Increase Sales With Your YouTube Channel

As videos become more important to your digital marketing strategy, creating a YouTube channel seems an obvious necessity. However, most businesses don’t know how to properly leverage their YouTube channel to drive traffic, generate leads, and increase sales.YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world, trailing only Google. And, being that Google owns YouTube, when properly optimized, your YouTube channel will have good organic search results on Google, which will translate into more traffic on YouTube.As mobile devices continue to make watching videos easier, now 35% of all online activity is spent watching video content. More importantly to digital marketers, is that 75% of users visit a marketer’s site after viewing a video.YouTube is a social media platform and needs to become an integral part of your social media marketing strategy. Just like the other platforms, regularly posting relevant content helps increase brand awareness, improves search results, and increases traffic to your website.Are you using YouTube properly?Leveraging Your YouTube Channel

1. Build an Engaged Community

Think of your YouTube channel as the video portion of your social media strategy. Your company uses Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks to engage with customers, answering questions, and providing solutions.Your YouTube Channel should offer the same level of engagement, if not more. By providing the right types of content and optimizing your channel for the right keywords, you will grow the subscribers to your channel, increasing comments and likes.Social media engagement is the best way to create a sustained advertising strategy. By using tools such as Monitoringand a Unified Social Inbox, your team can easily access all social media platforms and notifications from one screen. This allows you to respond to comments and likes quickly. Engage with your followers on other social media networks to continue driving traffic to new videos and to your channel.

2. Create Content

Maximizing your YouTube channel isn’t just about posting one great video. Treat your YouTube channel as a video blog on the most popular social networking sites.A great example of providing current, relevant content to your targeted audience is Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz. Every Friday he posts a Whiteboard Friday, where he explains, in depth, a topic his audience is concerned about.If you dedicate one day to filming your content, you will have enough video to post for an entire month. But just like every other aspect of your digital marketing strategy, have a plan and specific goals in mind for every video. This will drive more subscribers and give viewers an incentive to return for the next video.

3. Optimize Your YouTube Channel for Keywords

Everything you post online should have search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. That’s why your keyword research is so important. As mentioned, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and is owned by the largest. Use the same SEO best practices for your YouTube channel as you do for your blog.The same keywords that are important to your website and blog will be important to your social media marketing strategy. Place your keywords in the title of your videos, in the description, and use the proper tags. This helps YouTube and Google determine what your video is about. Also, a great way to get another life out of your video is to transcribe your video and use it as a blog post.Social Media Marketing and Your YouTube Channel

As companies rely more on leveraging social media to increase sales, social media management toolsbecome more important. By maximizing the use of social media automation, scheduling social media posts in advance, and Auto Posting from a queue, your company can make sure that your social media platforms remain active and are integrated into your overall strategy.Leverage your other social media networks to grow your YouTube channel. For example, post YouTube videos on Facebook, as Facebook videos now create more engagement than shared YouTube videos.All of your videos should include a Call-To-Action (CTA). This can be anything from “Check Out Our Other Videos” or “Visit Our Site” or “Subscribe to Our Email List”. No matter what your video is about, or where else you’ve posted it, each video should end with a CTA. Tell viewers what their next course of action should be and they will more than likely follow it.According to Forbes, the optimal length for your YouTube videos is 2 minutes and 54 seconds. Keep this in mind when creating your topics and scripts, but also while editing. Use the data available to you and keep your videos under three minutes to optimize the amount of viewers.Don’t underestimate the power of your YouTube channel for growing your business, SEO, and driving engagement. The importance of video for content and for SEO purposes continues to grow. Use that to your advantage by regularly posting relevant content. This will increase your subscribers, your engagement, and continue driving traffic to your website. Don’t forget to use the tools available to you, such as the 11 New Awesome Features with eClincherto make your social media marketing strategy that much easier to maintain.