Drive Leads to your E-comm Store with YouTube

If you’re an e-commerce business, chances are you’ve spent a lot of time, money, and energy on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because you know that showing up high in the rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can help drive leads (new customers) to your business. SEO is obviously important, but did you know that having a presence on YouTube is equally, and possibly, even more important?

Why is YouTube Important for Ecommerce Stores?

One of the main reasons ensuring your eCommerce store has a YouTube channel is so essential is because YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. A lot of people are shocked to learn that fact, but it’s true. Think about it in your own life. How many times have you been interested in a product or service and turned to YouTube to look up information about it? My recent search history on YouTube, for example, shows I’ve searched arabica coffee vs regular coffee, bikes for 8-year-old boys, and workout routines – all in the last day. If you were an eCommerce store that sold coffee beans, kids’ bikes, or health or workout-related gear or services, you can instantly see the value of having a presence on YouTube because I might have stumbled on your channel, and then from there, I might have ventured onto your website and become a customer.

Now you may be thinking: fair enough, I can see YouTube is important. But I have no idea what type of videos I’d make on YouTube for my ecommerce business. Plus, isn’t it good enough that my website has all the information new customers might need? My website has an up-to-date blog, high-quality photos of my products, and I even have customer testimonials. But let us make two points clear.

• First of all: congrats on your amazing website. 
• Second: see the point above that YouTube is a huge search engine, so your website can have all those fantastic attributes, but it still would never show up in a YouTube search!

Types of Videos You Should Create

Let’s address your other concern, though. What types of videos should you create? A good place to start is making videos about each of your main products or services. According to marketing guru Neil Patel, viewers are anywhere from 64-85% more likely to purchase products after watching product videos. These videos shouldn’t just be 360- degree shots of your product set to music. Instead, you want to tell a compelling story about your product or service. 

Stories have clear beginnings, middles, and ends – even 30 second commercials usually tell a complete story. Your video should, too. Additionally, your product video should try to answer questions like:

• Why do customers need this product? 
• What makes it a must-have?
• What problems is it solving? 

And just like all good stories have memorable characters, think about how you could weave humans into telling the story of your product or service. Humans tend to prefer watching other humans, especially if the human in the video is having some sort of emotional response or reaction to your product. With that in mind, is there any way to have a human demonstrating features of the product, or using the product and responding emotionally in some way? Videos with emotional reactions are usually more interesting to watch than plain beauty shots set to a cool song.

Branding On Your YouTube Video

Obviously, getting humans involved in your product videos means you might need to create some sort of script, and then you have to think about lighting and sound. But before you go down the rabbit hole of thinking you have to drop a cool million just to make a YouTube video, take a pause and think back to your brand. If you’re Nike, and you’re shooting low-quality, unscripted videos on an iPhone 3 and popping them on YouTube, that doesn’t match with your brand, does it? But if you’re a fitness coach in Vancouver, looking to make some product videos about your trademarked protein smoothie on YouTube, would your customers find it unseemly if you shot an off-the-cuff iPhone video that didn’t have professional-grade sound and audio? No, of course not. So think first of your eCommerce store brand. Ask yourself the following questions: 

• How big or small is your company?
• What does your budget allow? 
• Does your brand have a sense of humor? 
• Are you more serious in nature? 

Remember that the tone, quality, and aesthetics of your YouTube videos should match your brand and eCommerce store.

YouTube Video Length

Once you start crafting a script for your product video, most people begin worrying about length. How long should your video script be? One page? Five? A hundred? Well, the truth is: there is no right answer. Sorry to disappoint! However, keep in mind that on YouTube, longer is actually better! Yes, you heard that right: when it comes to YouTube, longer videos do better.

Videos that are under a minute perform well on social media. But for YouTube, videos can be much longer. That’s because the top metric that YouTube uses to determine where your eCommerce business shows up in their search page rankings is… (drumroll please)… minutes watched. It’s not for subscribers. It’s not the number of videos, or likes, or shares. Those metrics matter, but the top metric is how long viewers watch your videos, and further, how long they stay on the YouTube platform after finding your video. If you think about it, YouTube’s metric system makes sense. YouTube wants people to stay on the platform as long as possible because the longer viewers stay, the more ads they will see. The more ads they see, the more money YouTube makes. So go ahead and be long-winded with your product videos. “Minutes matter most” on YouTube. 

