Benefits of YouTube For Service Businesses
Today let’s talk about YouTube and the power of YouTube! If you’ve been following my videos and blogs for a while you understand that video is a powerful tool for local, service businesses. But I don’t think I talk enough about where to actually put those videos once you create them.
For all of our clients, we upload those directly to the Facebook news feed. We do this because those are auto-playing and they get a ton of reach, meaning that a lot more people are seeing these videos than just a photo or text post.
But after that, we take another step, and upload the videos to our clients’ YouTube channel. I highly recommend that everyone has a YouTube channel. If you have a Google + account you can use Google My Business, and you have a YouTube channel that you can just create right there. It’s very simple and seamless. You can upload your videos directly to your channel.
Here are some advantages of doing this:
1. Reach people trying to solve problems
This is how people search for problems. People look on YouTube for short tutorials: How do I change a flat tire? How do I change a filter? etc. In fact, I have an $800 plumber story from years ago. I YouTubed how to change the flapper in my toilet, but I ended up breaking a pipe! So I called the plumber who made that video. They made it very easy. To them, it was probably a very basic video—but it turned into an $800 service call! But they marketed correctly by solving the first problem I had, and it brought them my business.
People are always searching for these short tutorials—you want to get in front of those searches with your own video!
2. More brand awareness and likability for your brand
Get yourself and your employees on camera! There are people in your area, in your market, that are on YouTube. And if they subscribe to your channel, then every time you upload a new video, they get an email saying that you’ve uploaded a new video. This is a great way to give your clients and customers a soft touch and build more and more trust. The funny thing is, your audience will feel like they know you before even meeting you!
3. SEO
YouTube is great for search engine optimization purposes. Google happens to own YouTube. So if you play with Google’s “toys” (like posting on Google + and uploading videos to YouTube), Google will reward you. Just remember—just because you start uploading videos to YouTube doesn’t mean you’re immediately going to rank #1 here in Allen—it doesn’t work quite like that. But you can enter tags and search information into the description of your videos. In googling certain phrases, I’ve sometimes seen videos outranking websites!
Again, it’s a great way to get your name in front of more people who are searching for help on different problems, especially if you’re a home service type of business.
If this is something you think would be a great idea for your business but you think you have no time to set this up, upload the videos, and do all these different tasks—that’s something we can take off your plate! However you do it, I recommend that each and every business set up a YouTube channel and start uploading videos today.