It is pretty common to feel intimidated when creating videos for your business because of the huge amount of work it requires.
But can you get away with unpolished video for your YouTube channel? Can YouTube video be shot merely on a phone or tablet?
Video creation requires its fair share of upfront investment making many shy away from it. Entrepreneurs, however, can take advantage of its less competitive nature as a way to get in front of their ideal audience. The harder it is to enter, or market yourselves on, the more effective and less competition you will have.
YouTube provides a great business platform with it being recognised as the second largest search engine and the second most visited website in the world. They are simply stats that you cannot ignore!
With that being said, before deciding to upload a video, it is important to make the most out of your videos by implementing a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. This article looks at some of the ways to optimise your YouTube channel.
Understanding Your Target Audience
YouTube are the ones in charge of helping their users find the content that they are looking for. As YouTube is owned by Google, they really understand the value of the right information at the right time, and with the algorithms of the later at play, they do this superbly well.
To get started you need to ask yourself who are your target demographic, what age range, what are their buying behaviours, what makes them tick. It’s tempting to say anyone who buys is my customers, but do you want them to be? You will likely have multiple customer groups whose decision making process varies, so build up an understanding of them as individual audiences.
Through this information you can start to keep your end customer in mind as you highlight why they want to engage with your business and brand and how it benefits them and their lifestyle.
Video - The options are endless
You can easily get caught up with the ways to shoot and present your videos. It is worth remembering the following: Be authentic, Your customers should know what to expect when dealing with your brand. If you are a low cost retailer, than having a low cost video and ‘raw’ video makes more sense than a high end video which inturn indicates that your products have such great retailer margins you can allocate a high marketing budget towards them. The video can tell as much about a brand as the content so get your Target Audience information and use this to inform your decision making.
The important thing here is the content, as you want to create videos that delivers the information your audience is looking for.
Keyword Plan Creation
A profitable YouTube channel relies heavily on a keyword plan which many consider to be its foundation. Having this prepared in advance allows to create content that can rank well in search, a well as make content that you are certain your customers are searching for.
A keyword plan can be divided into three different categories: the keyword itself, the search volume, and the competition for the keyword. The exact phrase or phrases you want to show in search results are your keywords. The estimated number of people that seek that phrase each month is the search volume. Last definitely not least is competition which measures the number of advertisers running ads for that keyword.
The Keyword Research Process
Knowing what your customers are searching for (Keyword Research) has been greatly assisted by modern technology. This is made possible with the help of online tools that aim to streamline the entire procedure. These can be found in the form of Chrome extensions and Firefox plugins such as Keywords Everywhere which helps display monthly search volume, competition, as well as cost per click to advertise against the keyword. Having these statistics readily available at all times will go a long way in helping you identify a keyword or phrase that you have not thought of previously. Aside from that, you can also look into popular video tags that you can use to help give you keyword inspiration.
