It’s safe to say a majority of your target audiences have either interacted with YouTube or use the platform regularly. YouTube launched in 2005 as a video-sharing platform primarily based around home videos. YouTube today is a digital media powerhouse boasting over 2.1 billion active users and has become a severe contender in the social media marketing space. While the platform operates differently than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, it’s still a valuable tool that automotive marketing experts can use to get their dealerships the best results.
Like many of my previous entries, I can’t express enough how important multimedia is to marketing a business in 2021. Audio, video, and other creative can exponentially boost post impressions and drive traffic to your business’s website. YouTube is the perfect candidate to focus your advertising efforts and create engaging video content. A tertiary benefit of YouTube videos is that they can be shared across your social media or embedded into your website!
In this article, I’ll highlight a few starter marketing tips for YouTube. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and should change as the landscape of social media evolves.
Consistent Branding
Before you begin brainstorming video ideas or drafting scripts, you need to ensure your YouTube channel adheres to your brand guidelines and is consistent with your pages on other social media platforms. Profile photos, banners, descriptions, and color schemes should match on all of your accounts. Continuity ensures that the viewer always visits official sources when looking for your business online. All these elements can make the verification process on platforms Like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram a lot less of a headache.
YouTube & SEO
Like any other platform in the digital space, YouTube can utilize SEO to boost your business’s search ranking. Since YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, you can use many of the strategies I listed in my article about SEO and SEM. However, there are a few practices unique to YouTube you should adopt early. These practices include optimizing video descriptions and meta tags, adding cards to your videos that link to other related videos, utilizing keywords and tags relevant to your content or your business, and choosing the most appropriate category for your videos.
Adopting these practices and adding them to your ever-expanding arsenal of SEO tools will put you far above the rest in the search rankings on both YouTube and Google’s search engines.
Cross-promotion
Consider this situation: your business has social media pages and a fully functional website with a blog on every major social media platform. How can we leverage our existing pages to promote our YouTube channel and vice versa?
Cross-promoting your business between your website, YouTube, and other social media pages costs you nothing and have tremendous benefits, primarily boosting your total reach. YouTube makes sharing your content on different platforms incredibly easy. The built-in media player has a “Share” button that can instantly post to any linked social media accounts, provide a shortened URL for the video, and a line of code that you can use to embed a video in your website content.
The end-user should navigate to your page and access your content on every platform quickly and seamlessly. Fundamentally, YouTube is the platform that genuinely binds everything else together.
YouTube Analytics
YouTube Analytics is the younger brother of Google Analytics and offers an array of impressive statistics tailored to videos. Being vigilant about how your videos perform and how your audiences interact with the posts is key to your success.
When examining your YouTube analytics, you should determine a goal. What are you trying to achieve by posting videos on YouTube? It’s pretty standard to have metric-based goals like views, CTR, impressions, shares, or overall brand awareness. The types of goals you’d like to achieve will correspond with the kind of video you post to your channel.
Next, get a feel for the interface and the goals you’re tracking. Despite YouTube Analytics having a clean and user-friendly interface, it can appear daunting to users unfamiliar with this particular platform. I won’t go into too much depth about using the service, but I will outline a couple of the key metrics that you’ll need to pay attention to going forward.
Watch time – the cumulative time your audience spends engaging with the channel’s content and watching your videos. Higher watch time determines the likelihood YouTube will promote one of your videos.
Retention Rate – the average percentage of a video that your viewers watch. The higher this number is, the more likely a viewer will watch until the end of the video.
Conclusion
YouTube is an incredible platform to promote your business. You create and share engaging video content on the second largest search engine on the internet while also cross-promoting your other social media pages and your website. It’s the missing link that connects all of your previous audiences while simultaneously reaching new audiences. When utilized correctly, YouTube can very quickly become one of your most valuable digital marketing tools.
For more information about marketing on YouTube and related services we offer, reach out to Market Doctors at any contact information listed on this si
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