However, keep in mind that if your videos are boring, or people constantly click away from your videos, or people see your video and then instantly shut off the YouTube app – and that happens every time someone lands on your videos – you will find yourself falling in YouTube’s search rankings. So don’t make your videos obscenely long just to fill minutes. Make your video as long as you need it to be to tell a compelling story with a beginning, middle, and end. 

Hot tip: add internal links in your video to other videos! YouTube makes it extremely easy to put “suggested to watch” links within your videos so a viewer can easily click onto your other videos. Remember: the goal is to keep viewers watching your videos, clicking around on your channel, or staying on the YouTube platform in general. 

Types of Videos Formats 

Besides product videos, you could also make “How-To” videos, product comparison videos, or “Best” videos. 

Best Videos

You may not know what a “best” video is. The word “best” is often used when searching for a product or service. For example, people might search “5 best espresso machines of 2020” or “3 best bidets.” If you opt to do a “Best” video, you’d put the word “Best” in your video title, and then you’d do a little research on the top ten, top five, top two – you get the point – products in your industry. The only catch here is that you are potentially doing some inadvertent advertising for your competitors, so make sure to balance the airtime in your favor. It is your video after all! Then again, you might be in a situation where your eCommerce store sells all three of the “3 best bidets.” If that’s the case; lucky you! Make that “best” video and don’t worry about balancing airtime. 

Here’s an example of a “5 Best Bidet Toilets Seats of 2020” video.

Product Comparison Videos

Product comparison videos are usually interesting to viewers and they tend to be longer in length. When consumers start comparing similar products, they are deep in the purchasing funnel and very close to making a purchase. So if you can create some product comparison videos, that could also be a great way to make content for your channel. However, just like with the “Best” videos, you want to be careful about comparing your product to those of your competitors. You never want to lie about your product’s features, but you can choose to emphasize what your product has that others don’t have – as opposed to featuring what the other products have that yours do not. 

Here’s an example of a Comparison Video: “TOTO S550e Washlet vs BioBidet BB 2000 Bliss Bidet Comparison”

‘How-To’ Videos

Let’s back up and dive a little deeper into the How-To videos and product comparison videos mentioned in the last paragraph. Both How To’s and Comparison videos tend to be longer by nature – which we now know is a good thing when it comes to YouTube. If you can find an engaging, charismatic person to host some How-To videos related to your products or services, that would be a strong idea for your video content. Let’s say, for example, you sell bidets. You should start by showing how to use your bidets. Even if you already covered some of that in your product video, this How-To can be 100% devoted to how you actually use a bidet, how you turn it on, off, how you clean it, etc. Then, in subsequent videos, you could delve into related How-To topics, like: 

• How to clean your bidet
• How to install a bidet
• How to change water pressure on your bidet, 
• And so on. 

Think broadly. Videos can be tangentially related, as long as you can link them back to your product or service. 

Here’s an example of a “How-To” video.

YouTube Video Titles and Thumbnails

Once you’ve created a good-sized stockpile of product videos, How-To videos, “best” videos, and/or product comparison videos, you’re ready to launch your channel. Almost. After putting all this work into your videos, you want to make sure people can actually find them on YouTube. You can help your cause by spending a little time thinking about two factors: your video titles and your video thumbnails.

Video Titles

Your video title needs to summarize the content of your video, but the order of words in the title can raise or lower where your eCommerce store’s channel shows up in YouTube’s search results. The most important, searched-for keywords need to be first in your title. That is because YouTube puts more weight on terms that appear early in the title. 

For example, let’s say you made a product video about your product, the Lawny Brawny* Lawn Mower (*Clearly a fictional product!). You probably want to put Lawn Mower first in the title because that is likely what your customers will be searching for. Not your specific product. So instead of “Lawny Brawny Lawn Mower”, it would return better search rankings if you titled your video: “Lawn Mowers | All about the Lawny Brawny”.

Custom Thumbnails

A custom thumbnail can entice someone to click on your video over the competition’s. Good thumbnails use contrasting colors, have a consistent look, and clearly complement the content and title of the video. Other tips include:

• Featuring a human face that is making eye contact with the camera – as opposed to looking off to the side
• Including title text right there on the thumbnail in order to provide context for the video. 
• Double-check how your thumbnail looks on a phone since so much of the world watches YouTube on mobile devices. If your thumbnail looks cluttered and messy on a phone, then simplify it.

YouTube Video Frequency

Once you have great videos, search-engine-optimized titles, and catchy thumbnails, the last thing you need to think about is frequency – as in how often should your eCommerce store post videos? Again, there’s no perfect answer. Once a month is a good place to start. However, if you have a good-sized library of videos, you could consider a more frequent schedule: like twice per month, or even once per week. Some people actually post on the homepage of their channel how often viewers can expect to see new videos. For example: New How-To videos every Monday, or New How-To Videos on the first of the month! 

