Will Eagle

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-13-2022

YouTube has a lot of options to offer a marketer — so much so, it can feel overwhelming, making it hard to know where to start. The top questions from marketers at companies big and small come up time and again. This cheat sheet aims to answer some of your common queries about YouTube marketing and give you a few easy jumping off points to reach your target audience.

Article / Updated 12-19-2018

You have a lot of choices with YouTube, and to use the channel effectively as a marketing tool, you do not need to do everything. All you need to do is make a choice about how you want to use YouTube. If anyone else in any other department asks you why you aren’t doing something else on YouTube, you can explain the rationale behind your choice. After all, only so many hours, so much budget, and so many resources are available. The goal is never simply to have a YouTube strategy or even a video strategy; the goal is to determine whether YouTube videos are efficient options to help you deliver to your business goals. With that in mind, understanding how to use YouTube as a marketing channel boils down into four streams. Just run some ads You don’t need a full content strategy where you upload videos every week to your YouTube channel if you don’t think that will help deliver your business goals or if you don’t have the resources. Instead, you can create simple video ads and use the Google Ads tool to run them on YouTube. You have lots of great options when you set up your campaign to make sure that it’s efficient, and you’ll get tons of great insights from looking at your results. It’s as simple as that. Just run some ads on YouTube. Don’t worry about the rest if you don’t have to. Benefit from association There are two ideas as to how you can benefit from association. The first is if you like to control where your ads run because context is important to you, you can run your video ads on YouTube with a detailed level of sophistication to control your placement. You can get specific with the context of where and when your ads will run. The second is that if you’re the kind of marketer who cares about sponsorships, affiliations with celebrities, or other brands because you want to benefit from the association, you can work with YouTubers and channels with established audiences. In both of these cases, YouTube offers you more control and opportunities than just running ads, so if you’re a more advanced marketer, use YouTube as a channel where you maximize the benefits of association. Become your own content creator If you have the budget and resources available, and if you are confident that creating content can help drive your marketing and business goals, then you can start to create your own content. Most businesses should start by making help videos, those how-to videos that people will find when they search YouTube. If you need to provide customer service, video is a great tool to use because it answers the same question many times without requiring more effort from your customer service team. If you are an authority on something with a credible brand, you have every right to make content on the topic at hand. If you’re doing something special, if you have a unique story to tell, if you want to be a cultural contributor, or any other motivation of creating content, you can use YouTube as a content marketing channel, so become your own content creator. Go all out and make it your focus YouTube can be a business opportunity in itself. You can create content, grow your audience of fans and subscribers, and start to make money from sharing in the ads YouTube runs against your channel. YouTubers have made millions each year from this model, and there is no real barrier to entry. All you need to do is start creating content, so, go all out and make creating videos and YouTube your focus.