YouTube Marketing For E-commerce Business: A Complete Guide

Youtube Marketing is not a new trend among online marketers, business owners, and marketing professionals. It has been on for quite some time now. However, most businesses don’t know how to utilize the platform to promote their product and services. Youtube is one of the best digital channels out there for online marketers to promote their e-commerce websites. Since e-commerce has to do majorly with selling and showcasing products, YouTube gives you the chance to use videos that show off the benefits of what your e-commerce website is selling. In addition, Youtube is also the second most visited site in the world. There is a fat chance that your ideal target audience visits YouTube once a day. And since you are not making use of Youtube, your customer’s search results will lead them to other businesses’ e-commerce websites and products.

Therefore as an e-commerce business owner, you have to take advantage of the opportunity YouTube present to help promote your business. And if that’s something you are having difficulty achieving, you have come to the right place. In this article, we are going to take a look at developing a marketing strategy for your e-commerce site using YouTube, so you can subsequently drive sales.

What is Youtube Marketing?

Youtube marketing involves the promotion of businesses and products on YouTube’s platform by uploading valuable video content to promote your business to a target audience. It is the process of using video content and ads that educate, provide value, and encourages potential customers to buy your products on your YouTube channels. As an e-commerce business, you need to invest in YouTube like every other marketing strategy like social media and email marketing to help improve your traffic, and brand and make more sales.

On Youtube, you need to post valuable videos and optimize them for the YouTube algorithm by adding things like title, meta description, and alt text so that people can find your content and engage with it. 

Why You Need YouTube to Promote Your Business

In recent times, video content remains the most captivating and engaging form of content. And having compelling content is very important for a successful digital marketing strategy.

Furthermore, research has shown that YouTube is the second most popular site on the web and is second only to Google in the most visited sites on the web.

Subsequently, over 2.6 billion people worldwide use YouTube once a month according to Statista. Another statistic shows that 62% of businesses use YouTube as a channel to post video content and 85% of businesses are using video as a marketing tool.

YouTube is a powerful marketing tool that’s why about 90% of people say they discover new brands or products on YouTube. Currently, video content represents 82% of internet traffic, it would only make sense for businesses to take advantage of this medium. If done well, YouTube can help your E-commerce business with brand awareness, traffic and conversion. 

How to Grow Your E-Commerce Business with Youtube

There are about  2.6 billion people worldwide that use YouTube monthly and about 694,000 hours of video are streamed on the platform each minute. So starting a Youtube channel can be quite intimidating. That’s why you need a strategy to help your videos reach the right audience and get you the right result. 

1. Create a Content Marketing Strategy

For every form of marketing, be it social media or email, you must have a strategy. Without a mapped-out strategy, your marketing won’t make meaning and you won’t get the desired result. The same goes for YouTube marketing. Creating random videos for the sake of publishing won’t get your brand anywhere. An e-commerce business owner must have goals and objectives and a strategy in place before you start creating videos. You need to know what your goals and objectives are, who your target audience is? What information do they need for them to buy your products? What solution does your product offer to your target audience? What action does your audience need to take when finish watching your videos?

By answering all these questions, your content will have a focus. Furthermore, you will be able to measure some major metrics to have an idea of what is working and what is not. By measuring metrics, you can optimize your YouTube strategy to make sure you are getting the right result. 

2. Have a YouTube channel

Once you have figured out the answer to the above question and identified your target audience, you need to create a YouTube channel to help you get your content out there. To create a YouTube channel, log in to your Google account and go to the YouTube Channel Switcher. If you are a new user, you should see the option to create a new channel and if you are a returning user, you will see your personal account and any brand accounts you currently manage. After clicking on ” create account ” then you can choose a channel name and create an account. After your account has been created, you can start creating your content.

3. Optimize Your YouTube Content

Statistics show that YouTube is the second most visited website in the world after Google. This show that there are billions of searches conducted on YouTube every day. And with thousands of videos uploaded to the site every minute, your video can easily get lost. To avoid this, you must optimize your content by using the right keywords. Always have an SEO strategy in place when uploading videos to avoid getting outranked by your competitors. You need to perform keyword research by using some keyword research tools, Google Trends, Google keyword planner and any other keyword software to have an idea of which keyword to rank for.

You can also optimize your videos by adding titles and descriptions to your videos. Your titles and descriptions must contain keywords and be as relevant to the search query as possible.

Note that your title and description are the first things your viewers will read, so make sure you optimize it for more engagement. 

Don’t forget to add tags using keywords for more visibility on the SERP and add subtitles to make content more user-friendly and digestible. Use custom thumbnails for a better click rate. Thumbnails are the images that you see as a preview of the videos before you click on them.

4. Promote your videos

One way to use YouTube to promote your e-commerce is by leveraging paid ads. Youtube ads work exactly like the Google PPC campaign where users create an ad campaign, bid on keywords, set budgets and publish campaigns. This is one way to push your video content to a larger audience. You can also promote your video on your social media pages. Write a catchy headline to incentivize people to watch. Embed your video in a blog post that covers the same topic. Another strategy for promoting your video is by repurposing your video content into Instagram stories, blog posts, podcasts etc. You can also make use of social media ads to promote your YouTube videos on social media. You can make use of Facebook ad’s advanced technology to promote your videos to your target audience.

