Looking forward to Digital Marketing in 2018, it pretty much goes without saying that video is going to become increasingly important for businesses. And its not hard to see why.
According to the latest stats from HubSpot, 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers. And 51.9% of marketing professionals say video is the content with the best ROI.
If you needed more of a reason to create videos for your business, then that’s it right there. But if you’re new to the game, YouTube can be a confusing place to jump into.
Do you create branded videos to increase awareness? Entertaining videos to up your share count? Just what kind of content should you create?
Thankfully, the answers are in.
Why Users Use Youtube
Think With Google, a branch of the search giant specialising in data analysis and insights, has found that most users don’t want to just be entertained, they want to learn how to do things.
The key takeaways:
- 65% of Youtube users want help to fix something
- 57% want to be entertained
- 56% want to learn something new
- 54% want to satisfy their curiosity
- 50% want to see something unique
- 38% want motivation
- 37% want to improve their skills
Problem Solving
We’ve all been there. Needing to do something but having no idea where to begin. Whilst there are a wealth of written guides around the internet, seeing someone do what we need to do via how-to videos can offer the reassurance we need.
eLearning
Though it’s not just perfecting their current skills that YouTube users want to improve. A huge amount of viewers are watching videos in order to learn something completely new.
What does this mean for your business?
Fairly simply, creating educational and how-to video content for your niche could prove extremely fruitful for your marketing strategy in 2018. But how do you do that?
Where how-to videos are going to be most relevant is if your products require some specialist knowledge to use.
To tap into this market, first of all you need to discover the sorts of searches that your consumers are making. If you’re a specialist cleaning product company for instance, are your users searching for how to clean certain surfaces, or certain parts of a vehicle? As a make-up brand, are users searching for tutorials on how to get the most of your products for certain skin tones?
If this applies to you, you will need to find the specific search terms that your users are using.
In order to find keywords for YouTube videos, you can use the following tools:
- Specialist tools like VidIQ or TubeBuddy
- Free tools like KeywordTool.io
- Larger search data will appear in Google Trends
- Google’s Keyword Planner
- SEO tools like SEMRush, Moz and Ahrefs
- YouTube’s search autocomplete
- Competitor analysis
If you don’t have the bandwidth or budget for these tools, a digital marketing agency will be able to help.
Making a How-To Video for Business
Ok, so you have your how-to video topic, but now you need to actually make the video. The following stats should help you here:
Business Video Marketing Stats
- 86% of business related video views take place on desktop
- Businesses publish on average 18 videos per month
- 85% of businesses now have in-house video staff
- 56% of videos published online are under 2 minutes long
- Videos under 90 seconds have a retention rate of 53%
The main takeaway here is that your guide should be succinct and to-the-point. Ideally under 2 minutes in length. However, you don’t want to skip over valuable information just to keep the length short. This can be tricky, and a corporate scriptwriter will be able to help here.
How-To Video Marketing on YouTube
Creating how-to videos isn’t just limited to organic search. By creating brief snippet guides, you can also create how-to advertising campaigns to improve brand awareness and improve social awareness. The brand Make Up For Ever have done this very effectively by creating guide adverts which were served before relevant how-to makeup tutorials.
Since running this campaign the brand saw a lift in brand recall of 44%, and an increase in their subscriber count by 11% in a single month. More importantly this campaign also produced an 18% increase in organic product-related searches.
Looking to create How-To Videos? We’re here to help…
YouTube Viewer Stats
Still unsure what sort of how-to videos you should be creating? Perhaps the following stats can help you better understand who uses YouTube and how you can plug in to their search mentality.
Parental Marketing
Traditionally marketers will focus on marketing towards mothers, who were seen to be easier to target. That’s not the case with how-to videos, with millennial dads searching YouTube for advice on parenting…
Speaking of parents, how-to videos and tutorials aren’t just an exercise in brand expansion. These videos can lead directly to sales…
And if it’s the back-to-school market that you’re after, viewership of this sort of content has rocketed in the last few years.
Millennial Researchers
If your brand’s target market is mostly made up of millennials, then you’re in luck. Describing those born between the early 80’s and late 90’s, the millennial generation is using YouTube to learn skills in impressive numbers.
Whether it’s putting up shelves, or learning how to create the perfect cup of coffee, tapping into this generation’s need to learn, and reliance upon video tutorials can present a golden opportunity for your business.
But once more it’s not just guides that millennials want. They want to buy too.
Create strong brand content and link directly to your eCommerce product page to make those all-important sales. In addition, consumers aren’t just watching how-to videos, they’re looking for reviews too.
Creating reviews of your own products is pretty disingenuous, but this is where influencer marketing can come into play. Reaching out to YouTubers in your niche and getting them to review your products, ensuring they put a product link in the description, or overlayed on the video is a sure-fire way to get millennials excited.
