How to Use YouTube For Your Small Business

‍YouTube see's approximately 1.7 billion unique visitors each month with visitors spending an average of 19 minutes per day watching videos. As the world's second-most popular social media platform (after Facebook), it's a crucial marketing tool for any business wanting to boost traffic, improve brand awareness and of course, reach new customers. 

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But posting videos without a proper strategy won’t get you the results you’re looking for. In order for your small business to succeed on YouTube, you need a strategy. Fortunately for you, we’ve created a guide on how to use YouTube for your business.

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To use YouTube for your small business: 

1. Set up a YouTube account 
2. Understand your audience & competition
3. Create high-quality content
4. Post consistently 
5. Choose the right titles
6. Include CTA’s in your videos 
7. Create YouTube video ads

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1. Set up a YouTube Account 

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If you haven’t done so already, you need to set up a YouTube account for your business. To do this, you will need to create a Google account as YouTube is part of Google. If you already have a Google account, nothing is stopping you from using that one, but some people prefer to create a completely separate account especially for managing business.

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Once you’ve logged into YouTube, we recommend making a brand account, opposed to running it with your personal Google account. This is because a brand account allows you to expand your business later with additional YouTube channels, as well as the fact it lets multiple people in your company manage and update your YouTube channel.

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Customise Your Account

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Now the account is up and running, it’s time to customise it with colours, business info, social media/website links, pictures, header images etc. 

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This is a fantastic opportunity to strengthen your brand identity on YouTube by using your logo, colour palette, and company slogans so that viewers associate your videos with your business.

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2. Understand Your Audience & Competition

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Now the fun part - research! Before brainstorming video ideas, it’s essential you understand what your target audience wants to see. Who are your prospect customers and what are they already watching on YouTube? 

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Now, there are a couple of ways you can find out the type of videos your audience currently watches - checking your analytics tool and/or use social listening. 

Analytics Tool

Checking your analytics tab will give you valuable insights into your audience’s demographics and most importantly interests. You can see how many people are finding your videos through search, seeing it in their suggested feed or from other sources.

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Disclaimer - you will only be able to check your analytics tab if you already have a YouTube account.

Social Listening

Social listening allows you to search social platforms, including YouTube, for mentions of your brand or specific keywords. This is super helpful as it allows you to see what people want from your business and use this for content creation. 

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As well as understanding your audience, you need to understand your competition and find out what they’re doing and, well, do it better. To do so, conduct a competitor analysis of: how frequently they post, average views, subscriber count, video topics and overall video quality/ success. Once you have this information, you can plan your content. 

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3. Create High-quality Engaging Content

Once you’ve done your research and know the type of content you’ll be making, it’s filming time!

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There are numerous ways you can produce video content for your small business. You may choose to use clips from workshops and post them as a series of videos. Another popular idea is explainer videos, short tutorials or product demonstrations.

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4. Post Consistently 

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This is a really important tip when trying to create a successful YouTube channel for your business. Just like any other social media channel, you’ll need to upload regular content to build a following and keep those followers (or subscribers) interested in your channel and videos.  

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We recommend using a content schedule so you can plan exactly what content you’ll post and when. For example, every Wednesday or every other week.

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5. Choose the Right Titles

People search YouTube the same way they do on Google—with keywords that describe the type of video they’re looking for. Titles are weighed heavily in YouTube searches, so ensure your titles are engaging and most importantly, descriptive of the video. 

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It’s also important to put thought into your video descriptions. These descriptions should be concise, informative, and include a link to your business website or blog for people who want to know more. 

6. Include CTA’s in Your Videos

While your target audience may be browsing YouTube for fun or to educate themselves on a product or service, your business should know exactly what it wants people to do whilst watching one of its videos. A call-to-action (CTA) example could be subscribing to your channel, sharing your video via other social platforms or subscribing to your email newsletter.

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7. Create YouTube Ads

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If your YouTube videos aren’t reaching the right audience or you’re simply not growing fast enough, you may want to look at creating YouTube video ads. These can come in a number of different formats:

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• Skippable in-stream ads
• Non-skippable in-stream ads
• Discover ads
• Overlay ads
• Bumper ads

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Learn more about YouTube video ads here. 

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If you don’t feel confident creating your own YouTube ads, you should consider outsourcing your content to a specialised Ecommerce Video Service like Aura Ads. Through fresh direct response creative, ready to use on all paid social platforms, we have helped to drive growth for some of the world’s leading eCommerce brands.

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Freddie’s Flowers partnered with Aura Ads to step up the quality of their performance creative and produce beautiful, branded direct response video ads that would convert on paid social. This led to a 12% higher conversion rate and 20% higher CTR.

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And there we have it! 7 tips for getting the most out of YouTube for your small business. 

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We are Aura Ads, a unique performance creative agency designed for D2C eCommerce brands. We help clients sell more online and grow at scale with our bespoke video and static creative, delivered on a monthly basis. For more tips and tricks from our experts, head over to our blog page.

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Written by Kate Jones, for Aura Ads.

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