As video becomes more and more prominent in search behavior, it has become a viable medium for business marketing. Use this guide for YouTube marketing tips to create your own YouTube Marketing Funnel and develop your own video marketing strategy to start getting results.
Before we continue, please keep in mind that this guide is intended for organic search engine optimization (SEO), not pay-per-click ads (PPC). Google Ads are another great marketing channel, but this article is focusing only on utilizing organic YouTube SEO.
Why Use YouTube for Small Business Marketing?
YouTube has surpassed Google as the top global search engine, which means that people tend to prefer video content when searching the internet. Knowing this, small businesses can leverage YouTube marketing as a powerful tool.
More often than not, SEO favors engagement which is one of the benefits of YouTube. YouTube is a great way to directly communicate with your audience. Whether you have a new product you wish to promote, a special sale, or important news about your business, few other platforms can deliver this information like YouTube can.
YouTube videos aren’t just stuck on its website, you can embed videos on your website to add quality content. Google populates its search results with video carousels featuring relevant YouTube videos and YouTube featured snippets that provide a video timestamped to the exact time in the video where the search query is answered. YouTube SEO is good for organic SEO overall!
Learn how to get a YouTube Featured Snippet in this guide here.
What is a YouTube Marketing Funnel?
In many ways, a YouTube marketing funnel is not too different from a traditional marketing funnel. In a basic analysis, there are three stages of the funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
It is possible to create videos that can inform, educate, or otherwise guide a customer through each step of the funnel.
Awareness – Grab attention with a video that presents a burning question or glaring problem, and follow up with a promise to provide the solution.
Consideration – You’ve got their attention, now show them what you’ve got. This video can be used to show off the benefits of your product or service with greater detail.
Decision – Finally, convince your audience that your business is their best decision with a final hook.
Breaking Down the YouTube Funnel
Top of Funnel (Awareness) – Everyone has a problem, even if they aren’t aware of it yet. As a small business, you can deliver the solution to that unique problem. All you have to do is let your audience know.
At the top of the funnel, your video should educate the customer about the problem, how it directly affects them, and how to identify the problem in their daily life.
Middle of Funnel (Consideration) – In the middle of your marketing funnel, now is the time to position yourself as the best provider of the solution. Show your audience how your business provides the solution to their problem with details of the benefits your offer and the unique advantage you possess.
Bottom of Funnel (Decision) – Your customer knows who you are, they understand the problem that you can solve, and now you can provide evidence that you can deliver. This video shows customers how you have fulfilled your promise in the past and convince them that you will successfully do the same for them.
With a structured YouTube marketing funnel in place, you can develop an effective video marketing strategy for a segment of your business. Next, let’s cover how to put your YouTube marketing funnel to work.
How to Use a YouTube Marketing Funnel?
One of the most important aspects of creating an effective YouTube marketing funnel is YouTube SEO. Optimizing your YouTube videos will help search engines and your audience find your videos when searching online. Using the correct keywords, crafting titles, descriptions, and user-friendly content are all part of YouTube SEO.
Once you have your marketing funnel strategy laid out, it’s time to create videos for each stage, for the most important aspects of your business. Make them clear and to the point. Try to answer important questions in the beginning of the video and end it with an easy and compelling call-to-action.
Tips for How to Get Your YouTube Videos to Rank
Using a little keyword research, get a list of keywords that are important to the topics you will cover in your videos. Make sure those keywords make it into your video script, video title, video description, and added in the tags section at the bottom of the Video Creator screen in the backend of the video.
Use our YouTube SEO Guide for some suggestions on optimizing your videos.
Although keyword research tools are helpful, for a quick and dirty search, you can use Google Search and Google Trends to find those keyword phrases. When you see the results of a search query, Google will often display suggested search terms based on popular searches related to your query. These are displayed at the bottom of the page and under the People Also Ask section in the search results. Pay attention to these for more keyword ideas and questions to answer!
You can also use Google Trends, a free research tool, to compare popular terms over time across the Google network.
Check out our Guide for Google Trends for Business Marketing.
Now that you have a video marketing strategy, and a few well-made videos, it’s important to track how they perform in regards to directing traffic to your website. All your careful planning and hard work will be wasted if you don’t know how your audience reacts to them. This is where Google Analytics comes in. Let’s learn how to integrate Google Analytics with your YouTube channel next.
