That’s right, there is free advertising that is available to all local business owners (business owners everywhere, for that matter).
So, is your business missing out on the BEST free advertising?
I’m referring to YouTube videos, which some professionals state that this is the most unused medium for businesses.
And, before you ask, “No, you do NOT need to be a pro to get great results”.
YouTube has a lot of benefits over other mediums like blogs and social media.
Apparently, videos usually result in higher conversion rates. As the saying goes, “seeing is believing”, so this makes sense that video content might experience a higher conversion rate.
- Watching someone use a product, it usually does help you visualize your own experience with it.
- Video is a preferred content format among the majority of viewers.
When asked how they’d [consumers] most like to learn about a product or service, 69% said they’d prefer to watch a short video.
Source: https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/
- YouTube videos have a much longer lifespan than most other social media platforms. Some even estimate 20 times more, on average.
The 3 metrics to pay close attention to when measuring your video marketing efforts are:
- Audience retention at the video level
- Total watched hours
- New users or customers
Videos allow marketers to educate people in a way that is very rich, making it not so easy for other forms of content to be able to compete.
So then, why is video marketing untapped?
Well, that’s because people don’t know how to create content for YouTube.
What makes YouTube the BEST Free method of advertising?
Simply because there is very little competition outside the consumer/entertainment niches, and less competition than Google SEO.
Ranking on YouTube now is comparable to Google SEO back in 2010!
Besides gaining your audiences retention, you only have to do BASIC optimization to your YouTube titles, description, tags and content.
Then, to take it to the next level, it’s all about improving your user’s experience.
A 6 Step Process
1.) Understand your audience’s needs – problems and desires. People will pay to solve their problems and to improve their quality of life.
A good example is installing winter tires in place of summer tires and visa versa in the spring. Changing tires is easy enough to do, yet most people prefer to pay to have their tires changed every year.
If you own a garage, you could create a video on how to install your winter tires, showing the viewers step by step in how to do this, while outlining the safety precautions, and literally what you would do at your shop when performing this service.
Too many business owners assume that if you give away your trade secrets that you are just enabling DIYers and that you’re going to lose business, and maybe you will get one customer.
But in reality, there is going to be a small number of DIYers, and then there’s going to be a good number of people who would rather go and pay someone else to do the work for them. And then there’s the biggest group that will do nothing about it.
What you need to realize is that though most people won’t become your customer, you will still be leaving a positive impression in their online experience.
In order to understand your audience better, you can dig into things like:
- Customer interviews
- Surveys
- Segments of customers
- And, good old common sense
2.) Define your primary objective – your objective will dictate the format and length of your videos. To simplify this, the three main objectives are as shown below.
| Primary Objective | Example Channel | Length |
| Brand awareness | A pre-roll ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8XV8FiUlhY | 5 second – 1 minute |
| Education | Businesses selling product or services https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCdN9wVZNec | ~5 min. – 120 min. |
| Entertainment | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1veWbLpGa78 | ~5 min. – eternity |
3.) Topic research – Topics that your target audience is going to be interested in. Because YouTube is both a social and search platform, conventional or intuitive research methods aren’t always going to be the best ways to choose topics. That’s because past performance is no guarantee of future results.
In other words, don’t go checking out the number of views to the top-ranking videos and thinking that if you can out rank them that you’ll get just as many as views. That’s because views and subscribers are actually a really bad way of finding good topics.
Apparently, this mistake has been made by the best of video marketers and that’s why I’m sharing this with you here.
Instead, those pros now suggest using two other metrics that you should pay attention to; views velocity and search demand. View velocity is views per hour and search demand can be estimated with YouTube keyword research tools.
Check out your competitor’s videos to find topics that are worth going after, and look for the videos with the highest view velocity or VPH. Then, pay attention to when the video was published, and the current views per hours.
Use vidIQ to Discover VPH
Normally, new videos on a big YouTube channel will have a high VPH simply because YouTube will promote their content to subscribers first. So, when you see a new video with a high VPH, it is suggested for you to not pay too much attention to it, because you’re looking for somewhat aged videos.
