How to use YouTube for business

What are the benefits of YouTube for business?

Increase brand awareness

Despite TikTok’s phenomenal growth, YouTube’s popularity is increasing every year. Figures from Statista predict the platform will have 27.9 million subscribers by 2024, compared to its 25.5 million subscribers currently. This makes it an incredibly effective platform to increase brand equity, whatever type of business you run. So long as you produce engaging, creative, and unique high-quality video content, you’ll be sure to attract viewers and promote your brand.

Refillable deodorant startup Wild’s clever video ad campaign from earlier this year is a perfect example of how to market your brand on YouTube (watch below).

Position your business as an authority

Linked to brand awareness, producing relevant and informative video content will help to establish your business as an expert voice in your subject area, whether that’s plumbing, accountancy, law, or anything in between. This helps develop trust, and trust is crucial to your bottom line. Without it, potential customers will hesitate to purchase a product or service from you.

Generate leads and conversions

One of the great things about YouTube is its users are generally not just flicking through for entertainment, but are often actively searching for solutions to a problem. This means that it’s much easier to turn YouTube users into genuine leads as, just by having found your videos/channel, they are showing a genuine interest in your business and are far more likely to become a customer.

Drive website traffic

You should always think of your social media strategy as a harmonious loop, with your website and social media channels working hand-in-hand. An efficient YouTube video should always direct viewers to your website, where they can learn more about the company and ideally make a purchase or sign up for your services.

Placing CTA links to your website at the right times is important, but often difficult to execute without the help of a digital marketing expert. Getting support from an agency containing YouTube marketing specialists is your best bet. This is why we suggest you take one minute to find out what this professional support would cost your business using our free cost comparison tool.

Increase sales through ecommerce integration

At the end of the day, your business is ultimately marketing on YouTube in order to make sales. So having the ability to integrate your online store with YouTube and sell directly on the platform will be a game changer.

Just note that for this, you’ll need a Shopify online store; it’s the only ecommere platform offering this functionality owing to its exclusive partnership with YouTube.

Shopify merchants have option to sell to consumers through a variety of avenues on YouTube, including YouTube live streaming, brand channel store tabs, and on-demand videos. It’s also our second-highest-ranked product of the best ecommere platforms on the market.

How to set up a YouTube business account

In order to be able to publicly post and share videos, you’ll need to create a channel. Just follow these steps to get started.

Step 1: Sign into YouTube via your Google account

To create a channel, you must have a Google account (Google bought YouTube in 2006) and it should be specific to your business (don’t use your personal account). If you already have an account, go ahead and sign in. If you don’t, it’s easy to set one up – head to Google Accounts to get started. .

Step 2: Select “create a new channel”

There are a few steps to this process, but they’re all pretty straightforward. Follow the instructions below, and you’ll have your very own channel in about 30 seconds (or even fewer for the speedy typers amongst you).

1. Sign into YouTube via your Google account
2. Go to the user icon in the top right-hand corner
3. Find ‘Settings’
4. Select ‘Create a channel’
5. Use the ‘Business or other name’ option
6. Input your businesses name and details
7. Click ‘Create’

And there you have it – your very own business YouTube channel. However, as it is, it’s not going to do much: it needs artwork, a description, and links. In other words, it needs a little finesse.

How to optimise your YouTube business account

Once you’ve created your channel, it’s time to start adding a little sparkle in order to attract users. To do this, visit your channel and select ‘customise channel’ found on the right-hand side. From there you can add channel art, a description, and links to your website.

Adding channel art

If you’re wondering about the importance of channel art, it’s worth remembering that old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words. This is especially true for YouTube, which is first and foremost a visual platform – you’ll need high-quality images that capture the essence of your business and grab the user’s attention.

On YouTube, channel art comes in two forms – a channel icon and a channel banner.

Channel icons are the more visible of the two. These are the little circular images that appear next to your videos and are typically a company logo or something similar.

The recommended dimensions are as follows:

• 800 x 800 pixels for the original image, displayed as 98 x 98 pixels (in other words, you’ll need a high-quality image that YouTube then shrinks down)

With your channel banner, you can be a bit more creative. This is the long horizontal image that users will see when they’re on your channel homepage. The extra room means an extra opportunity to make an impact, so pick a dynamic, relevant image that says something about your business.

Make sure to consider how your image will look on different devices. YouTube gives you a guide for this, but it’s really important to have an image that will stand out even on a mobile phone screen (remember: 70% of YouTube watching is done on mobile devices).

