YouTube since time immemorial has been the most popular platform for promoting visual content over the web. YouTube has emerged as an extremely powerful tool for any business to reach a large audience. The impact of viewing a video cannot be underestimated.

It has been seen that a majority of viewers after watching a video visit the website of the business which is promoting its services and products. As a small business, you can put your product right in front of millions of viewers using YouTube.

Here are few of the strategies which a business should apply for reaching out to its intended audience:

Content Flow

Updated flow of consistent content in the video is extremely important. Video Content can be produced in many different ways such as webinars which impart crucial information to the people watching the video. Tutorials, how-to videos demonstrating knowledge and new information for the viewers are another great way to add content in a video.

The background or historical facts of a company at the time it was formed, milestones achieved by them or even company news related to employees, live presentations, customer testimonials, Interviews conducted with long-term clients all can be shown on the videos.

Creating Viral Videos

Creating viral videos is also an awesome way to generate buzz and drive traffic for your website. It is not very easy, though. In case you are planning to create one, you should be careful that the content of your video should be short, simple, not more than 1-2 minutes long, quite unique so that they are worth sharing, quickly shareable and relevant for the intended audience. If your video is not unique in its own way, it does not stand any chance of competing against umpteen videos being uploaded on YouTube.

Using Titles, Tags and Description

Using your relevant keywords within the Titles, Tags and Description will help increase the search engine ranking of your video and people will be able to find your video for related searches. As per Google guidelines, it is recommended to use keywords followed by the brand name in the title. The title preferably should not exceed 50 words otherwise it will get truncated and that will decrease the chances of getting viewed by users. Also, the title should reflect the type of content you have on the video. Boring, uninteresting and non-descriptive titles will not fetch any visitors.

The tags will be basically all your main keywords. It is advised that you should preferably use the prime keywords in the beginning followed by others. For the description, you should make sure that you have used call to actions within it. Major call-to-actions include clicking to the link to your website, sharing your content, contacting you for more info, leaving feedback etc. The description should be to-the-point, short and concise.

It is extremely important that you mention your website or blog url in the description and that too towards the beginning of the description so that the viewers do notice it and click through your site. Remember, the first few sentences are displayed in the search engine results, so these should describe the video and also contain your keywords or synonyms.

Leaving Comments

Leaving your thought, opinions and comments on other videos also can be quite valuable for driving traffic to your own website. Make sure that you don’t leave a comment simply without adding any value to the existing video. Leaving meaningful comments can drive people to click on your link especially if your website is related to your area of interest. Dropping a comment simply to get a link is totally inappropriate.

Closed Captions and Transcription

Including Closed Captioning to your videos is beneficial for not only the hearing-impaired viewers, but also as a good resource for adding more keywords. You can either enter the captions manually or upload a file with a closed caption file.

Having a Text based rendering of the video provides search engines more text to search and index. It also proves to be quite helpful for visitors and viewers who would want to have a quick look at the transcript to get a quick idea of the video they are going to watch. A transcription can be created by downloading/editing the automatically generated closed caption file or by manually typing your own transcription.

Start Customizing your Channel

Homepage for any account is known as a Channel on YouTube. It contains all the videos which have been uploaded, account type and any other important information related to the videos which has been entered by the business. This page should be customized with relevant images, information and links so that the viewers can associate the presentation on this page with your brand. Establishing a strong brand identity by using your logo, colours and so forth is advisable to enable viewers to your channel.

In addition, it is quite advantageous for your channel/brand that you will be notified as soon as someone subscribes to your channel and on the other hand, the subscribers get notified about any new uploaded video which ultimately helps in increasing the number of loyal visitors.

YouTube Paid Ads

YouTube is a website which has a great potential for running paid ad campaigns. Since it is such a hugely popular website, it is advisable to perform paid advertising too on it, besides the free options. You can have a number of options (Overlay Ads, Display Ads etc.) to choose from and the type of campaign you would like to run based on the number of days, cost and so forth as per your requirements. The content can be displayed based on the keywords, demographics and so forth.

Promoting your Videos

Unless you promote your videos on other social media marketing channels, your video marketing strategy stands incomplete. You need to spread the word around regarding your video. Take advantage of various social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and promote your videos on these platforms.

For this, you need to be quite active on all of these platforms and should have an active community of followers or fans for marketing your business. You can also embed videos and include them into your own website to reach out to the people who are regular visitors to your website, especially tutorials and videos depicting product demos