YouTube Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

YouTube is a powerful marketing channel for small businesses. With a YouTube video or ad you can potentially reach far more viewers than you would with a Super Bowl ad—and at a tiny fraction of the cost. Recording a Google Hangout on Air and posting it to YouTube is an effective, easy way to reach target customers through video.

I recently attended the Search Marketing Expo conference in San Jose, Calif., and learned some great YouTube marketing tips and strategies during a session called “YouTube Success Stories for Marketers.” Here are some of the key takeaways from the session.

YouTube Advertising Tactics & Strategies

During his presentation, Jake Larsen, owner of Video Power Marketing, noted that advertisers paid $4 million for a 30-second spot during the recent Super Bowl. The football playoff drew an average of 114.4 million viewers, making it the most watched broadcast in U.S. TV history, according to Nielsen.

By comparison, YouTube has approximately 1 billion users and more than 4 billion views daily. “That’s like 40 Super Bowls happening every day on YouTube,” Larsen pointed out.

With such a large potential pool of viewers, then, the return on investment (ROI) for advertising on YouTube can be substantial, Larsen said. “YouTube ads are one of best ways to get your message out there—at a low cost—to specific types of people,” he said.

For example, many businesses place a hyperlink to their website at the end of a YouTube ad or video. Visitors who go to a brand’s site after viewing its YouTube video or ad are twice as likely to convert into customers as those who arrive from other sites, he said. Also, those visitors are likely to “spend more money, more often” with a brand after watching its YouTube spot.

YouTube marketing is also a more consistent way to reach targeted audiences. Google constantly changes its search engine algorithms, and “one small change” can ruin your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, Larsen noted. Meanwhile, pay per click (PPC) campaigns, such as Google AdWords, are “competitive and expensive,” and they don’t always deliver the targeted, motivated traffic marketers seek.