You may be surprised to learn that video advertising is rarely a part of the online marketing strategy for small businesses, even in 2021. Only about nine percent of small businesses even report being active on YouTube, and there’s no reason to believe that all of them have actually integrated video advertising into their web content and social media.
It’s even less likely that these small businesses have optimized their content for video search. The failure to do so is a tremendous missed opportunity because that sort of SEO is every bit as important as ordinary search optimization, while also offering a wealth of data that companies can apply to other aspects of their online marketing strategy.
Video advertising is still not exclusive to YouTube, but of course that is what most people automatically think of when they think of online video. The popularity of that platform cannot be overstated. More than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to it every single minute. Although there’s probably just a tiny fraction of that that can be categorized as video advertising, the numbers still make it perfectly obvious that in order to capture the right attention your YouTube videos will have to overcome a heck of a lot of competition.
If it seems like this contradicts what we said about less than nine percent of small businesses being active on YouTube, bear in mind that the source of competition on the platform isn’t just other businesses like yours; it’s any source of information on the topics that are most associated with your business.
Even if you’re not directly competing with large corporations or non-profits, your video advertising might have to do so if people are finding their content by searching for topics that are relevant to your operations. The same is true of individual hobbyists and professional YouTubers, some of which are creating top-notch content and attracting a loyal following among people who might otherwise be interested in watching videos from professionals in a certain industry.
It may be seem daunting when you think about having to compete against a whole new group of people and firms when you roll out your video advertising. But there’s good news in this, and that is that any and all relevant, existing content is a potential source of data that you or your local SEO company could apply to making sure your own video content is search engine optimized.
As more and more small businesses get into video advertising, you will have more and more data to draw upon, but you’ll also have to compete against a growing number of other video-producers, not just for views but also for sales. If the current situation allows you to get started in video advertising while letting other aspects of your marketing strategy do the real work of elevating your company over others’, you should take advantage of it while you still can.
With a bit of luck and a bit of help from a marketing agency with video advertising experience, you can make your YouTube page the top result among professional accounts when it comes to people searching for industry-related information.
If you’re new to making video content, that’s all the more reason for you to try to integrate video advertising into your overall strategy before YouTube and other video hosting platforms are flooded with small businesses trying to exploit the exponential growth in popularity for video content. Right now, with so few of those businesses making their presence known, there are low expectations and ample opportunities for you to overcome the learning curve. This may not be the case for long into the future, and you may not have as much access to professional video production teams as you have today.
If there’s a chance video advertising could have a role to play in your future marketing strategy, now is the time to determine whether your digital marketing team or third-party contractors have the know-how to help you corner the market in video advertising where your industry and consumer market are concerned.
Ideally, the team you employ should be able to shoot and upload content for your YouTube page and then also handle most aspects of promotion, management, and engagement with other YouTube accounts. Furthermore, your digital marketing team should be able to analyze the performance of existing videos – not just your own but also any videos that reflect relevant search terms – and help you develop a strategy for how best to attract new viewers and maximize return visits to your video uploads page by those who have already watched one or more.
This is where the “wealth of data” that we referred to earlier comes into play. YouTube is arguably one of the best platforms for practicing SEO skills, because it provides various opportunities for adjusting content based on the most recent analytics. If you feel like personally cutting your teeth on video search optimization, all you have to do is click into the analytics section of your own account. And if you want to go beyond what it tells you about traffic sources and destinations, repeat views, types of engagement, and so on, there are numerous third-party tools you can utilize, as well.
These tools are useful from the get-go, but become far more so after you have developed a following and learned to manage your account – or have your digital marketing company do it for your – in a way that maintains substantial interactions with your audience.
In order to get you to that point, a professional marketing firm can start by running competitive analysis based on the sorts of video content you’ll initially be competing with. The data this yields can then be put in context with data about the types of non-video content that has already secured meaningful engagement on your website, social media accounts, and elsewhere. From there, you and your marketing team becomes can proceed to tackling the shared challenge of making video content that capitalizes upon established viewing patterns while also setting itself apart in a way that will put you at a sustained advantage over your competitors when they finally follow you into the world of video advertising.
