How To Market Your Ecommerce Store With YouTube
If you’re running an ecommerce store, you can’t sit back and wait for leads to come to you. You need to be proactive to generate conversions. That means you need to promote your business.
Fortunately, there are many tools you can use for your promotion. YouTube is an excellent one. With YouTube, you can increase online sales for your business and reap other benefits, too!
In this article, we’ll look at eight ways you can market your ecommerce store with YouTube.
Why Should You Market Your Ecommerce Store with YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing platform. So using YouTube to market your ecommerce store means getting into video marketing.
With video marketing, you boost your chances for conversions big-time. According to Wyzowl, 78% of marketers believe video has directly helped increase sales. Here’s a look at the increasing percentage of marketers who believe video gives them a positive return on investment:
Source: Hubspot
With video marketing, you can generate leads and increase traffic. According to Optinmonster, 83% of video marketers said video helps them with lead generation. 87% also said videos had increased traffic to their website.
According to Statista, YouTube has a whopping 1.86 billion users all over the world as of early 2021. In short, with YouTube, you generate leads, sales, and website traffic, all while enjoying incredible reach.
8 Ways to Market Your Ecommerce Store with YouTube
Are you convinced? Now let’s look at the ways you can market an ecommerce store with YouTube. These are tips that range from the types of content you should create to the ways you should approach your YouTube marketing.
1. Provide Variety and Value through Content
Source: Warby Parker
Content is king, and that holds in YouTube marketing. That means you need to provide value in your content if you want to get results.
Since you’re running an ecommerce website, your content marketing strategy should focus on two things:
- Content that makes people aware of your products and ecommerce store.
- Content that convinces people to buy your products.
To make people aware of your products, you can create tutorials or informative videos. These are your best options since these are what people usually search for online.
So, for instance, if you’re selling gardening tools, you can create a video on how to start a garden. If you’re selling eyewear, you can create one on how to check your eyesight on your own. In the screenshot above, an optometrist tries to debunk myths about food and healthy eyes. The video was on Warby Parker’s YouTube account.
To convince people to buy your products, you can create other content that shows how your products stand out. So you can create a video that shows your product in action. You can also produce video case studies and video customer testimonials. Testimonials are powerful because they rely on a psychological principle to convince people: social proof.
The bottomline is, you need to provide value and variety in your content to make your YouTube marketing successful.
2. Know Your Audience
Source: Ghostit
Your content should be based on your target audience’s preferences to be effective. That means you need to know your audience. Here’s where audience personas can help you. An audience persona is a fictional representation of a member of your target audience. It is based on data you gather through research or audience interviews.
That data should include the following:
- Age
- Gender
- Socio-economic data such as job position and income
- Location
- Interests
- Pain points
- Platforms used
Once you have your audience personas, you can create targeted content for each of them. The goal is to meet any of the two goals of your content marketing strategy. However, the content should still be related to any of the products you’re selling on your ecommerce store.
Source: Best Buy
Best Buy (above), which also has an online store, has a YouTube channel with different subchannels to cater to different audience segments. On its channel, you see there are animation clips that appeal to the younger generation. And then there are the more serious-sounding tech tips.
3. Have a Clear Idea of the Aim of the Content
Let’s back up a bit. We know you have two goals with your content: make people aware of your products and convince people to buy them. But you can further break down each of those goals into smaller objectives. Get together with your team to identify why you are creating the content. Pro tip: Use gmail extensions to keep track of your meetings and notes.
For instance, to create awareness, you might want to inform and engage leads specifically. For the second goal, you might want to focus on getting repeat customers. Or maybe you’d like to convince both existing customers and new prospects to make a purchase.
Besides knowing your audience, you need to know your specific objectives to determine the type of content to produce. And when you’re creating that content, you need to have those particular objectives in mind.
Let’s say to create awareness of your ecommerce store that sells wine, you decide you particularly want to inform and engage leads. You could create a YouTube video on how different types of wine are made. But since you want to engage leads, too, you might also include a YouTube poll in the video on which wine is the best.
4. Use Paid Ads
Source: YouTube
With YouTube paid ads, you can get even better results. There are two formats you can leverage:
With search ads, you will need to create ad copy to convince people to click on your video. Think Google ads - this is very similar.
With in-stream ads (see screenshot above), on the other hand, you have less flexibility. That’s because you’d need to persuade people to watch your entire ad in the first five seconds. After five seconds, they have the option to skip it and go straight to the video.
Before you decide to use YouTube ads, make sure your ecommerce website is set up properly. If the link in your ad leads to a website that is not optimized for conversions, you will have spent money for nothing.
5. Partner With Influencers and YouTubers
YouTube has millions of channels. According to Omnicore Agency, it has an astounding 31 million channels as of 2021. That means there are other people you can partner with to market your ecommerce store.
When choosing the person to partner with, make sure their channel caters to an audience you’d like to reach, too. It’s better to look for a small YouTube channel with a niche rather than a big YouTube channel with a heterogeneous audience.
So if you’re selling men’s apparel, for example, you might want to partner with someone who specializes on giving fashion tips.
Source: Alpha M
You can partner with people in several ways. You can send them free samples of your product on your ecommerce store and ask them to test and review them. You can also offer to sponsor their show in exchange for an ad or shout-out.
6. Involve Your Viewers
People like to watch videos, but they also have short attention spans. To effectively market an ecommerce store with YouTube, you need them to watch your video in its entirety. That means you need to engage them.
Take advantage of YouTube’s engagement features where applicable. For example, you can create polls on the platform. You can make video annotations, too. For example, in a video of someone talking directly to the camera, a thought bubble with a great joke can go a long way in keeping viewers engaged.
At the end of each video, you can also ask your audience to leave comments on a related topic in the comments section. So if you’re talking about how to grill steak, for example (let’s assume you’re selling grills in your ecommerce store), you can ask them to share how they cook their perfect steak.
7. Be Consistent with Your Videos
Once you decide to go into YouTube marketing, you have to commit to content production. One YouTube video won’t cut it. You need to be consistent in producing videos. A poorly maintained or sporadically updated YouTube account can undermine your brand credibility.
Decide on a posting schedule, make it public, and stick to it. If you decide you’ll post videos every Wednesday, then make sure you do just that.
There’s no hard and fast rule for how frequently you should post YouTube videos. But according to Social Media Examiner, three or more times per week is ideal if you can manage it. That’s especially true if you’re still trying to build an audience.
8. Keep It Short
Source: Forever21
Don’t get carried away. When creating videos to market an ecommerce store with YouTube, you have to consider the attention span of your target audience. According to a Socialbakers study, videos under two minutes get almost 50% of all views. Anything beyond two minutes is probably too long. Create a script so you say everything you need to say in the least amount of time possible.
Try not to sound too scripted, though. That can be a turn-off for some viewers. Practice before you go on camera so that you sound as natural as possible.
In Closing
YouTube marketing is an excellent option for ecommerce store owners like you. With YouTube, you can generate leads, increase sales, and grow your audience.
But to get these results, you need to market your ecommerce store the right way. That entails a strategy. And that strategy should take into account your target audience, your goals and objectives, and a few proven truths of YouTube marketing, too.
In this article, I gave you eight ways to market your ecommerce store with YouTube. Complement these with your creativity and hard work, and your business will soon see those online sales!
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