How can businesses use YouTube well?

Grant Leboff:  Danny, YouTube is one of those platforms that everybody knows and everybody uses – even if it’s just to watch something at some point – but of course, a lot of people don’t understand how to use it well. If you are a business and you want to use YouTube, what are some of the hints and tips that they should be thinking about?

Danny Bermant :  I think the first step is to keep it short. With YouTube you get some really great statistics and what you will see is the attrition rates; which is how your viewer numbers drop-off as the video gets longer and longer. So the first step is to keep the video short, keep on subject, keep to the point and if you’ve got key takeaways to give to your audience, those need to be quite early in the video.

The other thing about YouTube is that the subject line is so important. When you put a subject line on your YouTube video you need to make sure that it is something that is going to be relevant to the people who are searching. So you need to do a bit of keyword research to find out what your target audience is looking for. It is often forgotten that you Tube is the world’s second most popular search engine, Google being the first. So it’s thinking about what people search for. Also putting a description and your video. Is there a description there that people can look at in more detail? Is there a link back to your website, or back to the source of what the video is about?

And then there’s the video itself. Have you overlaid any captions on the video? So for people who are watching the video you can put a caption over it which will say, for example, for more information… or; if you would like to watch the next video click here… or; if you would like to give us a call here is our phone number.

YouTube has so many tools that make it easy for you to actually upload and then share that content.

Grant Leboff: That’s really interesting that you said that because it is one of the things that I am always talking to my clients about; what do you want your customer to do next? So it’s about using captions or directing them somewhere else… because I don’t know how many times you’ve done this, but I can be watching a really great video on YouTube and then you think, now what? I don’t always know what I’m supposed to do. So what are some of the things that people should be thinking about in terms of the customer journey, if the video is the catalyst?

Danny Bermant :  You need to think about embedding it, so you’ve created that great video, where are you putting it? Is it on your blog, is it on your website, and if the video is being shown elsewhere how the people moved to somewhere else?

So, absolutely, you need to ensure that the video has embedded links, you need to make sure that the description has links back to your website or wherever you want people to go… I’ve seen some really clever things, sometimes at the end of a YouTube video. What people will create is a run off of about 10 seconds where you will have hotspots on the screen. Where, if you click on those hotspots it will take you to different addresses.

Also it’s about having a YouTube channel that is properly branded, so if people see your video, they’ll see under your video the name of your business. This is your channel, if people click on the channel’s branding you can add website address and you can add your other social media addresses. So it’s very much a matter of thinking about where is this video going to be in your viewer’s user journey, from passive viewer to a buyer.

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