Best FREE YouTube Keyword Research Tools
Also, you need to understand that these keyword research tools are all flawed. For example, they each show huge different monthly search estimations from tool to tool. Ahref’s Keywords Explorer claims to provide a higher click through rate than either vidIQ or TubeBuddy.
Using vidIQ’s browser extension, you can see your video analysis, such as: current views per hour, for a video, as well as historical view data, and you can even spot season trends. You can also use your YouTube analysis to check other measures such as monthly views.
YouTube Analytics Explained: A Basic Tutorial for Beginners (2021 Update)
4.) Create content – Introduction, keep it short, sweet and to the point.
However, in addition to that, you want to create the “What?!?” effect. The effect will cause your viewers to pause your video and go back over whatever you said that made them go “What?!?”.
Brand intro impact, done right can actually help your videos. Though I find them silly and at times to be annoying, many viewers enjoy them when they are done right, which can have a positive and memorable impact on your brand.
Examples of Intros
- Stay Tuned
- Let’s get started in
- ______ and that’s coming up right now
For the body of the content, make it meaty, cut the fluff and perhaps the most important part, remember to create content for the bottom 97% in order to provide clarity. This will require you to let go of your ego, or certain technical details, and you may even sound a little less intelligent, but just do it.
5.) Promotion – For those who are just starting out with YouTube, you just have to hustle to get people on the YouTube platform. However, once you’ve built a sizeable and relevant audience, which both of those are very important, it becomes more about creating content. This is because YouTube is actually going to promote your videos for you.
The best place to start is with your owned assets, such as embedding your relevant videos on your blog posts, sending the URLs in your email newsletter, and share the URL of your videos on your social media accounts.
Your goals should be as follows:
- Keep people watching your video and other videos, even if those other videos are not yours, which improves session and watched time.
- Get people on the YouTube platform to keep them watching videos.
YouTube SEO
- Titles, description, tags, content
- Script your content
As for creating Suggested Views, you only need to create related videos that get clicked and holds the audience’s attention. That’s really all it’s about.
It’s basically click-through rate by using your YouTube thumbnail, video title, and creating helpful and/or entertaining content that is going to engage viewers. This will help to bump up your average view duration.
In terms of content formats, it is highly recommended that you create series, such as 3-part vlogs, a 3, 4, or 5-part series, and courses.
YouTube Search Ads – This is where you’re after engaged attention, and the trick to do that is to actually bid on keywords where your videos will serve searcher intent. This should eventually provide you with a graph that shows your organic and paid watch times to be almost identical.
This is a great way for local businesses to reach potential customers since you can just purchase your position for people in a specific location or whom speak a specific language. And, getting your videos in front of those you can actually serve is a huge advantage.
6.) Analyze and optimize – analyzing the performance of your videos and then optimizing new videos going forward.
If you see little bumps in your Audience retention graph, these are sometimes referred to as True Bumps of Engagement, which means that people are basically engaged enough that they want to re-watch these parts of your video.
When you see these bumps, especially your videos with lots of views, you’re going to want to figure out what you were doing in the video to make people want to re-watch. It could be as simple as a viewer is passively watching your video and then noticing a great graphic that you started referring to, so they went back to that graphic to take a closer look at it.
By telling your viewers to “take a screen shot” of a graph or chart, and then letting it disappear quickly in your video; People may stop your video to go back and take a screen shot, creating a true bump of engagement for your video.
This could cause these bumps, as they have for professional video marketers. And, because YouTube promotes videos mostly based on engagement metrics, it can be helpful to identify how those bumps can be fashioned for your audience.
Internal linking is the last tip, and though no one is certain if YouTube uses those as a true signal or not, professional video marketers recommend adding internal links in your video description, to your other videos on your channel, as this helps to improve session watch time. Apparently, especially for new viewers to your channel.
Should you have any questions regarding, is your business missing out on the best free advertising, please leave them in a comment below so that we can discuss this further.
I do hope you will follow through with the advice found here, as this will help your local business gain the attention of your potential customers. Especially given that so many Canadian local business owners have not used this untapped source of free advertising.
Source
Content Marketing with Video, an Untapped Medium for Businesses – by Sam Oh at ahrefs.com
