Here's how to build a YouTube first brand

Vishesh Sharma, Chief Marketing Officer, Ashika Group, writes that with the penetration of affordable handsets and easy access to the internet, India has truly emerged as a market where videos are playing a key role in not just effective engagement but real business growth

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Vishesh Sharma

The conscious mind of a marketer is always mapping the different marketing manoeuvres that are liked by the customers. Trends the world over have clearly established that there has been a rapid increase in video content viewership. In the age-old saga of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our minds perceive, motion pictures have always left an imprint on our memory. Since 2020, 96% of people have increased their video consumption. Likewise, in 2021, a report suggested that an average person is likely to spend 100 minutes on online videos. Facilitating brand-building exercises through video content marketing on YouTube provides brands with the optimum utilisation of the digital space. As a marketer, I believe the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" can be altered to "a video is worth a thousand customers" in the context of contemporary marketing campaigns. 

Why is YouTube the node to commercially throbbing markets? 

YouTube is not just a casual community-based video platform anymore; it has become a crucial cog in the wheel for brands to tap into key markets, especially the new-age customers in Tier 2 and 3 cities. It is the new-age centre for data exploration for millennials and the Gen-Z populace. This growth hasn’t been driven overnight. The transition has been completely organic as multiple factors have assisted in making YouTube the second largest search engine after Google, with traffic as titanic as 3 billion searches per month. In India, the Central government’s consistent efforts to create a digital-first nation and the epochal of the internet revolution created the internet-first generation. 

For brands trying to leverage the virtues of community-driven marketing, the internet-first community fits in like a glove. The impact of videos in the digital age is unrivalled; 93% of marketers have attested that video marketing has effectively helped them land new customers. The significance of video marketing establishes YouTube as the most business-conducive tool for brand promotions due to its escalating peerless popularity. If YouTube were a country, its consumer base would have been the third-largest. If a brand misses out on the marketing tactics on this front, they are missing out on influencing over two billion people! 

Mapping the ocean of opportunities that YouTube offers 

Infinitely flourishing as a platform, YouTube provides an ocean of opportunities to promote a brand through strategised video marketing. A recent survey showed that 76% of consumers purchase a product or invest in a service after watching a video. The differentiator between a successful YouTube marketing brand and a lacklustre video marketing campaign is the ability to understand the consumer psyche. How-to videos, brand promotional videos, and top-5 lists are the most popular types of brand videos among consumers.

Perpetual patronage: How the best brands leverage YouTube

With so many brands cramped within the marketing space that YouTube offers, a fresh and novel outlook is required to stand out from the crowd. With more than 50 million content creators uploading fresh videos every day, the competition is fierce. However, some have cracked the code. Brands like Cred, Swiggy, and Zomato, among many others, have been able to garner subscribers through their creative content. The famed Swiggy Uncle during the IPL ad breaks was so loved that fans engaged with Swiggy on YouTube. Zomato’s background music "Dum Dum Fire '' had everyone grooving, and thus the YouTube views counter kept filling for the restaurant aggregator from India. Cred's ad with Rahul Dravid was one of the most viewed YouTube videos in 2021, which brought them boundless engagement. 

Fintech leveraging YouTube to disrupt the market 

The last two years have seen a lot of GenZ and Millennials investing in stocks and mutual funds and the testimony to this is more than double Demat accounts opened out of which 75% were under the age of 30 yrs. The rise of young and first-time investors has been linked to the rise of Fin-influencers and the way brands are working with them in imparting education. Blogs, podcasts and videos have been the go-to medium for the fintech companies to educate their target audiences and this has been appealing to the younger audiences. 

YouTube has taken precedence over all the channels and has become a medium to help customers make purchase decisions. We would usually take advice from our family and friends over financial matters but, customers are more interested in learning and understanding a financial product than just going by recommendations. This is where most of the fin-techs are tapping the serious investors and providing them with knowledge which most of the time, successfully transform them from prospective customer to existing customer. 

Localising YouTube content

As I discussed earlier, YouTube has established itself successfully as the go-to platform in tier two and three cities. Hence in order to strike the right chord, it has become crucial to build a fantastic regional language ecosystem. A case in point is Groww, one of India’s fastest-growing Fintech platforms, which has created multiple regional sub-channels (Gujarati, Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, Malayalam) in order to build loyal viewership in regional towns and cities. 

However, achieving this isn’t as simple as running the content through Google translators and then sending the content for production, localisation is best suited to adapt customers’ culture, language and mannerisms. So be extremely careful while building the regional video content bank and use human verifications unless you are pretty sure about the tools. 

YouTube Optimisation: Key to Keywords

Around 59% of executives say watching a video is far more convenient than reading text-based documents. This is clear evidence in favour of SEO for videos that can lead to tangible benefits such as heightened brand awareness and longer viewing time that, in turn, can translate to more leads and eventual sales.

While most marketers focus their SEO efforts on content marketing, we may be overlooking the importance of having a specialist SEO firm for YouTube to distribute video content to a broader audience.

As a business that wants to get the most out of its video content, you should ensure what your aim is and what primary objectives you're attempting to achieve with YouTube, how SEO and YouTube intersect to support one other, and whether your content supports your YouTube videos.

In Summation

The important factors that promote organic outreach with customers are consistency in involvement, relevancy in communication, and clarity in the message. Your business may become the agent of successful video marketing by using focused and precise SEO tactics, offering customer testimonials, demonstrating staff expertise, motivating viewers with how-to films, and generating traffic with user-generated content.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of www.buzzincontent.com and we do not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.)

Vishesh Sharma Ashika Group