How to Create YouTube Videos That Connect With People

Are you looking for ways to improve your YouTube videos?

Do you want to increase your YouTube channel views and subscribers?

Keep reading to discover five valuable tips to enhance your YouTube marketing.

Simple YouTube Strategy

Here’s a simple strategy.

Want to integrate YouTube into your online marketing strategy effectively?

Then you must create and share valuable video content that’s relevant to what your ideal customer is searching for on the Internet.

This might be an answer to a frequent question, a tutorial or a customer review of your services.

When you use video strategically, YouTube will generate leads for your business.

In this article I’ll show you five styles of YouTube videos that will get you the results you’re looking for on YouTube.

#1: Turn New Viewers Into Subscribers With a Trailer Video

YouTube Trailer Video lets you feature a video at the top of your channel when nonsubscribers visit.

Why not use this space to tell new viewers who you are, what your business is all about and what they can expect from your content?

Your YouTube channel and trailer video as seen by nonsubscribers.

Here is a simple, three-step outline to help you create a 45-to 60-second video that will convert viewers into subscribers who will get alerts whenever you post new video.

• The Intro—Welcome new viewers to your channel by introducing yourself or the name of your business, then share notable credentials that will help instill confidence in the service you offer.
• The Why—To captivate your audience, tell them what benefits they’ll receive from your videos, then share why you do what you do. This is where your personal story comes in and will go a long way toward creating a personal connection.
• The Call to Action—Wrap up your video and tell people what to do next. Tell them how to subscribe to your channel. If you have a web page or blog you want them to visit, give them the URL!

#2: Share Stats That Matter to Benchmark Yourself

Position yourself as a reliable source of information with a video that presents numbers and niche market data in a unique, easily sharable way. People love statistics, and if you gather and present good data, they’ll share your video with colleagues who are interested.

About two years ago, I uploaded a simple two-minute video to share the latest statistics about online video, entitled YouTube and User Engagement. The original received 16,000 views and the follow-up, Video Revolution 2.0, now has close to 40,000 views.

Video Revolution 2.0 shares the latest statistics about online video and has close to 40,000 views.

Use these three simple steps to create your own stats video and share important, relevant information with your market:

• Collect eye-opening figures and data about your market.
• Find an awe-inspiring song over at Premiumbeat.com.
• Hire an Adobe After Effects animator at oDesk to combine the facts and figures with graphics and music.

#3: Share a Customer Success Story to Establish a Good Reputation

There are few things more powerful than a first-person testimonial that tells how your product or service made a customer’s life better.

This doesn’t have to be polished and technical. You can record customer interviews with your mobile device or on a Google hangout with a simple webcam.

Better yet, ask your past customers to put their own success stories on camera and send you a link to their video so you can share it on your own channel and add it to your channel’s favorites.

Showcase the stories of your customers through video.

Here’s a simple formula you can use to help customers bring their stories to life for you.

• Intro—Have your customers introduce themselves so people trust they’re real humans.
• The before—Ask them to share what need led them to search for your product/service.
• The shift—Remind them to tell viewers why they chose you.
• The after—Encourage them to share how your product/service has made their life better.

#4: Answer Questions to Demonstrate Your Knowledge

Your potential customers are going straight to Google to find answers to their questions. Claim your Google Authorship, then connect your Google+ profile with your YouTube channel and use video to deliver those answers. You’ll become a go-to Q&A resource in no time.

Share your knowledge with little things and people will remember you when they need to buy big things.

Marie Forleo of MarieTV reads and answers the questions her audience members ask.

To get a jump-start on the questions your customers ask most, use keyword research tools, review forum questions or send out a survey to your existing subscribers and customers. Use these questions to record a Q&A library of videos that are short and to the point so people get what they need quickly. Provide real value, avoid the fluff and don’t hold back!

#5: Teach People Something to Create Top-of-Mind Awareness of Your Services

If you do a quick search for “how to tie a tie,” you’ll find videos at the top of Google’s search results. Some of these videos have more than 13 million views.

Rather than writing a text-based article with a series of pictures on how to do something, record step-by-step tutorials, demonstrations and how-to videos. Your viewers can pause the video as needed and that makes their lives easier!

Find out which “how-to” keywords your customers are searching for on Google!

If you’re camera-shy, the good news about tutorial videos is that the “star” of your video is the product. For online or software tutorials, screen-capture software likeCamtasia or ScreenFlow will record your screen and you don’t even have to be on camera!

Here’s a recap:

The ONE Element Every Video Needs

There are more than five styles of videos that work on YouTube and you don’t have to limit yourself to the options in this article. Find the best fit for your business, theninclude the only essential element every video needs: your Call to Action. 

Provide value and communicate a clear and compelling call to action that inspires your viewer to subscribe, purchase, visit your website or share the video they just watched and you’ll see results in no time.

What do you think? Are you including video in your online marketing strategy? Which types of video work best for you? Please leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Instagram, Twitter or Facebook Advertising – Which Is Best for Brands?

