Do you include YouTube in your marketing strategy?

YouTube continues to be a huge influencer for all sorts of brands, companies, and celebrities online. It is also still one of the most powerful ways for ordinary people and small companies to get huge exposure for free, or for very little outlay.

If you are not using YouTube to market your business, we strongly suggest you consider it. It has the ability to help you attract more visitors to your website, to promote your products and services, and ultimately, to boost sales.

The YouTube audience is huge too. Once regarded as a playground for teenagers, it is used by people of all ages and backgrounds. And it’s excellent tagging, indexing and search facility means if you are clever, you can make your video easier to find and be seen by the right people – your target audience.

You can create a channel for your brand. This is like your ‘homepage’ where you can archive all the videos you post, you can also add more information about your company and add a link to your website. If the video content you post is good, you will attract followers who will come back regularly to see new content. The more followers you have on your channel, the more exposure your videos will get.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to spend a fortune having professionally produced videos done. These days, you can create highly polished and effective videos for very little money using simple software and camera equipment on your mobile device or laptop. And it’s also worth remembering that you can repost content from elsewhere too.

Think of YouTube as a video diary, or scrap book. Use it to build a collection of videos about your brand or of footage that is interesting and engaging that speaks of your brand ideals. To build a following, it’s also a good idea to have one person who ‘presents’ the videos. This gives your followers a chance to get to know you and build a relationship. Rather like a video blog.

Tutorials, discussions, white-board seminars, footage of products, tours of premises – let your imagination go! YouTube is not for adverts, think about what you like to watch on YouTube, and about the videos you have seen go viral in recent times.

It’s about catching people’s attention and giving them new information, helping them with advice, surprising them, making them laugh, or a combination of all of these.