YouTube for Small Businesses

The number one search engine in the world is Google, and funny enough, it acquired YouTube almost 20 years ago for a huge price tag. Small businesses often try to rank high on Google for their listings to get out in front of a demographic, but oftentimes they don’t go after the second largest search engine, YouTube. This insight will guide your small business to success in the video marketing world.

Video is king, there is no doubt about this. Video production can oftentimes be intimidating, but a good video campaign can bring in more business than you might imagine. Check out our other insight here for more information on utilizing your audience to create content for you. While there are many moving parts to running a small business we can’t stress the importance of video advertisements, they provide a much higher conversion rate for your business than text or graphics. Photos are close behind video, but creating a good video for your small business will be an evergreen piece of advertising on the internet forever.

The first consideration you will have is whether or not you want to start your YouTube channel as a business or as a personal brand account. Business accounts have a much stricter sign-up process with additional analytics and insights, but a personal brand channel is easier to set up and has less restrictions on where your channel will be shown.

Regardless of what type of channel you choose, you will need to brand your account. If you create a G-mail account, you will automatically have a YouTube account created for you. If you don’t have a logo or branding picked out yet you should consider having a graphic designer create some assets for your brand. You’ll want to start with a logo and hero image, these are the first things a perspective client will see on your page.

In this stage we are also going to add and connect all of your social media accounts, your website, and add a short “About Us” bio on your account. Feel free to rummage through all of the things your YouTube account will let you connect to, it can only help you in the long run to have everything set up immediately.

YouTube is well-known for being able to play and host almost any type of video you can imagine. Vertical, horizontal, 2:3, whatever dimensions and resolutions you can imagine YouTube can show it to you. The only hurdle we have found is when you want to upload videos that are over the 15-minute mark you need to verify your Google account and tie your phone number to it.

As a rule of thumb: videos should be 16:9 in aspect ratio, and usually 1920p x 1080p for high resolution. This is simply a recommendation, but almost every video you watch on YouTube will be in these parameters. We would also recommend using the Mp4 format for files, even though YouTube can retain and play videos of multiple formats, Mp4 is the most common. Video production is a very deep topic that we have covered in other insights, check them out here and here.

Once you have your video loading onto YouTube you will want to start filling out the metadata for the video. Take a pencil and paper and write down a couple titles, hashtags, and topics. Also, create a very detailed description of your video, your business, and maybe your brand to put in the description box below your video. Once you start adding tags and your title you will need to think about how these descriptive words can lead your audience to your video. Google will read every word on your video and direct search traffic to it.

Now you will need to create a thumbnail for your video, which many creators will say is the most important part of this whole process. You can easily make something in these free-to-use programs:

Canva

Adobe Express

These are the sections you will find as you explore your YouTube account in-depth. Once you click on your profile picture, you’ll see a menu drop down, click YouTube Studio. This is an entirely new world for most small businesses. This gives you analytics and insights into who is watching your video, where they are watching it from, and even down to the millisecond they clicked off your video.

Dashboard
When you first open up YouTube studio, in the drop-down menu on desktop or it’s own standalone app on your phone, You’ll be greeted with an overview of your channel and videos. This is where you will see how videos are performing, where they rank in relation to your other videos, and all activity on your channel. Think of this page as your home base. This is the first thing you check when you open your channel to look at the statistics.

The dashboard will let you look more closely at the demographics of people watching your videos and will also let you see the results of A/B testing different thumbnails. You will notice there are many tabs on the dashboard page, and we are going to go through them one by one.

Content Tab
This tab deals directly with your videos and posts. You’ll be able to do anything from changing the text on the metadata for each video, change the thumbnail, or even use a simple video editor to cut out mistakes or technical troubles.

Analytics Tab
Here you can see where your videos rank, who is watching them, and how long they are watching for. This is a great place to build up data about what types of videos are your best performing, and possibly cater your content towards a more niche-oriented audience.

Comments Tab
You can probably guess this is for all the comments on your content. This tab is designed for you to view all interactions in one localized place rather than jumping from video to video to comment or like the activity on your videos.

Monetization Tab
A small business probably has no interest in monetizing their channel as it takes a lot of work and upkeep to start earning money from your videos. You must have at least 500 followers and over a thousand hours of watch time to unlock the first level of monetization.

Customization Tab
This tab will focus on changing the aesthetic of your channel. This is where you fill out your About Me section, change your profile picture, or change your hero image displayed at the top of your channel’s home page.

Audio Library Tab
This will be your best friend down the road. YouTube does not want you using copyrighted music, so the alternative Google came up with was to commission artists to write music and create sound effects that are effectively royalty and copyright free. Familiarize yourself with this library because it is the best resource on the internet for available music.

What is a community post? Recently YouTube added a section where a channel can upload still images or carousels of images along with text and tags. These posts show up intermittently on peoples’ feeds and are an easy way for a creator to advertise their newest video, or for a small business to advertise a sale or special hours for a holiday.

These will also allow you to create engaging items like polls, which sound blaze but can be a powerful way to get people riled up. A quick example would be a sports equipment store creating a post about who will win the next Super Bowl, taking pictures of a couple of teams, and clearly creating names for each poll selection that favor one team and disparage the others. People love friendly teasing, and they will be far more inclined to interact with a post if there is a little bit of humor or information involved.

Check out our other insight that goes through all the platforms and best practices for each streaming service for a small business, here.

Livestreaming has exploded in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. This presents a rare opportunity for stores to interact directly with their audience or customers. It’s as easy as hitting the “Go Live!” button in the top-right hand corner of YouTube. Small businesses can utilize these to test out new products in front of their customers. Since livestreaming has a live chat, your customers can interact and directly ask you questions as you unveil something new, it’s a very cool system.

Product demos, new item reveals, webinars, everything is available to you with livestreaming on YouTube. There are many things that livestreaming has to offer, and exploring those options can be very beneficial for any business of any size.

Make sure when you livestream that you attempt to have a good internet signal, camera quality, and microphone quality. Check out our insight on making your video calls look more professional, here.

Short-form content has taken the internet by storm, and it’s not going away any time soon. Short-form vertical content is a titan in the content creation world. Many social media experts have called it the “Tiktokification” of media. YouTube alone hosts billions of views for their “Shorts” every single day.

A YouTube Short must be under one minute long and is in the vertical format. It’s meant to create rapid-fire content that is not necessarily an evergreen video. Shorts are also a good place to start creating short-form vertical content that can be used on other platforms like Facebook and Instagram Reels or TikTok.

If your video is vertical and under 60 seconds long YouTube will automatically create it as a short, there isn’t much more to it than that. You still need to fill out the metadata, title, tags, and everything else. Common short-form trends include:

– Dancing to music

– Lip-syncing to a famous movie quote

– “Get Ready With Me” (GRWM) content where you invite people to see your routines

– Smaller sections of longer form content zoomed in

Starting a YouTube channel can be a great asset to your brand or business, and we should all consider creating more content for our businesses. Having videos to advertise your brand will stay as evergreen content on the internet forever with very little upkeep if you learn how to upload the video with the proper metadata.

“You just gotta press record.”

Sean Cannel

It sounds simple, but this is the whole journey boiled down:

• Create a Google account
• Create a video
• Upload that video
• Add all the metadata
• Check the results

If you ever have any questions on video production, SEO, or YouTube in general you can always reach out to us here at Acclaim.