With last week’s announcement that Instagram advertising is coming in the near future (first through a limited test among U.S. users), brand marketers have taken notice. There will soon be a new way to reach the 150 million Instagram user audience. Ads will roll out with a small number of brands on both the Instagram website and mobile app with a focus on enhancing the user experience with ads.

An Instagram blog post explained the upcoming advertising launch to users as follows:

“Our aim is to make any advertisements you see feel as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already enjoy from your favorite brands. We want these ads to be enjoyable and creative in much the same way you see engaging, high-quality ads when you flip through your favorite magazine.”

Instagram users will also be able to hide ads they don’t like and provide feedback on those ads.  Let’s hope that the Instagram team will take many of the lessons its parent, Facebook, has learned about advertising to deliver a strong offering to advertisers that its user audience accepts.

Not only is Instagram joining Facebook in building an advertising platform that will generate revenue, but the announcement comes at the same time news of Twitter’s initial public offering hit the streets. In the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing from Twitter, the company revealed that it has 218 million monthly active users. Yoree Koh and Suzanne Vranica of The Wall Street Journal explain that this is significantly less than the 1.5 billion active monthly users that Facebook boasts. That 218 million Twitter user audience represents 22% of U.S. Internet users according to Forrester Research, but that’s very small compared to the 72% of U.S. Internet users who check Facebook at least once per month.

Koh and Vranica also explained in their article that Twitter advertisers don’t believe an audience of 218 million users is big enough to invest in Twitter advertising. Today, Twitter usage peaks during big events, and the rest of the time, it’s dominated by a small group of power users. Many advertisers are waiting for Twitter to find better ways to increase engagement among wider audiences and to encourage them to log in more frequently.

These shortcomings make most consumer brands choose Facebook first. Of course, Facebook advertising has its own long list of problems, but today, it’s the social network that most brands prioritize. Is it truly the right place for those brands to invest ad dollars or do they just think they have to be there because the Facebook user audience is so big and the site is so popular? For brand marketers, the problem becomes trying to explain why they’re not advertising on Facebook to executives.

So which is best for brands—Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook? The answer is, there is no single answer. Every brand is different, but advertising on Facebook because that’s where 1 billion people are doesn’t mean the investment will drive a positive return. The Super Bowl gets massive viewership each year, but that doesn’t mean every brand should advertise during the big game. If you can create a highly relevant offer and release it at the right time and to the right audience on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, then invest. However, as with all marketing investments, if you can’t generate the needed ROI, it doesn’t matter if there are 1 billion users, 218 million users, or 100 users. 

How to Use Facebook to Sell Your Products and Services

Have you leveraged the power of Facebook to sell your products and services?

Or maybe you’ve wondered if you should start a store on Facebook…

Many businesses are using Facebook to sell.

Check out these three ways your business can leverage a Facebook page to sell products and make it easier for your customers to buy from you.

#1: Create a Seamless Store Experience on Facebook With a Landing Page App

Before you start selling on Facebook, you’ll need to create a Facebook page and not a Facebook profile.

Using a Facebook page for business not only keeps you in compliance withFacebook’s Terms of Service, but also affords you additional benefits that aren’t available with profiles. For instance, with a page you can add a custom tab using a Facebook landing page app so you can build an online store.

The benefits of using third-party landing page apps.

Most landing page apps can be easily installed and are packed with features so you can build and manage your store in no time.

Sell products on Facebook using a Facebook landing page app.

With a landing page app, you can have a store that looks slick and professional, even if you’re not a designer or coder. And it’s easy for your customers to use, whether they’re shopping on a desktop or from their mobile device.

You can customize the look and feel of your Facebook store. Change colors, add a logo and adjust the layout of your products until your Facebook store closely resembles your website.

Outside of creating the look and flow of your shopping cart, securing your transaction data with an SSL certificate is equally important.

An example of a Facebook page without a valid SSL certificate.

While they can be expensive (upwards of $70 or more per year) and difficult to install on their own, most third-party landing page tools include an SSL certificate. They even install it for you, so all you have to do is create your store, add your products and associate your store with a Facebook page.

Now that we’ve gone over some of the benefits of using third-party landing page apps, let’s talk about a few you can use to sell products on Facebook.

Sync a store with ECWID’s Ecommerce Widget.

ECWID is a no-cost to low-cost way for business owners to add shopping functionality to their Facebook page and website.

ECWID syncs with your website store to put your products on Facebook.

ECWID offers a full list of features, but here are some of the more notable ones:

• 30 payment options
• Facebook store app
• Mobile-responsive
• Social commerce sharing
• Sell physical products
• Sell downloadable products
• Customize the look of your Facebook store to be consistent with your website

In just a few steps, you can add an online store to your Facebook page, customize it and begin selling products on your Facebook page.

Here’s an example of a Facebook store created using ECWID.

An example of ECWID installed on a Facebook page.

ECWID offers a great time-saving feature that allows you to sync your products between your website and Facebook page. Update multiple product catalogs on your website, and your customers immediately see the same thing in your Facebook store.

Couple that with an intuitive checkout process for your customers, and you have a valuable tool for selling products with ease on Facebook.

