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YouTube is now the second-leading search engine out there, so it only makes sense that any business attempting to grow its business would make YouTube a cornerstone of its digital marketing strategy. At a minimum, YouTube can help to raise awareness about your business and what it offers. And, if things really go right, YouTube can help to convert prospects into long-time paying customers. With that in mind, here are three types of YouTube videos that have the greatest potential to help you grow your business.
Type #1: Videos To Build Awareness and Bring In New Leads
These videos are the easiest to make and are designed to appeal to people who may have never heard of your business. If you think about a classic marketing sales funnel, these are the videos at the “top of the funnel” – they are cleverly designed to hook in new prospects, generate more leads, and generally raise awareness of what your company does – and more importantly, what your company offers in terms of a value proposition.
Again, think about YouTube as a massive search engine in which potential customers are continually typing in questions and search queries that reflect the types of problems or issues they are trying to solve. Your videos, quite simply, should provide some of the answers they are looking for and help prospects (and potential customers) begin to think about your business as a place to purchase solutions. Keep in mind here – you don’t need a “hard sell” in these videos. And you don’t even need a strong call-to-action (“CTA”). Think about these videos as simply the starting place for bringing in a lot of cold leads that you can convert later.
Type #2: Videos to Educate and Inform New Leads
Now that you’ve attracted plenty of new customers and prospects, it’s time to start moving them through the marketing sales funnel. You can’t expect a prospect to buy from you overnight, especially if you are offering a very expensive solution to their problem, so you need to go about educating them.
For example, since it’s finally winter and the weather is getting colder, think about the market for winter coats. You might have the next Canada Goose winter parka ready to fly off the shelves, but what if nobody has heard about your apparel company and the type of innovative technology it offers to keep people warm during the winter? Well, here’s your chance to educate them. Maybe you create a video on something like, “3 Things to Look For When Buying a New Winter Coat.” In this video, of course, you would mention some of the key elements of your winter coats and why they help to keep people warm. You could also follow the lead of Canada Goose and create a brief two-minute video that explains your firm’s dedication to craftsmanship and product innovation.
Type #3: Videos To Convert Leads Into Buyers
Finally, it’s time to start converting all of those leads into buyers. Here is where you really need to focus on your CTA. It needs to be more than just “sign up for our email newsletter” – it needs to be a strong invitation to buy something. After all, you’re not creating all these YouTube videos just for the sake of creating new videos. The best conversion videos have three key elements: a marketing hook to grab people’s attention, proof that your product can deliver what it claims to deliver, and some form of testimonial. Here is where you can really layer in some of your other social media efforts. If you are working with Instagram influencers, for example, you can work with them to create a testimonial video. If you have a lot of positive feedback on Facebook or Twitter, you can use these quotes in your videos as a form of “social proof” that people really like what you have to offer.
Final thought
The one caveat here, of course, is that you really need to understand how the YouTube algorithm works and how it decides what it will show to different people. From there, you will need to continually find ways to optimize your videos in terms of views and engagement. That’s why you always hear people imploring you to “subscribe and smash the like button” every time they make a video – those provide signals to the YouTube algorithm that you have something important to say. And, as with all things social media, continually test out what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to check out what other brands have to say, and start to think about their videos in terms of these three types of YouTube videos. Everyone is trying to move people through the YouTube sales funnel, so why aren’t you?
