YouTube Marketing for Brands and Retailers

YouTube is one of the top marketing mediums online. In order to successfully use YouTube as a marketing tool, brands and retailers need to ensure that their content is engaging community members through channel participation. At the same time, brands and retailers also need to use Youtube to drive online traffic to select destinations and enhance website search engine optimization strategies.Creating Participation & Community EngagementSince YouTube is a platform built entirely around the concept of engagement, it is essential to participate in the YouTube community and interact with audiences. As YouTube community members are very vocal about content they do and don't like, you should expect that they will voice their opinions via comments, likes, shares, or even direct video replies to your posted videos. Make sure, then, that you refrain from silencing consumers in the name of "brand control." Deleting profane or vulgar comments is okay, but make sure you moderate comments democratically. Your customers have opinions, and these opinions serve as valuable market research.Brands and retailers should also make their content accessible and actively participate in the YouTube community to get the best RETAIL ROI (sales, new customers and traffic). This means that they should not disable video sharing capabilities and should let community members to spread content. Brands and retailers need to also join discussions around community members’ content that’s relevant to their brand, as this will increase positive votes of the brand’s main content and will boost visibility.What’s Search Got To Do With It?Another important thing to keep in mind is that YouTube videos, as well as YouTube channels, aren’t properly optimized for higher ranking on search engines. This presents an amazing opportunity for smaller retailers to gain online market share and traffic by outranking larger retailers. According to comScore, YouTube ranks #2 in terms of search engines; it’s second only to Google (which now owns YouTube) and outranks Bing, Yahoo and any other search service. If a brand or retailer using YouTube as a marketing outlet isn’t optimizing their content, they’re not maximizing the money spent on video marketing. In fact, they’re losing online traffic that could be converted to sales.To optimize YouTube content, a brand simply follows the rules of any other SEO project. When a brand uploads a video, it is essentially creating a “page” with that video. That page can be optimized the same way as any other page on the web, and YouTube automatically generates meta data for each video page that’s created.Creating Cohesive Marketing StrategiesSound a little overwhelming? Well, don’t worry – it’s not that complicated. It just takes a bit of coordination and effort. The pay off is more streamlined, cost-effective social marketing campaigns with better results.To read the full article on how fashion brands can use YouTube for marketing: FashionablyMarketing.Me