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Does Video Marketing on YouTube work?
YouTube happens to be the second largest search engine in the world. It also happens to be owned and operated by THE largest search engine in the world. Google can scan your video content, index it, and use in Google search results. Your video can be discovered by anyone using Google and not just YouTube. Vimeo doesn’t have this feature, which is why it’s not as good from a marketing perspective. If your video answers a question that someone searched in Google and is displayed as one of the results, it is likely to be clicked on and viewed. If your answer is good, relates to your product, and you directed them to more resources on your website, you just gained a highly targeted positive experience with a potential customer. Video marketing on YouTube works.
I Don’t Have Equipment/Talent/Money for Video Marketing on YouTube!
Do you have an iPhone or Android phone or tablet? Then you already have the equipment. You don’t need any real talent, and YouTube is FREE! Be sure to read Part 2 to see the technical details of filming and editing with your iPhone!
Simple Strategy for Video Marketing on YouTube
Don’t worry about the view count. I mentioned in Video Marketing Is Like Baseball we are not after home runs (viral videos); instead we want a high on-base percentage (targeted views). Here’s an example:
You just created a funny video, and it went viral, 100,000 views in a day! That’s great, but you sell highly specialized medical equipment. How many of the 100,000 views were from your target audience of private practice Doctors? How many sales did the video convert?
I’m not saying a viral video is bad, it’s great, but they should not be your objective. What happens when a baseball player swings for home runs with every swing? More often than not it’s a quick three strikes. Your objective should be to have the right audience viewing your videos. I’d rather have 100 highly qualified leads watch my product video than 100,000 random viewers. We want solid contact, and if you happen to hit it out of the park, then that’s good too!
How Do I Target My Audience on YouTube?
With Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is simply making sure that your content is clearly understood by search engines (Google, YouTube) to be about what it is actually about. Search engines are looking to provide the most relevant and useful content for the given query. The better search engines understand our content, the better they can use and serve our content.
For the specific how-to on YouTube, optimization check out Part 3 of this post. For now, let’s focus on high-level tactics. First, you need to plan out your content. We need to do this for two reasons, to make sure our content is of value to our targeted viewer and worth watching. And when we add closed captioning later what we say in the video will be used by YouTube and Google for search (more on this later).
Your content can be valuable in many different ways. We want to focus on our targeted buyer persona. Who is our target customer? What do they want to see? What do they need help with? What stage of the buyer’s journey are they on? To keep it simple let’s focus our value by answering questions. What type of questions are your target customers asking Google? Once you have a list of these questions, this becomes your list of titles, and you just need to answer these questions in the form of a video.
It doesn’t matter if you are screen recording or putting your face in front of the camera; you need to be yourself. We could write a whole post on the importance of being genuine in your video but for now just take my word for it, if you’re not, your audience will know. Depending on the type of question you may be able to answer it simply by talking. If this is the case, be aware that staring at a talking head can start to become boring. So if your content is long and you don’t want to do much editing, you are using your phone after all, try taking your viewer on a journey. Taking your viewer with you to different locals can make the viewer feel “closer” to you, an affinity can develop in a shorter period. This trick is used in the real world with dating psychology as well as neuro-linguistic programming.
The most simple way to do this is by filming yourself walking or driving, including simple stop-start edits where you are now in a different location. Technically for the trick to work it doesn’t matter where you are, beach, restaurant, different rooms in your home, but it is nice when your locations relate to what you’re talking about.
Demonstrations are the most effective form of video content. That is exactly why when searching for an answer on Google, videos are clicked more often than blog posts; people want to see how to do things.
To review, the types of content you should create for YouTube video marketing:
- Answer Questions
- Be of Value
- Entertain/Be Yourself
- Film “On the Go” in the car, walking, etc.
- Simple One Camera Table
- Screen Record
- Demonstrate
We’ll get into the nitty gritty of exactly how to create these videos using the phone or tablet and a simple video editing software like iMovie in Part 2 of this post.
– Chris
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