About YouTube Video Builder – A Helpful Tool for Businesses
In one of their latest initiatives to make YouTube more useful for businesses, the platform has launched a tool called YouTube Video Builder. This marketing tool is free to use, and allows any business with a YouTube channel to easily create their own promotional videos to showcase on YouTube.
Many business owners do not have the time, resources, or budget to create elaborate marketing videos. This is why YouTube Video Builder was made to make simple, professional-looking promo videos with little video production skills needed. You can create your own branded video in a matter of minutes.
To create video with the tool, you will need to upload your own logos, static assets, and images. YouTube provides music and animations from their free-to-use library.
With the tool, you can customize colors, fonts, and layout to create 6-15 second videos. YouTube also provides a number of templates to help you craft your message and offer: the “story” of your promo.
Once published, your videos can be displayed on your channel and across the YouTube platform. If you are using YouTube ads, your custom content can be used you advertising campaigns as well.
Read more about using YouTube Video Builder from this guide from Google.
How to Connect Your YouTube Channel to Google Analytics
If you have a Google Analytics account for your business website, it is very simple to integrate your YouTube channel into your regular analytics reports. YouTube traffic can be tracked in Analytics using a special tracking ID. Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds.
Follow these steps to connect your YouTube channel to your Google Analytics account:
First, you need to set up a new filter. Log into your Google Analytics account and click on the Admin icon, that looks like a gear (lower left), to go to the admin dashboard.
Next, click Create View in the upper right. Fill out the form that appears. Name the new view, select the time zone, and click Create View to finish.
Now, back in the Admin dashboard, make sure your new view is selected, and click the Filters the View column. Next, select the Add Filter button, name the filter and click Custom.In the custom settings, click Include and select Hostname in the Filter Field dropdown menu. This is where you can fill in the Filter Pattern Box with “youtube” before clicking Save.
Part One is finished. You have a special filter set up to view specific traffic flowing from YouTube.
Part Two requires creating a new property in Google Analytics to get a tracking ID for your YouTube channel.
In the Admin menu of Google Analytics, click Create Property and follow the prompts. Once the new property is created, click Tracking Info and then Tracking Code in the Property column that appears. Copy the tracking ID code in the Tracking Code window that appears.
Next, you will need to add the copied tracking ID code to your YouTube channel. Log into your YouTube channel and select View Additional Features in your account menu. You will then navigate to YouTube Studio where you will need to click Channel and then Advanced on the left-hand side.
At the bottom of the Advanced menu, paste the copied tracking ID into the box labeled Google Analytics Property Tracking ID.
Finally, click Save. Phew, you’re all done!
Now your YouTube channel is integrated with your Google Analytics account and you have created a filter view to see all the tracked data from YouTube.
In the top of the Analytics home page, click the accounts dropdown menu and click YouTube. Now you can see analytics data in the Behavior or Acquisitions tabs just like your other traffic sources.
Add UTM Tags to Your YouTube Videos
In your YouTube video descriptions or in video cards (if applicable), you should include URL links to product or service pages on your website. Viewers can click these links and go directly to a product page or your contact page. This is how you can get leads from your videos.
UTM tags should be added to these links in order to send tracking information to your Google Analytics account. Every link should contain a UTM tag.
Use Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool to easily create UTM tags for your videos.
A basic UTM tag should include the original URL of the page you are linking to, the source (YouTube), the medium (social), and the campaign name (the video title, product, service, or other marketing campaign identifier with each word separated by a hyphen).
Now you will be able to track performance of individual YouTube videos within your Google Analytics account like a pro!
Smartz Has Over 25 Years of Digital Marketing Experience
The Smartz digital marketing team has over 25 years of experience helping businesses over a broad spectrum of industries meet and exceed their online marketing goals. Are you serious about taking your marketing to the next level? Reach out to Smartz and let’s start the conversation.
Hello, Very informative piece of article, this blog has helped me to understand the concept even better. Keep on blogging.
@ July 28th, 2020 at 04:01Thanks!
Thank you! We are happy that you found it useful.
@ August 7th, 2020 at 11:20