For your channel banner, recommended dimensions are as follows:

• 2560 × 1440 pixels,
• The safe area for mobile and web (without text and logo cropping) is 1546 x 423 pixels, maximum file size is 6MB

Thankfully, if you don’t know your pixels from your post-its, then help is at hand. Canva is a fantastic site that has a load of YouTube-ready templates to play around with, allowing you to easily add text to create a great channel banner in minutes. Make sure you download your image as a JPG rather than the default PNG though, otherwise it will exceed the file size limit.

Here’s an “amazing” example that took literally five minutes to create, which demonstrates just how useful Canva is.

Once you’ve got your desired images, adding them is easy – simply hit the little pencil icon on your blank icon/banner to upload directly from your computer.

And there you have it – two great images that grab attention and perfectly sum up your business. Now they need some words to go with them, which brings us to the channel description.

Adding a description

No matter how amazing your channel images are, they won’t sum up everything you want to say about your business. This is where the description comes in.

Descriptions are a great chance to concisely sell your business, i.e. what you do and how you can help the people viewing your videos. You’ll typically have a company mission statement or ‘about us’ copy from your website that you can use as a base for this – and speaking of websites, make sure you include a link to your company site.

Don’t skip adding a description, but don’t overthink it either. This is not the place for reams of text – instead, focus on quickly summing up what your business does, and how it can offer a solution to a user’s problem.

To fill in this section, simply click ‘About’ on the Customise Channel page, hit the plus under Channel Description, type your description, and then click ‘Done’.

Under the details section, add a business email and a location, before proceeding to the links section.

Adding links

Here’s where you should plug every social channel associated with your business – particularly as 99% of YouTube users are also on other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. As well as linking to your social media channels, you should of course link to your businesses website, and any other content that may be relevant to your audience.

Adding links is hugely important: not only does it make the channel look more professional, but sending viewers to your other social platforms will increase their traffic and help potential customers find out more about your company.

And adding them is easy – just click the ‘+add’ button below the links section on the Customise Channel page, copy in the URLs, and away you go.

10 top tips for using YouTube to market your business

Post content consistently

This is our number 1 tip for a reason – it’s the single most important thing you need to do in order for your YouTube channel to be a success. Just like any other social media platform, you’ll need to upload content on a regular basis in order to build a following and keep people interested.

It’s useful to create a content schedule – what content will you post, and when? Common strategies include posting one video every week, or every other week. And if you can’t commit to this, why not take a day to shoot a load of video content, which can then be released week by week?

Include calls-to-action (CTAs)

While your target audience may be browsing YouTube for fun or to learn something new, your business should know exactly what it wants people to do whilst watching one of its videos. Examples of CTAs include subscribing to your channel, signing up to receive your email newsletter, or sharing your video via social networks.

Create a community

It’s easy to think that as soon as you upload a video, all you need to do is sit back and wait for the views to come in. But to really build an engaged customer base on YouTube, your business should be active on the platform, and interacting with other users.

Sharing content, liking videos, and replying to comments is essential. When doing any of these, make sure to use your commercial judgment – don’t share or like videos produced by your competitors, only like relevant content, and give human, personal responses to the comments posted on your videos.

Post with a purpose

With so many social media platforms and YouTube channels out there, it can be easy to jump from one to another in an effort to keep up with the latest trends. However, it’s key to know why you’re using YouTube in the first place. Consider what results you want to see – for example, whether you want to increase traffic to your website, raise general brand awareness, or increase sales through integration with your Shopify store.

Target keywords

Every time you upload a video, always remember that its name, description, and tags are all opportunities to target the keywords associated with your business. Just like writing a blog post or composing a social media message, you’ll want to use language that matches what your target audience is searching for online.

Be specific

Always create video content with your target audience in mind. Understanding who your customers are, where they’re coming from, and why they’re watching your video will help you to refine your YouTube marketing strategy. You can find all this out using YouTube analytics – see below for more information.

Collaborate with other YouTubers

Consider working with other companies or influencers on YouTube that complement your business. Not only is it an opportunity for you to extend your network, but it’s also a way to reach more people and diversify your content offering.

Create a playlist

Once you’ve built up a catalogue of videos, consider grouping them together into playlists, so that users can see similar content from your business in one place.

Stay topical

If you can, it’s a great idea to quickly produce videos that cover new developments in your industry, whether that’s new product launches or impending government regulation. Not only will this help to position your business as a leading authority in the field, but videos that address relevant news stories will attract large amounts of engaged viewers.

Create custom thumbnails

Every YouTube video you create will need a thumbnail, and while it’s fine to choose a still from the video when you get started, creating a custom thumbnail for each video will make a big difference.

Make sure this is bold and grabs users’ attention, with text and images that concisely sum up your video and a visual style that makes an impact even on a phone screen. The thumbnail below gives a good idea of what you’re aiming for. The use of bold colours and relevant images immediately grabs your attention and makes you more likely to watch the video.