Should You Launch a YouTube Channel?

YouTube is the second largest search engine and the third most viewed website in the world behind Google and Facebook. With such a massive reach, YouTube provides vast opportunities for marketing businesses. Some business owners believe that YouTube isn’t relevant to their company, but in reality, many different types of organizations can benefit from launching a YouTube channel.

To take advantage of YouTube’s offerings, companies require a deeper understanding of the benefits and features of the channel. Here, we’ve listed the pros and cons of launching a corporate YouTube channel and the types of content that many companies consider worth sharing, to help you best utilize the YouTube platform

Provide Audience Analysis

Your YouTube channel for business can give you access to an analytics tab, which contains quantitative insights about your audience behavior, number of views, average watch time and interaction rate across videos. It also includes valuable data on your subscriber demographics, such as location, age and gender of viewers, as well as video playback locations and traffic sources.

Help Target the Right Audience

You can reach the right audience by analyzing audience demographics and adjusting your content strategy to meet their needs. You can also gain qualitative information about your audience by reading and managing the comments on your videos.

Enable Interaction with Subscribers

Located under the community tab on your profile, you can interact with your viewers directly, post questions or create a poll to gain a deeper understanding of your customers' interests. Due to this, YouTube provides a huge opportunity to establish your brand through interactive videos that can build your following.

Free to Use

Uploading and watching videos on YouTube is free. This makes it a good option for startups or those that don’t have a lot of money to invest in marketing.

Easy to Share Information

You can share information with a lot of people via your corporate YouTube channel in a short time. YouTube makes it easy to share videos on other platforms as well, such as Facebook, Twitter and more. You can also ask your viewers to share your videos as part of your call-to-action or even have it written in the description of your video.

No Video Length Limitations

Your videos on YouTube can be as short or as long as you want them to be. If you have any videos of seminars, expert interviews or speeches, you can upload them to YouTube as well.

Enhance Customer Reach

YouTube marketing can help you reach new customers and followers. Using the tag feature with the right keywords while uploading a video can help you ensure that your video will appear on appropriate searches.

Channel Monetization

With YouTube, you can promote your products and business while also making money through Google AdSense, just for posting videos. You can also monetize your videos when you get a good number of followers and viewers.

Improve SEO Ranking

YouTube can help you boost your SEO by creating relevant hashtags and backlinks for your website, thus also increasing the traffic to your website. Using YouTube as marketing media will make it easier for you to market the products that you want to sell.

Check These Drawbacks of Using YouTube Marketing for Business

Now that you know how YouTube can benefit your company, consider the following potential cons to it as well.

1. Any advertiser can put ads on your video – Even your competitors can advertise on your video, which can potentially hurt your brand.
2. Limited customization – YouTube has certain limitations in terms of customizing and optimizing the channel. It restricts what you can post on your channel and how it looks.
3. Takes time – Creating content for YouTube is a time-consuming process. You need to create, edit and optimize the video before finally uploading it. You also need to carefully consider the title, the description of the video, the hashtags and the thumbnail. It can take months to build up your channel and gain a substantial number of followers and views.
4. No guarantees – Even if you create the perfect video with strong value, there isn’t any guarantee that your videos will be popular. YouTube has more than 50 million content creators churning out videos regularly, so your content has to stand out.
5. Your account can be disabled – YouTube has the right to delete or disable your channel if you are in breach of the rules or don’t comply with the terms of service and community guidelines.

Types of Content That Businesses Should Consider Worth Sharing

You’ll want to be careful when creating content for building brand awareness and keeping viewers engaged. Divide your videos into categories so you can organize your content into playlists. Each playlist should have a clear focus and progress logically from one video to the next to keep people watching. You can customize your channel for your brand and access YouTube analytics for insights into who’s watching your videos and what kind of content they respond to best.

There are several different kinds of videos you can create to support both marketing and sales. These include training, customer stories, product information, general awareness, product demo, how-to tutorials, slideshows with voice-overs, tips, events videos, interviews and channel trailers. These can be in the form of videos, music, comedy sketch and animation. A channel trailer is a short video that allows you to introduce your brand to new visitors and tell them why they should watch your videos and subscribe to your channel.

Creating the best content to maximize views and shares requires you to understand your customers’ interests and their information consumption patterns – which are always changing. Following are a few tips to find the right content for your channel:

• Research the kinds of content your audience enjoys as you create your strategy.
• Read competing video descriptions to see what keywords are used in competitors’ YouTube search optimization strategies.
• Monitor your target audience to find commonly shared questions your videos can answer.
• Evaluate audience engagement, number of likes, dislikes and shares, as well as any comments.
• Make sure there’s a logical progression of ideas from one video to the next.
• Translate your videos into different languages or add subtitles to your YouTube videos.

Following are some ways to make it easier for people to find your content when they do a Google search:

1. Design a cover image that works on all screens.
2. Add your website information to your YouTube channel banner.
3. Add a good channel title and compelling video description.
4. Use the right keywords and tags relevant to your content to boost rankings for your videos, giving you extra visibility in search results.
5. Create a YouTube channel structure to organize your channel.
6. Add team members to help you manage it.
7. Verify your YouTube account to access more features.
8. Create an “About” page, and include a short, persuasive description of your channel.
9. Optimize your channel and videos for watch time and audience retention.
10. Follow YouTube’s video specifications to suit a variety of needs.

Authors

Tasnim Ahmed

Tasnim Ahmed is a content writer at Escalon Business Services who enjoys writing on a multitude of subjects that include finops, peopleops, risk management, entrepreneurship, VC and startup culture. Based in Delhi NCR, she previously contributed to ANI, Qatar Tribune, Marhaba, Havas Worldwide, and curated content for top-notch brands in the PR sphere. On weekends, she loves to explore the city on a motorcycle and binge watch new OTT releases with a plateful of piping hot dumplings!