2 Billion active monthly users across 100 countries around the world. What’s everyone watching?

This year, a record-breaking 6 Million US residents decided to kill their cable subscriptions. There are now 31.2 Million consumers out there without access to traditional cable services and this growing group of cord cutters is expected to expand to 55 Million by 2022.

Where are people shifting their screen time? The answer may lie in the 2 Billion active monthly users currently on YouTube.

A video platform powerhouse, YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world, second only to its parent company Google. In 2019, more than 500 hours of video content was uploaded every 60 seconds to the YouTube servers and the streaming platform now reaches more adults than traditional cable networks in the United States.

YouTube can be an excellent way for businesses to share visual stories, stream demonstrations of new products, introduce new services or build a community of engaged customers.

YouTube by the Numbers

Live Chat allows customers to communicate with a company or brand in real-time. Instead of speaking with a rep via the phone or by email, customers can visit a website and initiate a conversation directly within the browser from their desktop or mobile phone. This channel of communication has a number of benefits.

• YouTube accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s mobile traffic
• It has more than 2 Billion users, which makes up almost one-third of the entire worldwide web
• The platform has a presence in more than 100 countries around the world in approximately 80 different languages
• Users watch approximatively 1 Billion hours of content every day
• According to Google Ads, 70% of users have purchased from a brand after watching their content on YouTube

Why Your Business Should Consider YouTube

Using YouTube is a great way to grow a business’ audience. When used consistently as part of your overall marketing mix, YouTube can be a great, cost-effective way to increase your social audience.

There are several great benefits to marketing on YouTube. The first is that video continues to outperform other forms of content. According to HubSpot, 54% of consumers have indicated that they want to see more video content from the brands or businesses they love.

If you’re a business looking to get started on YouTube channel, here’s a brief overview of the steps you can take to get things started.

1. Define Your Goals
Before getting started, it’s important to understand exactly what your business is looking to achieve. Are you looking to build awareness? Influence consideration? Drive online of offline sales? Build loyalty through brand advocates?

Setting up goals helps ensure that your business creates the right type of content and defines the right audience to achieve those goals.

2. Know Your Audience
Your business likely has a defined audience, but it’s important to understand how that same audience behaves on social media, and more specifically, on YouTube.

Developing audience personas specifically for social media forces a business to dive deeper into how their customer behaves online. Doing this leg work allows you to produce a more meaningful strategy that will resonate with your audience.

The global YouTube audience is growing every day. In Q3 2020, 77% of 15-to-25-year-olds and 70% of 45-to-64-year-olds in the U.S. used YouTube. (Source: Statista) Outside of China, 77% of Gen Z, 75% of Millennials, 61% of Gen X, and 44% of Baby Boomers visit YouTube daily. (Source: GlobalWebIndex)

3. Develop a Content Plan
Creating the channel is the easy part. Figuring out what content should go up and when takes a bit more finesse.

Start by revising your social media content strategy to include YouTube. From there, you can build a content calendar that integrates YouTube within your existing social channels.

Building one integrated plan helps ensure that you are looking at things holistically and the stories you create are meeting objectives and flow from one social channel to the other.

Some of the top YouTube content formats to consider for 2021:

• Product Announcements
• Event Announcements
• Tutorials
• Live Streams
• AMA’s (Ask Me Anything)
• Interviews
• Testimonials

A content plan also makes the execution and dissemination easier; it will act as a hub and ensure that everyone who manages social can access the same content at any given time.

4. Promote Your Channel
YouTube is a great source for organic search traffic, but there are also plenty of things that you can do to help amplify this.

Each new piece of content posted is a new opportunity to gain new viewers or subscribers. It’s important to ensure that each video is programmed for SEO including relevant keywords and phrases in the title and description.

Businesses can also pay to promote content with ad campaigns via Google Ads. YouTube offers a number of advertising formats that include:

Skippable Video Ads – Skippable video ads allow viewers to skip ads after 5 seconds.

Non-Skippable Video Ads – Non-skippable video ads must be watched before a video can be viewed.

Bumper Ads – Short, non-skippable video ads of up to 6 seconds that must be watched before a video can be viewed. Bumper ads are turned on when skippable or non-skippable ads are turned on.

Overlay Ads – Overlay image or text ads that can appear on the lower 20% portion of a video. (Source: YouTube)

YouTube is a great option for creating cost-effective advertising (Source: BigCommerce)

• Average Cost Per View (CPV): $0.026 US
• Average View Rate: 31.9%
• Average View Click Through Rate (CTR): 0.514%

5. Analyze Your Data
Once you start developing the content for YouTube it’s important to track how your content is performing. Ensure that you have clear KPI’s for measuring success. A few metrics to keep your eye on along the way:

Watch Time – the total amount of time that viewers spend watching any given video.

Average Percentage Viewed – the percentage of each video that viewers have watched.

Subscriber Growth – percentage of people that have subscribed to your channel over time.

Engagement Rates – the number of comments, shares, likes and dislikes for each video.

Unique Viewers – the estimated number of individuals who watch your videos over a certain period of time.

Keyword Performance – most popular queries guiding viewers to your videos

Tracking performance against these metrics can help inform future decisions on creating, sharing, and promoting your videos on YouTube.

6. Manage Your Community
YouTube has created a tight community of YouTubers who will subscribe and exchange with your business’ channel because they are looking for more. The worst thing you can do is upload a video and then not monitor and engage with the comments. Use the opportunity to gather feedback, gain insight and interact with some of your most loyal customers.

Interested in learning more about how YouTube can help enhance your content and media strategies?