetic sand video has been viewed over105 milliontimes. Vat19’s approach really shows what it takes to attract attention (and new customers) on YouTube with entertaining and unique content.
Optimizing Your Videos for Search
Staying on top of yourYouTube SEOis critical if you want to get your videos noticed. Every minute500 hours of videoare uploaded to YouTube, so you need to be doing everything you can to stand out from the crowd.
Every element of your videos, from the title to the description to keywords, can have a huge impact on how prominently they get featured in search results. Let’s take a look at how you can improve your rankings on YouTube and get in front of viewers when they need to see you most.
Keywords
Before you start optimizing your videos, you should narrow down whichkeywordsyou’ll be focusing on.
Brainstorm which keywords someone might search to come across your video and run them through a keyword planning tool likeKeywords Everywhere, a paid browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
Keywords Everywhere works directly within Youtube’s search bar and gives you three key pieces of information for each term: the monthly search volume, the cost per click to advertise against that term, and the competition.
To use the tool you need to purchase some credits (1 Credit = 1 Keyword). You use a credit only when you turn the tool "on" to provide search insight data which is visible in the search bars across Google, YouTube, Amazon, and more. $10 should be enough to validate keyword demand before you launch into video production mode.
The suggested search results can also be a solid source of inspiration for future videos. It’s a good idea to experiment with keywords and build future content around popular search terms in your industry.
Engagement
One of the most important things that YouTube takes into consideration when determining the quality of your video is its engagement.
Encourage your viewers to leave a comment, subscribe, share, or hit the ‘Thumbs Up’ button after they’ve finished watching to increase your chance of showing up higher in search results. If you want to boost your engagement levels, try running a contest. Giveaways and contests are an excellent way to increase viewer participation and connect with your audience.
When YouTube is determining your rank, it will also take your video’s view count into consideration. To kickstart your views, make sure that you’re distributing your new videos through your email list and all of your business’ social media channels soon after you publish them on Youtube.
Format
The format of your video also plays a role in your overall search ranking. Although Youtube can’t watch your videos to determine their content, there are a few other things that it looks at to make an educated guess.
Filename: Be sure to include your target keywords in the name of the file that you’re uploading. Youtube will pay attention to it.
Length: YouTube considers longer videos to be of higher value, so try to make them as substantial as possible—but always balance this with keeping the content valuable, because “watch time” is another key metric for search rankings. If your video should be 2 minutes long, but you stretched it to 10 and viewers drop off after 1, you won’t rank higher just because your video is longer. However, with the introduction ofYouTube Shorts, and the reduced attention spans of the audience, longer videos now have to be more relevant and engaging in order to get the audience to stay.
Title: The title of your video should be concise, descriptive, and feature your target keyword near the start.
Description: The longer the description, the better. Add as much content as you possibly can: include a detailed overview of everything in your video and any relevant resources that your viewers might need. Your keywords should also show up in your description, with a special focus on getting your target keyword into the first sentence.
Tags: Do your best to include your target keywords and a handful of other associated terms as tags on your videos. Tools likeTube Buddycan give you some insight into the tags your competitors are using on their videos. Tags can help determine whether your video shows up as a suggested video as well, so tagging competitors and people who make related content can be a good use of the 500 characters available for tags.
Tips and Tricks
After covering everything above, you should be on your way to building an audience and maximizing your business’ potential on YouTube.
However, if you’re feeling a little adventurous, I’ve put together some nifty YouTube hacks that you can use to increase your subscribers and generate more traffic for your website.
Add a watermark
A watermark is perfect for driving new viewers back to your channel and encouraging them to subscribe. These customizable images will be overlaid on every one of your uploads and offer a clear and easy way for viewers to subscribe, making it easy for them to hear about your newest videos (and building your subscriber count while you’re at it!).
To add a watermark to your videos, take a look at your channel page and click on ‘customize channel’. Click on the branding option and at the end you’ll find the ‘Upload Watermark’ option. Click on upload and choose a watermark, click done.
Enable an automatic subscription prompt
It’s important to not only be driving people to your YouTube channel, but to also be encouraging them to subscribe while they’re there.
If you’ve got an existing subscriber base, like your email list or your social media followers, you can make it easy for them to subscribe to your channel. Whenever you promote your channel to them with a “Remember to subscribe!” call to action, add “?sub_confirmation=1” to the end of your channel’s URL and a pop-up will automatically appear on your channel prompting visitors to subscribe.
Link cards to your website
As long as your account is part of theYouTube Partner Program, which currently means you have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the past year, you can add cards that link to external websites in your videos. If you have a Shopify store and you’re part of the YouTube Partner Program, you can use cards to link your viewers directly to your store to buy the items featured in your videos.
Learn how you can further monetize your YouTube channel in ourCreator's Guide to Making Money on YouTube.
Use end screens effectively
When viewers have finished watching all the way to the end of a video, you want to keep them around and make sure theydon’t leave without subscribing to your video. YouTube makes this really easy with end screen elements you can layer over the last 20 seconds of your video.
You can add other videos, a subscribe button, or a link to another channel to keep viewers engaged. This is important becauseYouTube’s algorithm rewards both your total watch time and how long you keep people on the platform, so ideally, you want someone to watch more of your videos.
Here’s howFirst We Feastsets up its end screens to keep you watching.
They’ve linked to a playlist of videos and a standalone video, both of which will take you directly to something else to watch.
Here’s how to set it up yourself.
- Go to your Creator Studio and select a video you want to edit.
- After selecting the video ,on the right you will find, “End screens”, which will take you to the end screen editing screen.
- After selecting the end screen you will find elements you can add.
- You’ll see that the Link option is not enabled, because on this test account, I’m not yet part of the Youtube Partner Program. Once you are, you can add links to your website as part of your standard end screens.
YouTube can help you grow your business
If you’ve followed all of these steps closely, you should be growing your business on YouTube in no time! What’s more is that monetizing your YouTube videos has now become easier through the all newYouTube Shopping Feature. You can live shop, integrate products with one click and take your business to a larger audience. Try it now!