How to Successfully Use YouTube Marketing for Your Shopify Store
Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day and it’s the third most visited website in the world. It’s the perfect medium for building brand awareness and a loyal following for your Shopify store. YouTube is a great medium for ecommerce marketing but there are three key hurdles an ecommerce marketer has to overcome when using it, particularly if they are trying to leverage Youtube ads: 1. Many viewers use adblockers. In a 2017 survey from AdBlock Plus and Global Web Index, roughly 40 percent of all respondents said they had used an ad blocker in the past month. 2. Viewers have the option of skipping ads after 5 seconds and most take it. According to AdWeek about 94% of displayed ads are skipped immediately after the skip button is displayed. 3. Viewers are not in the mood for marketing when they come to YouTube. They do not want to be sold directly on your product, they either want to learn something or be entertained. Here are five key tips on how use YouTube marketing the right way for your Shopify store.
1. Make Sure You Have Brand Consistency Your channel should look and feel like an extension of your store and brand as a whole. Potential customers should immediately recognize your logo, color palette, and other basic branding elements. Once you have chosen a beautiful Shopify theme with a great layout for your ecommerce store (such as the Debutify theme), you should make sure to check out YouTube’s customization features.
2. Find Consistency in Your Content Posting
It’s extremely critical to be able to post new video content on your YouTube channel on a regular schedule. If you don’t post often enough, your audience will forget about you in the midst of the flood of other YouTube content. If you post too much at once, they will feel overwhelmed and unsubscribe.
3. Create Engaging Content to Build A Following
The ultimate goal of your YouTube marketing efforts is to drive traffic to your Shopify store and make sales but that’s impossible if you don’t have an audience in the first place. There are two basic steps to going about this. First, you need to identify your target audience to figure out how to speak to them. This entails creating personas of the audience you’re looking to reach by researching demographic and psychographic data such as location, age, gender, interests/hobbies, career, income level, and relationship status. How-to videos (aka explainer videos) and product FAQs are two of the most effective, engaging and easy-tomake types of videos you can use to leverage YouTube marketing for your Shopify store. Together, these how-to videos and FAQ videos are great for building the consistency in posting content that whose importance we explained in the previous point. Once you have made a bunch of them, you can a playlist on your YouTube channel so that you come across as a proper expert in your niche. Also remember to include subtitles in all your YouTube videos to make them more accessible to those who suffer from hearing impairment, as well as viewers who simply prefer to watch with the sound off.
4. Pay Attention to SEO
As the second largest search engine in the world, it’s absolutely critical to pay attention to SEO when using YouTube marketing for your Shopify store. A well-crafted YouTube video that ranks well in search is an invaluable asset for your marketing campaign that will bear plenty of fruit for a long time. Once you have identified your target audience personas, the next step is to create a keyword plan by testing the relevant words.
5. Leverage Product Reviews From Relevant YouTube Influencers Product reviews are still critical to brand credibility and today’s viewers trust product reviews from their favorite YouTube influencer as much as they trust a recommendation from a friend or family member. YouTube influencers these days have thousands, and sometimes millions of subscribers, ready to hear them review products.
Conclusion Once you have the above down pat, make sure your videos always have clear, specific and compelling calls-toaction (CTAs) to drive viewers to your Shopify store (be it in the beginning, middle, or end). Despite how saturated YouTube is with content creators, you can still get great ecommerce marketing results from it if you regularly make great content and consistently get it in front of the right audience.