With over 4 billion videos viewed daily, YouTube is the second largest search engine and the third most visited website worldwide, behind only Google and Facebook. It’s a well known fact that YouTube reaches more adults aged 18-34 than any television programme. For one reason or another YouTube is often overlooked when creating marketing strategies for business but in my opinion, if used properly, YouTube can be just as powerful as Facebook.
Not sure how YouTube can be used to grow your business? Below are 5 reasons why you should be using YouTube.
1. Domain Authority
Everyone knows about domain authority and how important that can be for your business, but not everyone knows how YouTube can improve this. Once you create a YouTube channel you can associate your website with it – essentially telling Google that they are linked and that your channel is official. After they are linked, if your YouTube channel grows, so does your domain authority. Think of your channel as an additional page to your website.
2. Google’s Universal Search
With Google’s Universal Search, YouTube videos are now included in Google’s search results. If Google can find a relevant video for your search, more often than not it’ll be shown to you as one of the top results. You can take advantage of this by accompanying text-only web pages with an video or even creating a YouTube video that answers a very specific question.
It’s also worth mentioning that Google takes into account how many times your videos have been embedded onto other websites and not just your own. Consider every video embed the equivalent of a link to your website.
3. YouTube Video Content Stays Around Forever
Something that many often forget is that YouTube video content stays around forever. Let’s say you create a very specific video for your business including CTA’s and links to pages on your site. As soon as you upload it, even if you receive very few video views, that’s just the start. For every video you upload there’s always the potential that months, sometimes even years down the line, your video will rack up thousands of views. As long as you include links to your website, that’s a constant traffic source that will never disappear.
4. YouTube Content Can Be Re-purposed
Admittedly, a good YouTube video is often time consuming to create. Once you’ve finally finished editing and exporting your video, you’ll often be left with a lengthy wait while uploading your video to YouTube and waiting for the video to process. This may seem like a long process for one video but video content can always be re-purposed and before you know it, your one video has been used to create a blog post, GIFs, individual social assets or even an infographic. Re-purposing content can be an extremely effective form of content marketing as it allows you to convey the same message in many different formats, catering to many different audiences.
5. Monetise Content
Once your channel grows in popularity, there’s the potential that you can start monetising your content. Although you won’t make a lot of money at first, the potential is massive. Millions of content creators all around the world are earning money from their YouTube videos with thousands of those channels making six figures a year. While it’s incredibly rare for a business channel to earn that sort of money from their video content alone, there’s nothing stopping you from creating regular videos and growing your audience enough to start making some extra money.
