YouTube is one of the most underrated yet efficient marketing tools that can be super useful for promoting brand awareness and building a loyal following. More so where eCommerce is concerned.

In business, it’s always better to show and not just tell, and YouTube serves as a perfect platform to do just that. You can show your brand and what you have to offer to a large audience to capture their attention so when it’s time to buy, they remember you.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to use this amazing platform called YouTube to take your eCommerce store to another level.

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Table of Contents

1. How Can You Leverage YouTube to Enhance Your Selling Efforts?

2. Tips to Nail YouTube for E-Commerce

3. Content Ideas to Lure More E-Commerce Buyers to Your YouTube Channel

4. Tips to Leverage YouTube to Promote Your Business

How Can You Leverage YouTube to Enhance Your Selling Efforts?

YouTube has many things going for it, and you don’t just have to take a word for it, you can look at the stats.

• YouTube visitors watch more than 1 billion hours of video.
• It’s the world’s second most used social media platform.
• 50.9 percent of B2B decision-makers use YouTube to research purchases.
• Seventy percent of viewers bought from a brand after seeing it on YouTube.
• The number of YouTube channels that earn at least 10,000 USD per year grew by 50 percent, year over year

See what we meant?

However, this doesn’t mean generating new leads on a platform like YouTube is easy. The main culprit? Market saturation.

YouTube can be an amazing platform to create more awareness about your product or service. You know it, but so do your competitors. You’re going to be actively competing with millions of people around the world, so to say the competition is going to be an understatement.

But it’s not all bad…

Your audience is there, you just need to find ways to get to them effectively.

But how do you do this?

Look At the E-Commerce Bigshots Leverage YouTube

Let’s take a look at a few big names and how they’ve leveraged YouTube to their advantage.

Geico

Geico has proved that you don’t need new content to gain a YouTube following. 

Having seen a massive deal of success with the commercials, they’ve simply uploaded the same to their YouTube channel. You’ll also find their campaign videos like Gecko, Caveman, Piggy, and Taste Test ads. 

There’s also a “Get a Quote” button on their YouTube cover image, which is a subtle yet effective way of bringing in new customers.

Best Buy

Best Buy has mastered social media, and their YouTube channel is a shining example of this.

They have a fully customized channel, along with organized playlists to make it easier for visitors to navigate through their content. They frequently post videos about their products, dealers, and customer interaction pieces.

You’ll also find different sub-channels to give different user groups a more targeted experience.

The end result? Best Buy successfully boosted its subscription rates. 

We also like how the channel is connected to their official eCommerce website, Facebook, and Twitter, tying all their social media profiles and website together. Precisely why even we have implemented it to Sleeknote’s YouTube channel too:

Tips to Nail YouTube for eCommerce to Improve Results 

You need a different approach for YouTube: You have to master the art of selling without doing the actual selling.

Sounds confusing, right? Imagine implementing it.

Luckily, you can get results by following a few effective strategies. Read on as we discuss the best tips to use YouTube for e-commerce.

Don’t Fake It Till You Make It

You must maintain consistency across all platforms where you present your brand—even YouTube. 

Your YouTube channel should be an extension of your brand, website, and your business objectives. This way, potential customers will immediately recognize you and your brand regardless of where they find you.

Create a cohesive story to make it a cognitive link between you and the reader. It takes 5-7 brand impressions for anyone to remember you. So a visitor will have to see your story or your content at least five times to remember you down the line.

Stories can connect customers, but good stories connect with customers—something that Toms understand. 

The company has put its mission statement “Improving lives, giving back, helping people in need” across the front and center on their website.

If you take a look at their YouTube channel, you‘ll find that the look and feel are similar to the site.

Here’s how even you can customize your YouTube channel to make it more on-brand:

1. Check out YouTube’s customization features to determine ways of adding brand flavor to your channel. You can add logos, images, and design elements carried over from your website.
2. Try to include relevant keywords to establish brand identity. The right keywords reinforce your brand, helping customers find you on video channels like YouTube.

You can also use specific tools to make your YouTube customization order easier. For instance, Ubersuggest, a free keyword search tool, can help you understand what kind of keywords to include in your content.

Don’t Be Afraid of Customization

Your visitors should immediately relate your YouTube channel to your brand. In turn, this will help you improve your credibility and online presence.

Apart from the content you produce, your channel’s aesthetic and appeal also matter. Outline what your channel is about, provide links to online businesses, and create a net of all your content with YouTube being the central point. 

We highly recommend creating an introductory video that includes an overview of all the products and services you have on offer. Think of it as a trailer to your movie—your online store’s movie.

This way, your visitors won’t have to rely on the description box of a channel to know what your business is about. Plus, you can engage your audience with your channel right off the bat.

Below are a few pointers to include in your introductory video:

• Introduce yourself to your viewers. Mention where you’re from, what qualifications you have, and other details.
• Provide viewers with more information about your business. Talk about what you do, where you are based, what you plan on doing with your business, and so on.
• Add a call to action in your intro video. Remember your favorite YouTuber yelling, “Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe?“ That’s what you need here. You can also go with something subtle like “Subscribe to my channel for more tips and insights on…“

When creating content for YouTube, always try to think from the customers’ viewpoint. What do they want to see? What is your audience coming to your channel for? 

Then think about the brand image you want to present to your target audience. 

These can be fantastic guiding factors to customize a YouTube channel that helps you achieve your business objectives.

