With over a billion users on YouTube and hundreds of millions of hours of video watched each day, it’s easy to see how popular video content has become. Moving into 2017, video will have even more of an appearance on websites, landing pages, social media posts, and email newsletters.
Get a head start on video content by creating a branded YouTube channel now and start marketing to your demographic.
If you’re not 100% sure where the value lies for YouTube and your business, and if your demographic is even on YouTube, here’s a few stats:
- YouTube has launched local versions in more than 88 countries.
- More than half of all YouTube views come from mobile devices.
- You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population).
That’s a Lot of People – But WHO Are They?
There are over a billion users on YouTube, and it’s audience is only growing. A majority of YouTube’s audience is millennial, reaching more people ages 18 to 34 than any cable network. As a video provider, that’s huge and proves to be a great way to reach the millennial demographic.
Millennials aren’t the only ones learning how to change their oil on YouTube, though. In the beginning of the year, YouTube attracted 19.4 million visitors who were 65 years old and older in only one month.
A young audience is watching YouTube, as well, with 82% of US internet users between the ages of 14 to 17 watching YouTube on a regular basis.
Just about everyone is using YouTube, including your demographic. So, how can you reach them on YouTube?
Create a Branded YouTube Channel
To reach your demographic on YouTube you’re going to need an active account. All it takes to create an account on YouTube is an existing Google+ account, which as a business you should already have. If you don’t already have a Google+ account then you can create a YouTube account which will automatically create a Google+ Page for you.
Once you have an active account created, here’s how to setup a new channel:
- On a computer or in a mobile browser, make sure you’re signed in to YouTube.
- Go to your channel list.
- If you want to make a YouTube channel for a Brand Account that you manage, choose the account from the list. Otherwise, choose Create a new channel to set up a channel with a different name than your Google Account name.
- Fill out the details to create your new channel. Customize the channel to add a branded background and colors. The more branded your YouTube channel is the more people will be able to relate and remember your business across multiple outlets.
- Post videos regularly and engage.
Once you have the account and channel created, and you’re posting new videos, it’s now time to get exposure to all of that hard work that you just accomplished.
Showcase Your Brand on YouTube by Advertising
Advertising on YouTube is a great way to place your business directly in front of your demographic. It’s one thing to have a channel on YouTube and to post videos regularly, respond to comments, and engage with your audience. Advertising helps take your business to the next level on YouTube and puts a brand in front of an even larger audience.
ZAGG, the company who creates invesibleSHIELDs for cell phones, saw a 75% rise in conversions when they started to advertise on YouTube using targeted videos.
“We used YouTube for product demos and installation tips, finding it far more useful and compelling than any we’d previously used. We upload and advertise an average of 100 videos per year to maintain interest in our products.”
There are essentially three different types of advertisements you can launch on YouTube. The first being pre roll ads. Pre roll video ads are the advertisements that show before other videos play on YouTube. This type of video ad is highly effective if you’re trying to reach a specific demographic, one who you know what kind of videos they would watch on YouTube and can display your ad in front of.
Targeting options are very similar to that of normal advertising. Chose the target audience based on age, gender, location, interests, and more.
The other video ad types on YouTube are search result ads and video ads that play alongside videos that are playing.
Let’s Get to the Bacon – What’s the Cost to Advertise on YouTube?
To give you an idea of the cost, for $50 a day you can expect to receive 1,000 video views on YouTube. An added bonus is that you’ll only actually pay YouTube when someone engages with the video ad, unlike other advertising platforms that pay per impression. If someone doesn’t stick around for at least 30 seconds of the ad (or until the end), you don’t pay a dime.
Aside From Advertising, What Else Does YouTube Have to Offer Businesses?
Advertising isn’t the only way businesses can succeed on YouTube. Before exploring the many other options, let’s first define what it means to be a successful business or brand on YouTube. Businesses can justify success on YouTube based on how many video views, conversions, and engagement a video receives.
The most successful videos on YouTube immediately set themselves apart from the rest by having video views in the millions, comments in the thousands, and shares all across social media networks.
So, how can your business succeed? Follow these tips:
- Optimize Videos During the Upload Process
YouTube encourages you to add keywords and descriptions to your videos so YouTube can place videos where they belong – in relevant search results. Just as you optimize web pages with keywords, you also need to keyword optimize a YouTube video description. - Use keyword tools. Search for relevant keywords using tools like the Keyword Tool or our very own keyword tool. The Keyword Tool is a great resource because it displays keywords specifically based on what people search for on YouTube. Our keyword tool will help you further define that search, especially when it comes to tricky keywords that don’t have as many similarly searched terms.
- Create videos that spur emotion. Happiness, humor, sadness, anger, and pity are great emotions to capture within video. Let your audience feel and connect with your video through a specific emotion. The video will have more shares and engagement if the viewer is able to feel and take away something from the video. Even educational videos can have a little bit of humor, or product videos that can make a consumer happy.