An example of the checkout process on a Facebook page using ECWID.

ECWID offers multiple versions of their online store. Depending on how many products you have and the features your business needs, there’s an option for everyone. To get started, install a basic store and when your business grows, move up to a paid plan.

Import your existing online stores to Facebook with StoreYa.

StoreYa is another alternative. It has a free plan that gives you the ability to add 50 product SKUs, whereas ECWID’s free plan lets you add 10.

An example of an Amazon shopping cart on Facebook created with StoreYa.

What differentiates StoreYa from ECWID is StoreYa’s data integration feature.

This feature allows you to import your products from over 23 popular store platforms such as Amazon, Shopify or WooCommerce. If you don’t have a store on any of these platforms, you can use a CSV file to manually add products. If you have hundreds of products in different colors and sizes, this is a big time-saver.

StoreYa also includes the ability for businesses to have different stores and store managers. This is helpful if you run a business that has a chain of stores, each with its own Facebook page and page admin.

Once you’ve imported your products, StoreYa has a set of marketing tools that can help you get your customers involved and sell more products on Facebook.

An example of StoreYa marketing tools for your Facebook store.

StoreYa Instagram gallery.

While you’ll need one of their paid plans to take advantage of their marketing tools, the amount of time you save by having everything you need to sell products on Facebook in one place might outweigh the cost.

Integrate complete Ecommerce with Bigcommerce.

Not only does Bigcommerce give you control over your storefront, store management and marketing features, but it also uses built-in SEO to help you with improved search placement.

An example of Bigcommerce added to The Home T's Facebook page.

Once you’re set up, use the Bigcommerce SocialShop to install a landing page app and add your products to your Facebook page.

A big plus you get from Bigcommerce is the apps they offer to let you integrateMailChimp, Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey and other platforms into your store.

While Bigcommerce can cost a little more than other ecommerce solutions, they make up for it with their excellent customer service and the fact that they don’t charge transaction fees.

Drive traffic to your retail shop with ShortStack.

While ShortStack won’t let you create a store on your Facebook page, you can use it as a marketing tool to display your products to fans and drive Facebook traffic back to your retail shop.

Examples of different ways to use ShortStack.

While this may not seem like an optimal way to sell products on Facebook, remember, it can be a great promotional tool.

If your customers tend to visit you from phones or tablets instead of desktops, ShortStack has you covered with landing pages that display on mobile devices. Simply post a link to your landing page in a status update to drive customers back to your retail shop.

Third-party landing page apps make it easy for you to set up a storefront on Facebook.

#2: Promote Products or Campaigns With Your Timeline Cover Photo

In addition to selling products through a shopping cart on your Facebook page, you can now use your timeline cover photo to market and sell products to fans.

An example of Mari Smith using her timeline cover photo to drive product sales for her Inner Circle product.

Remember to include a direct link to your product in the image caption so fans who are interested don’t have to hunt for it on your website.

Share a link to the sales page in the caption section of your timeline photo to make it easy for your Facebook readers to find you.

Besides uploading a new timeline cover photo that will show up in your fans’ news feeds, you’ll also want to promote the link to your product from time to time.

How to get the URL of your Facebook timeline cover photo.

To do this, simply click your Facebook page’s timeline cover photo, copy the URL in your browser’s address bar and share it with fans in a status update.

Don’t ignore this simple way of using your timeline photo to get your product in front of your Facebook audience.

#3: Share Product Links in Your Facebook Status Updates

While this may not be the most glamorous way to sell products on Facebook, it does work and you have a few options to use.

Post a link to your product.

First, you can post a link to your product as a status update.

Make it easy for customers to get to the product you’re advertising and to drop it into their cart and check out. Use a deep link that takes fans straight to your product, not just your website.

Be sure not to make the mistake of displaying a product with no link. This can lead to a high abandonment rate in your shopping cart.

In the image below, UnMarketing is using Facebook to sell their book.

An example of UnMarketing selling their book listed on Amazon.

Use the embedded post feature.

Second, you can use the Facebook embedded post feature to embed your public Facebook posts outside of Facebook.

Post a status update that includes a link to your store or a product and embed it on a blog or a website.

An example of embedding a Facebook post.

When your readers click a link included in a Facebook embedded post, they are taken directly to your product or to your Facebook store, and can check out from your store on your Facebook page.

By sharing your product links in your Facebook page updates, you’re likely to drive more traffic and make more sales.

Selling Your Products on Facebook

Regardless of whether you use just one of these methods or combine them, remember that you cannot just set up a store and expect customers to flock to it. Be sure youtest it and have proper marketing ready to go.

Before you post any links to your Facebook store, create a focus group or invite some of your best customers to try out the process before you push it live to everyone.

Have product images ready to post on your Facebook page, add a new timeline cover photo to advertise your store or specific products and publish a status update to let your fans know that you’ve added a store to your Facebook page, so they can check it out.

And don’t overlook leveraging other social networks such as Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram to market your store to users on those networks.

What do you think? Have you used any of these tactics or tools to sell on Facebook? What else have you had success with? Let me know by leaving a comment below.