Integrating YouTube into your marketing strategy: how to maximize your business profits
Viacheslav Yurenko
CEO IT company 4Limes | Media Buyer: TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Ads, Redit Ads
YouTube has long since grown from an entertainment video hosting service to a powerful marketing tool. Today, this platform is capable of bringing thousands and thousands of targeted customers to your website.
For example, let's take a look at the numbers. Statista forecasts that YouTube's audience will exceed 933 million people from all over the world this year. And that, for a minute, is almost twice the population of the US and EU combined! In 2023 alone, the average time spent watching videos on YouTube was about 30 min/day per person. This means that people aren't just randomly clicking on the first YouTube video they come across - people are spending a good portion of their time watching videos!
How companies use YouTube to promote their business
With such a large YouTube audience, it's a great opportunity to promote your business with even greater impact. Here, for example, are just a few of the benefits of YouTube that you can take advantage of today:
Below we'll briefly look at real-life examples of how companies have used YouTube, and what the main approaches to working with the video hosting service have been. This will help you better understand how you yourself can use YouTube tools to promote your business.
Case #1. Niche: Psychology
Let's take a closer look at an example of working with one of our clients - a school of psychology. We had the task of finding new markets and, as a result, expanding the presence of this school of psychology in other countries. Initially, we focused on developing the school's YouTube channel and preparing contextual advertising for the Kazakhstan market. And then we began to gradually introduce the client to the European and American markets.
Initially, we analyzed the existing traffic sources. It turned out that the course website lacked analytics. So we optimized the homepage to track user behavior.
To attract the target audience, we developed a content strategy including useful articles and videos on the topics of psychology and family counseling. This allowed us to improve the site's position in search and increase organic traffic.
To scale audience reach, we launched contextual advertising with gradual coverage of new countries. In addition, we worked on improving the sales funnel, introduced installment payments for expensive courses (to increase conversion), and launched YouTube ads.
We applied the "4-2-2" format in creating the promotional videos. This format involves recording separate video fragments that can be combined at the editing stage to create a larger number of commercials. We also set up an advertising campaign in Performance Max, which made it possible to get more leads at a lower cost.
As a result, in three months we were able to achieve a significant increase in course sales and reduce the cost of attracting a client to 100-150% in Kazakhstan and to 200-300% in Europe. In the period from December 1, 2022 to November 1, 2023, the number of leads grew to 9914, and total sales amounted to $225,405.37 with an advertising budget of $44,229.
While in this project we focused on optimizing content for search queries, with another client (from online education) we built a strategy around attracting subscribers on YouTube using video announcements and trailers. More on that below.
Case No. 2. Niche: language school
It is worth considering another example of our work - promotion of an online German language school. The client askedto increase the popularity of the school and attract new subscribers to the existing YouTube channel.
We analyzed the existing content and audience to understand what type of video generates the most interest. It turned out that short "catchy" announcement videos with previews of full video tutorials work best in this niche.
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To increase recognition of the author and the channel, we developed a promotion strategy around video trailers. We published the trailers with limited access and then ran targeted YouTube ads on them in Discovery and InStream formats. In simple terms, we showed the trailers to people who were actively looking for information about learning German.
In just 6 months, we managed to significantly increase the audience of our educational YouTube channel in the language learning niche. Between February 15 and August 15, 2023, we attracted 6,348 subscribers to the YouTube channel, received over 5 million ad impressions and 518,000 views.
What you need to know to get the same results
A good way to get results on YouTube is to use the Hero-Hub-Help-Hype-Action strategy when creating content. It allows you to focus your efforts on the most fruitful types of content.
It involves producing videos of several types:
Each of the YouTube video formats allows you to address your business objectives and goals within your YouTube strategy. For example, long videos are great for attracting organic search engine optimization (SEO) traffic. Short videos, on the other hand, are mostly designed to go viral and maximize reach through memorable creative.
Using different formats, you can solve the tasks of attracting traffic, brand awareness, generating leads and increasing sales.
What's important to consider about YouTube for businesses in 2024
Hype content has tremendous power in terms of building audience reach. However, in practice, it is difficult to constantly guess current trends and instantly create viral videos based on them. Here, it would be optimal to use the Shorts format - it requires less money, but it also contributes to the growth of interest in the channel.
As for advertising, today's loyal audience responds adequately to such content. But over time, viewers may become "saturated", the inflow of new audiences may decrease, and competition with other platforms may increase. But for monetization and revenue growth, you need to increase ad impressions!
How to be?
The answer is to use automatic multi-language video translation using neural networks. This feature will allow you to grow your reach many times over without significantly increasing your content budget!
Why do you need YouTube Shorts?
To get good results from YouTube Shorts promotion, it is crucial to find the optimal content formats for your target audience. It is recommended to test 4 to 10 approaches to video in the first month. The key is to find the unique creative that will resonate most with viewers of the business and scale it!
In conclusion, three key recommendations for YouTube promotion in 2024:
This will help you in developing an effective YouTube strategy for your business. More YouTube marketing insights and tips can be found in my posts on my Facebook profile.