By Jessica Bubenheim, on 4 July 2018
Digital marketing strategies are dependent on the business model you follow. The first thing you need to do before you start implementing digital marketing campaigns is gain clarity in your customer segment. Whether you are targeting consumers or businesses matters. With this guide we’ll give you insights Youtube to demonstrate how to optimize your Social Media use to reflect your target audience composition. This guide will focus specifically on digital marketing with B2C, so let’s start by defining the term.
B2C. B to C marketing, also known as Business-to-Consumer is the ideal type of marketing for those companies that target consumers. This guide will be drawing on one of the most powerful social networks and second largest search engine to target consumers, YouTube.
B2C through Youtube
With 1,000,000,000 users and 4,000,000,000 video playbacks per day, the impact you can achieve with audiovisual content makes the effort more than worth it. Let’s look at video content insights, to help you analyse the benefits you can derive from it.
Know your audience.
Much like with other strategies based on content, the first thing you need to do is to know exactly who you are targeting. So before creating your company’s YouTube channel, sit down with your team and answer these following questions together:
Who are they? Ideally, your YouTube subscribers and visitors should be the same type of people that are interested in buying your products or services, in other words, your target. For example, “women from 25 to 40 years old interested in getting in shape”, or “digital marketers specialized in SEO who work with big companies”. Be as specific as you need to be, but make sure that you have a market big enough to leave room for growth.
What do they want? It is not enough to define the main demographic and occupational characteristics of your target, you also need to know what it is that motivates them, whether it is increasing their muscular resistance or making a certain salary per year. Ideally, these wishes are related to your products and services, although it is not vital. Only knowing their motivations, will you be able to offer them videos that truly interest them.
What videos do they need? When it comes around to planning your videos, keep in mind that certain types of format are more appropriate than other for this kind of format. If you want to build a successful YouTube channel in a short amount of time, your best bets are tutorials, demonstrations, courses and general knowledge, as well as opinions concerning products.
People love to learn
A content strategy for a company YouTube channel is not all that different to that of a website or blog: what you need to succeed is good SEO and to create content that people will be excited to share. Long story short, make videos that people want to watch. These tips might help you out:
YouTube users’ needs can be summed up into to key points: to learn, and to feel entertained. The most successful videos are those which teach how to do something useful to solve a problem and those that are particularly fascinating or entertaining. If you can combine the two in one, even better! In any case, remember you should be as brief as possible: the quicker you cut to the chase, the quicker you will convince your viewers to stick with you.
To create an attractive YouTube channel, the quality of your videos is absolutely essential: the more professional they look, the better. If your budget is not large enough to hire an entire film team, there are two lifesaving tools which will help you out: videos which use a white background, and “whiteboard style” videos, based on illustrations on a whiteboard. Making a little extra effort when it comes to editing can work wonders for the quality.
Have you managed to make an amazing video? Fantastic! Now, go do it again and again. What you are looking do is make a YouTube channel and in order to do so you should be creating a whole base of content, step by step. Think of it like a series: your first video is the Pilot episode, but to create a TV Classic, you need several seasons. Your goal is got get users hooked on your content, for them to subscribe.
Search Engine Optimization with Youtube
It’s important to understand, what is SEO. In many ways, the rankings on YouTube work just like SEO on Google: if you’re not on the first page, you’re not found. So how to do it? You have to have two important points under control:
Your keywords. Just as in conventional SEO, clearly defining your keywords is the first step to being found. Some magical words are those like “explanation”, “tutorial”, “test”, or “How to…”, but there are no universal formulas. After all, the best keywords are those that adjust to your content and that your target is looking for. In any case, there are three essential places you need to put them: in the title of your video, the description and in the tags (once in each place or at most a couple in the description). Remember that the description is the main source of information about your video so use it!
Your users’ actions. YouTube is a smart system: it wants its users to find the best videos possible, so it rewards the contents that are most liked. To know this, is bases itself on certain factors:
Number of views. Logically, the more the better.
Amount of time it was viewed. If a video is interesting users will view it until the end; if not, they will abandon it after a few seconds. For you to have an idea, if 50 or 60 percent of your users stay until the end of the video, you’re doing very well.
Number of “likes” or “dislikes”.
Number of subscribers, favorites and shares in relation to the total number of visitors.
Viewed videos get views
The most important data for YouTube when it comes to ranking your video is the number of quality visits. To evaluate the quality of the visits however, your video needs to have enough visits at all. For this reason, your first goal should be to achieve at least 1,000 visits on each video. Why? Both search engine studies and behavioural research show that views work with positive feedback loops where viewed videos get more views. These strategies will help you do just that:
Do cross promotion with other youtubers. With a little bit of research, you will surely find other YouTube channels with a similar target audience to yours and that might be interested in your content. To reach them, offer to collaborate with the channel’s owners. At the end of the video, you can insert a small call to action encouraging them the visit and subscribe to the rest of your content.
Send your videos to your emailing list. Incorporate your videos into your emailing campaigns. You will get even more point if you create blog posts for each one of them.
Get in touch with influencers of your sector. Influencer marketing can seriously work in your favor, but to get their attention you need to have content that is truly of high quality and to properly explain why it would be interesting for their audience.
Use advertising on YouTube. YouTube Ads are a great way to get segmented visits in a short period of time. The average price is between 10 and 30 dollars for every thousand visits: if you know how to use them correctly, is it without a doubt an investment that will pay off.
Drive Conversions with Video
Visits are fundamental for your company’s YouTube channel to be visible, but don’t lose sight of your true goal: increasing your sales. In order to do so, you need to know how YouTube fits into your conversion funnel and how to use it to get your users where you want them.
Generally, your video marketing will be at the beginning of your conversion funnel. Once you have managed to capture the attention of your potential clients, what you want is from them to move on to the next steps, such as visiting your website or filling out a form with their email. These two simple tricks will help you out:
For your new user not to forget about you, the first step is to get them to subscribe to your channel. As always in marketing, calls to action are essential. You can add a button at the end of every video, or you’re the notes and description.
If you want them to get to your website, don’t forget to add a link to it! Insert a link to your landing page in the description to attract quality traffic.
Youtube marketing principles
To finish off, here are three pieces of advice that I find very useful when marketing on YouTube:
Be patient. Unless you have a magical mailing list or a very large amount of contacts, the most likely is that it will take several months to reach thousands of visits. But don’t despair: building a YouTube channel is a long-term strategy.
Learn to deal with negative comments. The golden rule is that there are fundamentally two types: the mean ones trying to get your attention (whom you will have to ignore) and the honest ones (which you should take as an opportunity to improve).
Treat YouTube as any other external marketing channel: the goal is to capture the interest of users to redirect them to your webpage.
To conclude this guide on B2C online marketing, remember, the first thing you need to do before you start implementing a digital marketing campaigns is clarity in your customer segment. Digital marketing strategies are dependent on the business model you follow. Whether you are targeting consumers or businesses matters. If your interested in learning how to target businesses, the first step is to understand where to find the professional network you’re targeting.