The long-term goal is to eventually upload a large quantity of videos, because once potential customers see one of your videos, you want them to be able to browse as much additional content as possible. Remember, the more videos on your channel, the higher YouTube ranks your channel in those precious search results. Plus, the more time customers spend watching your YouTube videos, the further you imprint in their brains.

YouTube Promotions and Giveaways

Another big part of YouTube success is to be able to drum up engagement. You don’t want users just watching your videos and never interacting. A great way to bridge this gap is to use promotions and giveaways in tandem with your YouTube videos. 

Some great occasions that you can do these include:

• Holiday specials
• New product launches
• Seasonal lines
• Clearance
• And really, whenever you feel like it

The difficulty for any blog, YouTube video and pretty much any web asset is to get your viewers to actually engage. With these types of promotions, you help encourage the user to cross over and start engaging. 

These don’t have to be overly complex either. A lot of marketing teams and businesses try to hit home runs with their giveaways. I like to think of these as simply as a business card raffle for a free sandwich. 

Some great giveaways that you can run: 

Best Comment Contest

If you have a product/service that is launching and you want to drum up some excitement, you can ask your viewers to give their best shot at a comment to try and win the prize. For example, if you are launching a winter series of products, you can ask your viewers to comment on the best winter drink and why. And the best 3 comments will be selected for the prize! Honestly, there is no one way to do this, the point is to just have fun, get users to comment and engage! 

If you want some inspiration, lots of newspapers and publications have run caption contests for their cartoon strips. These are always fun. Or you can also harken back to the days of school where students, and in this case, YouTube viewers can vote on their favorite name for a product or marketing asset. 

What you’ll find with these is you’ll get much higher rates of comments on these types of videos, and those who comment will be more inclined to comment in the future because they have done so before. 

The Traditional Subscribe & Comment 

A particularly common and traditional social media play is to ask viewers to subscribe and comment to be entered into a drawing. There isn’t much to explain here; we’ve all seen these kinds of plays. 

These are great for trying to grow the number of subscribers to your YouTube videos.

When creating contests like these, the temptation is to come up with a large prize that would be appealing to everyone. For example, Loop Giveaways are gaining in popularity on sites like Instagram and Tik Tok. 

A business or brand makes an irresistible offer, such as winning $100,000. To enter, people just need to follow the brand/business AND the other profiles it lists. 

These contests are great for blowing up your subscriber numbers, but be careful. We have all signed up for contests where we do not ever interact or want to interact with the brand again. 

What we often find better for these kinds of giveaways is to make the prizes more targeted to the target customer you want. For example, if you know your target customers like to read, give $1000 worth of books away instead of $1000 cash. 

Though this might make the reach smaller, the subscribers you’d get would be more relevant to the business. 

YouTube Live Promotions & Announcements

Another great form of engagement is taking advantage of YouTube Live. YouTube Live now gives you the ability to interact with your fans and subscribers in real-time. The interesting part of the YouTube Live experience is where viewers typically can watch your videos whenever convenient; YouTube Live’s real power is when your viewers come together at the same time to interact. 

These methods of YouTube videos are best to really engage your super fans. Those who are brand loyalists who regularly consume your content will go out of their way to participate in these. 

In these YouTube Live sessions is where you can unveil your newest product and give those who are on the YouTube Live a special discount. Unlike the traditional subscribe and comment play, these YouTube live sessions aren’t about scaling the growth of your subscribers, but rather deepening the engagement relationship with your pre-existing fans. 

Subscriber Submitted Videos

This style of giveaway and promotion is much more difficult, but can reap in lots of rewards. When you engage with users and ask them to submit a video to be looped into a contest, you help filter out all of those who are there just for the freebies. 

You really engage with those who are actual fans of your business.

Subscriber submitted videos and content can be used to help show that your business not only provides content to its fans, but also is looping its fans and subscribers into its content as well.

Contests like these tend to need a bigger prize and pot because the labor of getting a video filmed is much higher. However, the payoff for having all this user-generated content provides a wide variety of options for your business. 

Conclusion

It may seem overwhelming to create a YouTube channel, but if you take it one step at a time and eventually work your way up to creating a library of good-quality videos, you will likely see more and more leads being driven to your eCommerce store. And that’s definitely worth your while!

This post appeared first on myMarketingcafe.com.