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How Local Businesses Can Utilize YouTube to Grow Their Customer Base | Extensive Channel Review

Nov 06, 2020

So if you can't come up for search, then your channel is already not doing a great job with that, for your name. We could talk about titles and stuff all day, but if you're primary channel host/business owner or channel name isn't coming up on YouTube, you're invisible.

Maximizing Your YouTube Homepage to Gain Subscribers to Your Channel

When it comes to YouTube, most entrepreneurs getting into content creation on YouTube miss the mark when it comes to understanding how to best use the platform.

YouTube has many layers to it and one of those layers is best utilizing the real estate space they provide you on your channel home page.

Always be thinking of the viewer's experience of what they're seeing "above the fold".

Before someone ever scrolls down to find out more of what you have or what other videos you have, your channel header, channel trailer, channel trailer descriptions, and the links to your website are all the different areas of real estate data and space YouTube provides above the fold.

In this channel review, the business's YouTube channel has lots of space where other content could be used to communicate the channel value proposition.

 

"Why does the channel trailer matter and home page matter if they're watching and subscribing from the videos?"

YouTube works hard to get a channel subscribers with initiatives like having a huge subscribe button at the end of your channel trailer and plenty of space to encourage people to subscribe from what they see on your homepage alone.

When you don't utilize that, you're missing an opportunity for people to easily say "Yes, I'm loving what I see here, I definitely want to subscribe!" vs being confused and not sure what you offer on your channel or what they can come to expect from your content.

Avoiding Areas of Confusion on Your Channel

If it's unclear what value your channel provides, there's no way a person can quickly say "yes" and subscribe because your channel is creating too many unresolved questions the viewer hasn't and may not be willing to stick around long enough to attempt to solve.

In this channel review, it turns out this is a local music store. However, this is not communicated anywhere on the channel homepage or easily identified in what few minutes of video is seen in this channel review.

So even if you're a local brand, you can say something around that.

Take advantage of having a store or location to create various scenes, setups and places you can create content in your business to share suggestive signals that you are a local shop where people can do business with you.

Otherwise, you may be seen as just be another tutorial channel in the viewer's eyes.

Live Streams or Recorded Content? Or Both?

In this channel review, there is a mix of content but a lack of a logical viewing progression for the viewer.

Meaning, if you're going to have both live and recorded content on your channel, you'll want to consider your viewer's logical digestive content pattern.

Here's an example:

An example of this would be a search I created today, "How to cook potstickers."

This search led to a great video that gave a great answer on how these are prepared and how to easily make these at home.

If this is something I intend to proceed on cooking these, some questions I might have would be around how to create the dipping sauce or which sauce to buy, what to use to make the dumpling wrappings or the best flour type, etc.

I started with my primary initial search on how to make them, then I started down a path on "how to's" around elements in the cooking process.

So, if you're creating consistent content on your channel, if you don't have this series of progressive logical questions answered in videos, back to back live streams as seen in this channel review, could prove more difficult for your audience to digest and be at a place to engage with your content in a meaningful way.

Use YouTube Within a Wholistic Well-Rounded Content Marketing Strategy

What things are you doing that contribute to somebody's experience when they come to your website if they found you on Google so they can still see the videos?

How much better is it for them to also do business with who they're learning from?

Because you're taking care of the full scope of a potential customer buying process from not just buying what you sell and you're like everybody else in town like to see you, "Good luck to you and watch whatever tutorials you can find online".

Or also making it known "We also do tutorials" as part of the conversation in emails, part of the conversation in phone calls, and when you do have a customer that maybe comes the conversation becomes, "Did you know we make guitar tutorials on YouTube?"

Become your customer's go-to resource.

 

Up Next: Is Video Content Marketing Worth the Time Investment to Entrepreneurs?