Making the Most Out of Your YouTube Channel

I wanted to thank everyone who submitted their feedback on other “Making the Most Out of…” posts we should write about. Using your suggestions, I got a number of people requesting a post on how to better utilize your YouTube channel, so that’s next.

Given the fact that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the web, you cannot ignore it. Developing a YouTube channel for your company can be a great way of getting your brand and products in front of thousands of potential customers.

Add a Custom Design

You have a logo, website, Twitter background, Facebook custom tab, and YouTube is no different. YouTube allows you to create a custom design that allows for HTML to keep your branding consistent. Creating an experience that integrates your messaging, social media presence and products is an outstanding way to keep your brand fresh in the users mind.

Have a Solid Content Strategy

The foundation for any good marketing campaign is having a solid content strategy, that has an end goal in mind. Depending on what niche you are in, create video content that will be compelling, delivers high value, and is what your users are asking for.

Keep it Fresh: The last thing you want to do is upload a few videos to your channel, then never touch it again. Have a long-term strategy in place so that you are consistently adding new videos on a weekly or monthly basis. By doing this, you are keeping your channel fresh and gives people a reason to keep coming back.

Professional: If possible, hire a professional videographer and editor to shoot your videos and edit them to give them a professional touch. With HD cameras, being so inexpensive nowadays, it is worth it to invest in one for high quality videos. This can really make your videos stand out from the crowd and help give you brand more credibility.

Help Your Audience: Depending on your audience, create videos that help solve a specific problem your users have. Tutorials, How-Tos, Product Demos, Case Studies, Reviews, and Training Seminars are all great ways of creating content of value.

Think Outside the Box: Some of the best and most viral videos on YouTube are videos that are unique and outside the box. Creating funny videos that tie in your product/service seem to do extremely well. Just take the new Old Spice commercials as an example.

Optimize Your Videos

I recently wrote an entire blog post about how you can optimize your YouTube videos, that I highly recommend you read. Basically a recap of that post is to make sure that you can get views on YouTube by incorporating the keywords you want to rank for in your video title, description and tags. Add your URL into the description so people can find your website or blog from your YouTube channel.

For help with figuring out what keywords you should optimize for, try using the YouTube Keyword Tool.

Analyze YouTube Insights

Similar to looking at your Google Analytics data, you can use your YouTube insights data to see which videos are being viewed most often and look at demographic data on your subscribers. If you notice that a certain type of video is gaining more views than others, that may tell you that you should expand on that topic or continue to create videos with a similar format.

You can also see how effective your YouTube channel is by looking at your subscriber numbers overtime and how many visitors your videos are driving back to your website.

Promote on Your Website/Blog

In order for people to find your YouTube channel, don’t rely simply on people stumbling across it from doing a search on YouTube. Integrate it into your blog, website, and e-mail marketing campaigns. This way you can leverage your existing traffic and customer base to drive traffic to your channel and getting them to subscribe.

You can also use Paid Search platforms like the Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and other ad networks that allow videos, to promote your YouTube Channel. This tactic would be more as a branding strategy, than leading to sales, but it can be another way of driving traffic to your video content.

Tip: Try using the YouTube Video Targeting Tool to identify places you can advertise on.