YouTube is a franchise marketing channel that you can't afford to ignore. But are you using it right?
Build these YouTube marketing tips for franchise companies into your social media strategy.
And start benefiting from more exposure through the second largest search engine in the world - a channel that streams 3 billion hours of video every day...
1. Create more videos - tell a story
With YouTube, quality isn't always everything - but quantity is certainly important. Just look at the statistics:
- Leading brands post 70-80 videos per month
- Top media outlets post 400-500 videos per month
Which just goes to show you the importance of creating more videos. On average, better-performing brands have 50% more videos than less successful ones. But how are you going to create a subject for all of these hundreds of videos? The answer?
Tell a story. Most of the best YouTube channel marketing strategies involve a wide range of content, but every single video will tell its own story. You need to decide what this is before you even start filming:
Who is your audience? What point of view will they see your story from? When does your story happen? Where is your story set? Why should your audience care about this story?
It doesn't need to be a Hollywood blockbuster, but even instructional videos should have a clearly thought-out structure. Recurring characters or presenters can also be helpful, as your audience will become used to their presence and look forward to forthcoming content featuring them.
2. Optimise your videos with keywords
Only topped by Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine currently in use. It gets over one billion daily views from mobile devices alone - which is a gigantic audience you could potentially be reaching. There's a downside to this huge amount of content, though:
How will your audience see your little bit of the wood for all of these trees?
That's where optimising your videos with keywords comes in.
But when you need to promote your video on YouTube, don't just treat it like it's your website homepage. YouTube follows different rules than you might be used to, even if you're an SEO expert. Learn them.
The results speak for themselves - the brands that perform the best on YouTube use on average about twice as many playlists and video tags as the ones closer to the bottom.
One of the most important things to consider is that users looking at your videos on YouTube will usually be after information - not a hard and fast sales call. This means you need to prioritise keywords which are relevant to this.
One added bonus of your YouTube franchise advertising:
You can embed your YouTube videos into your web pages and get much more interest from Google!
3. Create a broad range of content
Because you'll be needing to create a lot of content, simply churning out a stream of identical videos will start lessening your audience engagement. Viewers will quickly become bored with what your channel has to offer.
The key is not more channels! More content on fewer channels has proven time and again to be the best way to use YouTube to market franchises. The larger your archive of videos, the better.
The answer is more variety in the content you produce. Most successful YouTube marketing campaigns include a certain diversity in the type of content they produce. Don't get caught up on high production values - sometimes lower "quality" content can be powerful too.
4. Stream live on YouTube
Streaming live on YouTube has several advantages:
- You can reach every screen on the planet that can display live video feeds
- YouTube automatically encodes your broadcast so it can be saved on your channel (you can then optimise it for search)
Make sure you've planned your live-streaming strategy properly, though. It needs to fit in with the market niche you've chosen for yourself, and your brand's positioning.
As well as the vlog-style camera-to-face option, you can also talk over infographics, images, presentations, or share your desktop view for instructional videos. But if you're not telling a story with your video (see Tip #1), then you'd better be sharing some incredibly vital tips that your audience can't find elsewhere.
5. Engage, educate - but leave them wanting more...
Engagement and education are the two goals you should be aiming for with your YouTube content. The time of the purchase cycle that your audience will likely be in - discovery - means that any immediate calls to action may, in fact, stop them from proceeding down your marketing funnel.
Whereas:
- An engaged audience - will watch your videos and be compelled to comment and otherwise interact with your content.
- Your YouTube audience often wants to be educated - which is why how-to and other instructional video formats are so popular. YouTube is often where people look for this sort of content.
That said, you don't want to give your audience all of the answers... otherwise why would they come back and watch another video?
6. Boost your influence with star brand placement
Like most social media platforms, YouTube has its own brand of celebrities - people who really understand the channel and have risen to prominence because of it.
One of the best YouTube marketing tips for franchise companies - especially those who want to see fast rewards for their efforts, or in fact the lack thereof in this case - is to get brand placement with these YouTube personalities.
Select influencers who are popular in your market niche, or who share your values or brand positioning. You'll then immediately have access to a much wider audience of potential clients, and get most of the hard work of content creation taken care of for you.
7. Make something worth marketing
Even the best designers of YouTube strategy for franchises are wasting their time without something worth marketing. Likewise, the smartest and best optimised distribution tactics are pointless if the content they're promoting isn't going to be watched.
You need to make something noteworthy:
- Shock your audience
- Scare your viewers
- Inform your watchers
- Be unique to hold users' interest
- Be timely so that your video is relevant
Because if your video is boring, why would anyone watch it?
Videos that exist purely to promote a single product and drily focus on the product's benefits in order to do so will rarely succeed. Go back to Tip #1 again and think about the story you're telling.
Feel free to try to conjure up feelings about your product in your potential clients. But be wary of becoming one of those adverts where it's impossible to tell what the company actually sells until the very end. There needs to be some sort of logical link between your franchise and the content of your advert:
If you're a paper manufacturer, for example, few people might get genuinely excited about the actual products you sell. But think of all the artwork that your paper could be used to create - that's a story that's waiting to be told...
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