How a YouTube channel can help your business

Should I start a YouTube channel for my business?

This should be a question that more businesses in TT should be asking, but unfortunately, I don’t hear it enough. It’s quite shocking, actually, because YouTube has so many direct and indirect benefits for businesses that will allow them to generate three key things they are always stressing over: sales, lead generation and brand awareness.

Let me cut right to the chase and answer the question. Yes! You should start a YouTube channel for your business,

But I want to explore the why and how it will help your business.

It’s no secret that nine out of ten businesses here in TT struggle when it comes to social media. They don’t understand it, most people internally don’t want to understand it – and therefore they outsource the work to agencies or graphic designers and believe they can simply create graphics hard-selling their products, and all will be well in the world.

So you find that most businesses tend to stay away from platforms that require you to focus on video.

The bad news is that since Instagram made its announcement some months that it is no longer a photo-sharing app but a media platform, every social network is pushing you to create video content. Creating static images and hoping for anybody to see them is a thing of the past.

Now when it comes to YouTube, here's where businesses should be making a conscious effort to build on the platform.

YouTube isn’t like any other social network and that’s because YouTube is a search engine that benefits greatly from being a part of Google.

The videos that do extremely well on YouTube fall into one of three categories: typically, educational, entertaining and inspirational. If you can manage to achieve all three of these things in one video, you got yourself a winner.

Learning how to do “search engine listening” will allow you to tap into all the insights that the search engines collect on everybody in every country in the world. When you gain access to this type of data, you can fully understand your customer, their pain points, desires, demographics, and the questions they are asking on the search engines.

That will allow you to craft your marketing and business development plans. This will tell you exactly what types of video content you need to create to solve the problems your customers have.

Think about it. Whenever you have a question or a problem, where is the first place you go?

If you said Google, you are correct. From Google, we look for either an article/blog or a video that directly answers our query.

If you – the business – are consistently showing up in all of the searches related to your niche and your YouTube video content is there answering the questions, you will build your brand awareness, get your ideal customers to subscribe to your channel, and the next logical step will be for them to reach out to you for more information or to make a purchase.

That is the power of YouTube and creating video content right there.

It gets better. We can monetise our YouTube channels right here in TT and Google will send you out a cheque in US dollars or they can do a direct deposit right into our local bank accounts.

The requirements to monetise are that you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last 365 days. YouTube pays out promptly on the 22nd of every month.

Check out YouTubers like Devon X Scott (a Trini YouTuber) who have spoken about how to monetise YouTube. He also created an e-book on how to do it that is available on Amazon.

As a business owner, this means YouTube could create an additional revenue stream for your business through the monetisation of your content. In 2019, YouTube paid out over $16 billion in the US, which was the equivalent of supporting 345,000 full-time jobs in the US!

You can also add your affiliate links into the description to drive sales or add your booking links or website to help drive traffic to your platforms.

Remember: YouTube is a search engine.

You are in business to solve a problem. The first place we go to when we have a problem is Google, which will then direct us to a video answering our questions. This is the number-one way to get in front of your ideal customers. Your subscribers are the people who are actively seeking out the answers to the problems your business solves, and this is why every single business should have a YouTube channel.

I hope this helps your decision in adding YouTube as a platform to help grow your business.

For more info on building your digital presence visit KeronRose.com or @keronrose on IG/Linkedin/TikTok. Check out the Digipreneur FM Podcast on Apple Podcast/Spotify/Google Podcast.