YouTube marketing is one of the most effective ways for businesses to grow their brand and engage with a wide and diverse audience. Done right, YouTube marketing can open up the path for better engagement, boost your sales and help you to grow your brand. However, there are several common mistakes that marketers make when trying to cash in on the YouTube market. Take a look at the 5 most common errors made and how you can avoid them:
1. Targeting the wrong viewers
One of the most common mistakes made in YouTube marketing is targeting the wrong audience. Many marketers are under the impression that their videos will appeal to a wide range of audiences, and as a result, they can often choose the wrong audience, which leads to a loss of visitors no matter the quality of the content.
To ensure that you don’t make this mistake, you should take the time to understand your customer demographics. Work out who your target customers are through defining categories such as age, gender, relationship status, background, occupation, education level, income, and location. You should also work out what the main interests, values and attitudes of your audience are, which can help you better understand trends and purchase intent.
Make use of analytics tools, affiliate partners and customer service teams to better understand the interests, likes, dislikes and any critical keywords or search terms that can be used to better target your audience.
2. Not defining your goals
An essential part of any marketing campaign is a clear objective. Your objective can be anything from increasing brand awareness, growing sales and leads, improving conversion rates or anything else. The objective of your YouTube marketing campaign as well as the interests of your target audience will influence the kind of content you will make. This could be anything from an educational how-to video, a behind-the-scenes look at your business, a Q&A session, an interview or coverage of an event.
Work out what you most want to get out of each piece of content you are creating. Are you trying to inspire your audience or get them hyped up for an upcoming release or event? Make an effort to stick to positive emotions wherever possible, as encouraging your audience to associate your brand with negative emotions can lose you opportunities and sales.
3. Creating poor-quality content
With the growing popularity of video content on the internet, consumers are now expecting all of their video content to be of good quality. A big mistake that is often made by brands is producing lower-quality video content in an attempt to reduce costs. A good quality video is essential to ensure that your brand looks professional. In particular, you should pay attention to the audio quality of your YouTube content, as the majority of viewers are likely to leave your video if the audio quality is not good enough, leaving your entire content strategy useless as viewers are missing the message.
Ideally, any YouTube marketing content you release should engage your audience and inform them while also staying light and entertaining, Make sure your topics are relevant to your brand and interesting for your viewers. You should be presenting any information in an easy-to-understand and accessible way, ideally solving a specific problem your audience may be experiencing.
4. Not tracking the right metrics
YouTube marketing campaigns often fall short when it comes to setting the correct metrics for their content. Although the shares and comments your video receives can be extremely valuable metrics, it is just as worthwhile to track other features such as the average view duration, conversion rates, your view-to-subscribers ratio and your traffic sources. These will give you a better insight as to where your audiences are coming from, what they are interested in and what parts of your marketing campaign are working and which are falling short. This will in turn help you to direct future financing to the best places for your business.
5. Not moderating content
Any audience member who is visiting your YouTube channel is not just taking in the tailored content you’re putting out there for them, but also everything else that is on screen, such as your comments section. For this reason, moderation of your comments is very important to get rid of any spam or harmful comments that may have appeared in your comments section. You could either do this yourself, hire an external moderator or use YouTube’s moderation and community management features to identify and flag up any comments containing particular words and approve and post comments which are appropriate for your channel.
Although YouTube marketing can be an incredibly lucrative method of brand building, a few mistakes can bring a whole marketing campaign crashing down. If you want to be able to connect with a wider, more diverse audience and boost your brand awareness and sales, make sure to keep these common mistakes in mind so that your YouTube marketing campaign can be as successful as possible.
