YouTube Marketing Tips, Strategies and Tactics for Business Success

In addition to its incredible success as the de facto portal for video uploads and viewing, YouTube is itself a community. For brands, it provides an additional viable opportunities to spark discussion with followers. It’s a place to build relationships and create a space for users to converse with each other about branded content.

Just as Facebook has become an incredibly popular place for brands to maintain a dialogue with their customers, YouTube offers a similar opportunity, although the conversation is driven primarily by video content. Treating YouTube not only as a platform for video distribution, but as a forum for engagement deepens the customer experience.

YouTube Marketing Tips

So how do companies make the most of the conversations happening on YouTube?

1. Start With Great Content

Whether you’re a popular consumer brand or an emerging B2B company, engaging content that prompts discussion and social pass-along requires outside-the-box thinking to make an impression (pun intended). Like any other content provided to social audiences, videos on YouTube must be engaging and compelling enough to spark those discussions and encourage sharing.

A classic example of this is “Will it Blend?” Blendtec’s famous video campaign that purées popular gadgets is an ingenious way to captivate viewers while demonstrating the power of the product. The ROI equaled its creativity, with sales jumping 700% since the campaign started four years ago. Great content brings users to your channel and your videos; engaging them once they arrive is another challenge.

2. Don’t Post Your Videos and Run

Pairing good content with a commitment to engaging viewers and commenters will help strengthen those relationships on YouTube. Old Spice is a fantastic example of how great content worked in conjunction with a smart response strategy. After an intensely popular run for its initial commercials, Old Spice took the relationship building potential of the YouTube community to a new level by creating 180 individual video responses to those who commented on the originals. It’s now highlighted as one of the most successful interactive campaigns in history, with 40 million impressions in the first week and a 107% jump in sales after the first month.

3. Know Thyself

Understanding what your brand voice is and what your goals are will shape how your brand interacts in this space. Are you aiming to be a resource for your customers with how-to videos? Be ready to respond to questions and be as helpful in the comments as you are on film. Going strictly for the fun factor? Take a cue from Old Spice and approach your responses with the same attitude in your content that got the discussion going in the first place.

4. Use Data to Inform Your Actions

Pull lessons from platform-specific data points, such as what people “like” and “dislike” on YouTube. Initiate discussion about what’s popular and what’s not. Your viewers are voting with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down — try to get a dialog going about why.

5. Cross-promote

There are discussions happening on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, often about the same content. If you post the same video to Facebook and YouTube, draw on conversations happening in other spaces.

For example, when you post a video to Facebook that’s seen traction on YouTube, point it out in a post:

“10,000 people in Acme’s YouTube community ‘liked’ this video. What do you think? Tell us here and join the discussion on YouTube.”

You’ll expose different parts of your community to other opinions and potentially encourage others to join the conversation regularly on more of your company’s social pages.

Like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube can be a fertile ground for interacting with your customers. Its features and content may differ, but the basic principles for interaction remain the same. Keeping this in mind and taking a savvy approach to YouTube responses can help your company make the most of this incredibly popular social space.

Source: Marshable

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