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How to be successful on YouTube?

YouTube offers marketers the opportunity to reach over a billion users. At the same time, however, since it is a 3rd party platform, it can be a challenge to know if your efforts are successful.

YouTube, since it reaches such a broad audience, typically is used for boosting brand engagement and awareness. Understanding how to monitor these factors will allow you to see how worthwhile your YouTube efforts have been and how you can produce better results in the future by using your data to streamline your efforts.

What does YouTube success look like?

Branded Traffic and Your Share of Voice

YouTube is a valuable tool for increasing your brand awareness. As you create engaging videos that help people better understand or learn about topics of interest, you expose them to your brand and what you have to offer. Monitoring your Share of Voice and Branded Traffic can be a good way to know if you succeed in this endeavor. The BrightEdge Share of Voice tool can be valuable to help you accomplish this goal.

Referral Traffic from YouTube

Make it easy for people to click through from YouTube to your brand website by including a link to your page in the description of the video and on your brand’s YouTube page. It is important to note that YouTube is not known for large amounts of referral traffic, so just because this number is low does not mean your videos are failing. Rather than looking at the number, you want to look at the pattern-- if the number increases, then you know your videos are having a positive impact.

YouTube analytics

YouTube also offers you a few different options for monitoring your video success right on the platform. You can measure engagement by tracking watch time insights. You can also monitor factors such as Likes and Dislikes, Audience Retention and Sharing, which all add valuable insights into what people think of your videos. Here is a complete list of the currently available analytics.

YouTube is a valuable resource for your organization to increase brand awareness and improve your reputation, but it can be a challenge to measure your success. Using these three main categories of metrics, however, will help you gain the insights you need to improve your YouTube strategy and integrate it into the rest of your campaign.

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What is the role of blogs and articles in the sales funnel?

An estimated 94 percent of B2B buyers and 81 percent of consumers search online before making a decision about what to purchase. Other studies have indicated that as much as 67 percent of the buyer’s journey takes place online. In other words, your customers are using the Internet to learn about their options—independently and without direct guidance. Since the Internet has become a primary source of information for customers, failing to have a strong online presence can be devastating to a business.

Your blog articles and other website content should be designed to guide potential customers from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next. Your content should nurture your relationships with customers and encourage them to respond to links and calls to action that provide them with content further down the sales funnel. The content you create should be carefully aligned with your ideal customers and should demonstrate that you are able to meet the needs of your readers and effectively build a relationship with them.

How can keyword and topic research improve content production?

Keyword and topic research should drive effective topic development for your website. Once you have outlined your buyer’s journey and customer personas, you should align customer pain points with the content they want to see at each at each stage of the journey towards a solution. Keyword research, such as through the BrightEdge Data Cube, allows you to see keywords that are related to various topics impacting your buyers. You can then select keywords that have high traffic rates, indicating that they are popular topics and have the best chances of helping you draw new prospects into your sales funnel.

How do I develop strong topic ideas?

If you are having trouble thinking of topics for your keyword research, consider these tips:

• Look at your past content and see which topics have generated the most interest and engagement
• Consider the topics that your customers are most likely to ask you about when they reach out to a sales person
• Establish thought leadership by writing about news and the latest developments in your industry

You want to focus on generating topic ideas and content that provide value to your audience by helping to address their needs and concerns.

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