Guest Post: YouTube Is a Marketing Channel

Today’s guest post is by Jill Kurtz, who provides online marketing strategies for small businesses through Kurtz Digital Strategy. She uses more than 30 years of marketing and communication experience to help each client reach customers and prospects using websites, social media, and other online tools.

Your online marketing strategy needs to include YouTube. With over 2.5 billion active users every month, YouTube is a great place for social media marketing. It’s particularly great for product discovery and purchase consideration, making it an important channel for brand awareness.

Every Post is a Mini Website

Think of your YouTube channel and each video posted as a mini website for your brand. Each should visually represent your brand and share your value proposition. Every video posted should have a call to action to connect with you. Just as with Google, every post to YouTube should be optimized to be found in searches on the platform.

Think Quality Over Quantity

YouTube is different from other social media platforms because it isn’t a content feed. As a content library, people can easily access information posted weeks, months, or years ago.

Videos that offer valuable content have the opportunity to rank in search and be viewed for a much longer period than Facebook, LinkedIn or X. YouTube marketing requires a quality over quantity strategy. Create content that will be interesting for a longer period.

To post a video for sustained access:

Reduce the number of uploads to one or two high-quality videos
Use effective thumbnail images
Optimize content for search

Capitalize on Relationship Marketing

YouTube is a great place to build your brand – the look and feel, the tone and the voice. Use videos to establish your subject matter expertise. Use the platform to build trust in your brand over time, and be less focused on short-term marketing metrics.

Focus on Your Niche

YouTube recommends additional videos to users based on what they watch. YouTube promotes videos to only some of your subscribers first, then to more of your subscribers, then to non-subscribers whom YouTube has identified as having similar viewing behavior as your subscribers.

If your market is clear, YouTube will do the work of finding new people for you. This won’t work if your messaging – and therefore your target viewer – is too broad or not clear.

Have a clear value proposition and consistently deliver on that. This doesn’t mean that you should never try something new or get stuck in a rut. The key is to have a focused message.