YouTube Marketing For E-commerce Best Practices

1. Create Videos that Resonate with Your Audience

The best way to promote your e-commerce business with YouTube is by creating video-based insight gotten from research on your audience. When you create youtube videos that are valuable and informative to your target audience, they will not only help your business get traffic but also become loyal customers. This will help you build your audience in the long run. To make sure your video content resonates with your audience, you have to base your strategy on what your audience is asking about.  

You can create videos responding to your audience’s questions. Reply to their comments and answer any related questions. Ask them about what they will like to see in your videos. Host live streams, and always read and reply to the comments. If you’re just starting out, you could use youtube templates to make your video creation process easy.

2. Organize Your Content

Organizing and planning your video content is a good youtube marketing practice that e-commerce businesses have to implement. In digital marketing, the time you publish your content matters for engagement. One way to organize your content is by creating a content calendar. By creating a content calendar, you will be able to organize your time and set deadlines. This will help you optimize your publishing schedule for maximum reach and engagement. To create a content calendar, you can either use tools like Coshedule or do it manually by using a Google spreadsheet. You can create columns based on the type of content, time, platform, focus area, etc. You have to figure out the days and hours that tend to get more views and interactions. You can do this by viewing Youtube’s analytics to get insight into your audience’s data. This way, you can get data on when your viewers use Youtube, among other demographics such as gender, geography, etc. This will help you predict when to post content on YouTube.

3. Perform Keyword Research

Keyword research is very important if you want your video content to rank high on the YouTube search result page. YouTube is owned by Google, so search queries work the same way as it does on Google. On Google, searchers enter a series of keywords and some related results are displayed relating to the search. The same goes for YouTube, when people search for a video using a related keyword, videos related to that keyword are going to pop out on the search result page. The question is how do you get your video to pop out on the first page of the YouTube search result when keywords relating to your videos are entered? This is where keyword research comes in.

First off, you need to brainstorm a list of topics based on your content strategy. Then build a list of possible keywords for each topic. You can use keyword research tools like SEMrush, Google keyword planner, UbberSuggest, etc to research the best possible keywords based on Google trends and competition analysis. You can also type some relevant words in Youtube’s search box and see which keywords are recommended.

4. Perform Competitive Analysis

Researching your competitors is good for your YouTube marketing strategy. This will give you an insight into which keywords your competitors are using, what time they are posting, the type of video format they are posting, and what strategies they are using. This will also give you insights on what’s working and what’s not plus an opportunity to outrank and climb Youtube’s SERP. This process will let you come up with strategies and ideas to get a competitive edge.

5. Optimize Your Videos

Optimizing your video content is good for search engine optimization. Optimizing your title and meta description will help your video rank higher on the search engine result page. Make sure your video titles and descriptions are as relevant to the search query as possible. Also include keywords in your title and description. This will make your videos more visible to searchers. Your description must match the content of the video. 

• Add tags: Tag is really important when it comes to SEO. Tags allow your content to be more visible to searchers. Make sure you add tags that are relevant to your content and make sure you add keywords.

• Add subtitles: Subtitle is another best practice you can add to your videos. Adding subtitle to your video help people digest your content. Some non-native speakers of your language might find it a little bit difficult to understand what you are saying, adding subtitles makes sure that they are not missing anything. Furthermore, subtitles help the YouTube algorithm to understand how relevant your content is.

• Add custom: thumbnail

6. Invest in YouTube ads

Globally, 40% of shoppers said that they purchased products that they had discovered on YouTube while 90% of people across the globe said that they discover new brands and products on YouTube. Investing in Youtube ads is a good idea for promoting your videos to a larger audience. Youtube ads are a lot like Google ads where users have to bid for a keyword, set a budget, and publish ad campaigns. Advertising on Youtube is cheaper and easier to set up.

7. Partner with Influencers

Research shows that from January 2017-2018, there was a 70% increase in the number of YouTube users who subscribed to and engaged with content created by influencers. People are more likely to trust recommendations from influencers because of the prestige and knowledge they have about a particular industry. People also trust them because of their reputation. So it is a strategy to leverage if you want to promote your e-commerce business with YouTube.

Here are some interesting tips on YouTube influencer marketing

• Sponsor your product in a way that blends with the rest of the video.
• Collaborate with influencers and create a special video together. This will put your brand in front of the influencer’s audience more naturally.
• Gift your products to the influencer, let them experience the benefits, and then ask them to give a shout-out on their channel about your product. You can create a testimonial video about it.
• Choose influencers that are relevant to your niche.
• Go for influencers with large followers
• Also, make sure that their followers are active and engaging to make it worthwhile.

Conclusion

Youtube was once a platform where people go to listen to songs and watch videos. However as the year passed, businesses have turned to it for the promotion of their product and services. If used well youtube can help your e-commerce business with brand awareness, generate quality traffic, build loyal customers and audience and ultimately create conversion. Some videos resonate with youtube like how-to videos, explainer videos, product videos, and behind the scene video. You can read our article on video marketing for more. There is also an article on tools for creating videos that can be found here. If you are looking for ways to increase the sales of your eCommerce store, follow these tips to give you an early start.