How to Promote Your Business on YouTube

Many businesses make the mistake of jumping into YouTube marketing without taking the time to identify their goals or what type of content is going to work best for them.

Before you start creating videos, do the research to understand who your audience is and what they are looking for on YouTube. Start by browsing videos in your space to see what topics are popular and generating a lot of views. This is a great first step to understand what types of videos your customers prefer to watch on YouTube. These could range from how-to videos to product demos. Once you know what your audience likes, you can follow a similar approach to deliver your content.

You can also analyze what your competitors are doing on the platform to find what works and what they might be missing. All this research will help you plan your own channel content and choose the right keywords and topics to attract subscribers.

Once you’ve created your YouTube channel, you need to brand it. Your channel description, banner image, profile picture, and other artwork should align with the look and feel of your other brand assets. This enhances the visual impact of your channel when a viewer lands on your page. You can also choose up to five links to feature in your banner.

You should pin a featured video to the top of your channel page. This video can introduce your company and YouTube channel, so customers know what to expect from your content. Or, you can routinely add new featured videos that you want customers to immediately notice and watch.

Organizing your content into playlists is another great way to customize your channel. By curating your videos based on topics, you can make it easy for viewers to quickly browse through your content and find what they want to watch.

Another key element of YouTube marketing is your video thumbnails. Design your thumbnail to be an eye-catching snapshot of your video to pique a viewer’s interest.

Engaging video content is the pillar of YouTube marketing. To really gain exposure for your brand on YouTube and generate engagement, you need to regularly publish high-quality videos that speak to your audience. At GraVoc, our video team consistently creates YouTube content that’s geared toward solving problems for our customers or exploring a variety of technology topics that are useful to them.

There are several different video types that you can create, including customer testimonials, influencer campaigns, event recaps, product demos, explainer videos and tutorials, animated videos, employee spotlight, and more. Choose a format that best serves the purpose of your content. On the GraVoc channel, for instance, we use tutorials and animated explainer videos to deliver easy-to-digest content on cybersecurity. Take, for example, this informational video we created on social engineering techniques.

Also, don’t be afraid to experiment with new YouTube video formats. You can, for instance, create catchy, bite-sized YouTube Shorts featuring behind-the-scenes content or product launch teasers for your mobile-first viewers.

Ultimately, the key to YouTube marketing is quality and consistency. It’s important to feed YouTube with a steady flow of thoughtful content that keeps your audience coming back for more.

Another common question we get asked about video marketing is ‘how long should a video be?’ While statistics show that 10 minutes is the ideal video length, it’s best to experiment with both long-form and short-form content to see what works for your audience.

Once you create all this great video content, you need to make sure it’s discoverable on YouTube. That’s where SEO comes into play! Do your keyword research to find high-performing search terms and sprinkle these in your video title, description, and tags. Choosing the right keywords is essential to optimizing your content for a wider reach, but don’t resort to keyword stuffing! You should also add relevant hashtags to your video description.

Finally, don’t forget to add a call to action at the end of your video and in the description. Ask viewers to subscribe to your channel or check out your website to learn more. On the GraVoc channel, we always include a link to a relevant page on our website to get viewers to further engage with our content and hopefully become leads.

You can also add Cards and End Screens to your videos to promote related content and encourage more viewer engagement with your channel.

Leverage your website, social media, email, and other channels to cross-promote your YouTube content to build engagement and attract more subscribers. You can also engage with your viewers in the comments section to further build your YouTube community.

Use YouTube Analytics to evaluate your videos’ performance. By analyzing views, watch time, traffic sources, audience retention, and other reports, you can figure out which videos are resonating with audiences and which ones are not doing so well. This way, you can make changes and enhance your content strategy.

You can also use the Research section in YouTube Analytics to explore what users are searching for on the platform, which will help inform your keyword and content strategy.

The number of subscribers and views your channel has will likely impact your content’s ranking, so make sure you are regularly posting fresh videos, monitoring analytics, and improving your content.