Work on Building a Loyal Following

On YouTube, the more subscribers you have, the more views and shares your content will receive—the greater your credibility and brand awareness too.

Try to create a connection with your audience. Trust us, they really do value genuine content over fake and flashy theatrics.

For this, you have to understand the persona of the target audience you’re trying to reach. You can learn a few things from Daisy Jing, the CEO of Banish skincare.

Jing realized she had to create an authentic connection with viewers who were experiencing a problem she knew she could solve: acne. Instead of posting a flashy marketing video, she posted a video that showed her in her most vulnerable way—and it worked.

Interestingly, Banish has raised over $3 million in revenue from YouTube subscribers alone.

But you must have a strategy in place to maximize results. You don’t want to throw a dart without aiming—you’ll never hit the bulls-eye like that.

Content Ideas to Lure More eCommerce Buyers to Your YouTube Channel

You have to be consistent with your content if you want to create a loyal subscriber base. Below, we’ve made a list of some of the best content ideas that could help draw in more viewers to your channel.

Product Reviews

Eighty-four percent of customers trust product reviews as much as they trust a recommendation from a friend or family member. Precisely you should also consider uploading product review videos on your channel.

In fact, you’ll find several YouTube channels with millions of subscribers who want to hear more about the brands they like.

When filming these videos, try to inform customers why they need a product and how it can help improve their lives. The idea here is to first educate, tell a story, and then recommend a product or a brand you want to promote.

That said, all your YouTube product reviews should be focused on solutions—not selling. 

You can also rope in YouTube influencers to gain greater reach too. But it doesn’t mean that you can jump on the product review bandwagon without doing your research. 

For instance, if you sell products to outdoorsmen, a YouTube influencer that reviews vintage fashion may not resonate well with your audience. 

Our tip? Use tools like Social Bluebook to connect with the right kind of channels. Plus, they show key metrics, influencer channels, follower information, and engagement grades.

Product FAQs

If customers have to work too hard to learn about your offering, chances are they’ll never buy from you again. But, customers will return to you if they feel you care about them and can help solve their problems.

Creating a list of short FAQs—about 5 to 10 questions—can be a great way to introduce people to your brand and your products or services. Moreover, viewers retain 95 percent of what they see in the video, compared to 10 percent of what they read.

You should aim to answer FAQs before they are even asked to pave the way for happy customers and future sales. A free tool like TubeBuddy lets you run A/B tests on your video thumbnails, video length, and view rates, which can help you make better videos. 

How-to Videos

How-to videos can be great to drive revenue. Just take a look at these stats:

So there’s tremendous potential for you to capitalize on this loyalty. 

But how do you do this? By teaching other people how to use your products.

How-to videos are often called explainer videos because they explain what your product can do in two minutes or less. Of course, you can extend the duration, but it’s better to keep them short and to the point.

Another tip would be to create a playlist of similar videos on your YouTube channel. This will help you establish yourself as an expert, as well as make it easy for your viewers to learn about your product or service.

Tips to Leverage Youtube for eCommerce to Promote Your Business

Video adds a new dimension to your marketing mix. If used properly, you can do so many things with it—explain how your product might be used, tell you companies’ histories, add depth to your product’s features, and so on.

Keeping that in mind, here are a few tips and strategies that can help you achieve your business objectives.

Keep the Videos Short

The best YouTube videos are those under two minutes. Precisely why they get almost 50 percent of all views.

Plus, YouTube has recently made a video change in its rankings algorithm and is favoring videos that are more engaging a.k.a videos that have been watched till the very end. As such, the quality of engagement has become more important than the number of views.

Deliver Good Content Consistently

You can have the most attractive-looking channel, but it won’t be of any use if you don’t have content. 

While you can decide the frequency, you must be consistent about posting. Generally, posting a video every month or every two weeks is good enough, but it really depends on your target audience.

Once you figure out a pattern that works best, do your best to stick to it as the only way to succeed in YouTube is to be committed to the long-term.

Utilize AdWords

YouTube is owned by Google, so it makes sense to also utilize AdWords for Video.

There are three ways to advertise on YouTube:

• As a pre-roll ad before the videos that people watch
• As a banner ad when you’re browsing the web
• As a promoted ad when people search for similar videos on YouTube

Similar to Google AdWords, you can select your daily budget and pick the demographics for your audience. Correctly using keywords is also crucial here to get more exposure.

Use Analytics to Determine Your Audience’s Preferences

YouTube can provide you with tons of data on your video performance. And like any successful e-commerce seller, you must take full advantage of it.

Go through this data to know exactly what works and what doesn’t put your target audience. It’s comprehensive enough to include the breakdown of your traffic sources, your views over time, and analyze your viewers’ demographics.

Use this, and all the other information you can find to figure out which part of your video isn’t working as well as you’d anticipated.

Want More Conversion Optimization Tips?

We’ve put together 12 CRO resources to help you drive more leads and revenue.

Whether you’re looking for satisfaction guarantee examples or product page examples, we’ve got something for you.

You’ll also get immediate access to 23+ other bonus resources, categorized in Notion for your convenience.

Download Swipe File Now →

The Bottom Line

Even though only 9 percent of small businesses use YouTube, it’s still one of the most powerful social media platforms.

With a reach like no other, not tapping into the open market of over two billion users is simply unwise. Contrarily, you can generate a steady stream of revenue for your eCommerce website if you use the platform wisely.

We hope our guide will help you incorporate the right branding, create the right type of content, and make the most of the presented opportunity.

Go get ’em.