Youtube Marketing and the Importance of Regular, Scheduled Posts
YouTube marketing is an excellent market to reach your audience in Washington DC, Maryland and Virgina. You can add value by giving video product demonstrations. You can even give people a glimpse into the inner workings of your company with video profiles or video testimonials.
YouTube is also a fickle beast, with a constantly moving goalpost of requirements, optimum length and posting times. The complex and shifting algorithms of YouTube has confounded many a social media marketing expert in their efforts to become popular or even viral.
Contrary to the beliefs of many small businesses and would-be YouTube stars, the game is not leveraging a loophole in the system. YouTube marketing, like many marketing campaigns, is a long game.
You develop a following over time and nurture it with trust. This all sounds a little too ethereal so let’s get into the meat of it. Every YouTube self-proclaimed expert and actual YouTube star will tell you the same thing. You need regularity and predictability.
Successful YouTube marketing channels have one post a month, or one post a week or even two posts a day! The videos come out at the same time of day so everyone knows after two pm (or whatever) they can count on a new video sitting on their dashboard. This classic conditioning keeps viewers coming back on a regular basis and guarantees views.
More than that, it builds trust with new viewers who can see your track record of regular, reliable content. Here’s what you need to figure out for your company before you take your business YouTube channel to the next level:
Repeatable Production Quality
Whatever your schedule ends up being, you have to stick to it. Six months of Washington DC video production and a $200,000 video budget will look cool and wow viewers, but if next month’s video looks more like 1 day and $300, then you violate the viewer’s trust and reduce the chance they’ll be back for more. Pick the budget that you can maintain indefinitely and at your schedule.
A small business can stretch their budget by shooting several DC video productions episodes (5-10 usually) at once and spreading the cost across them. this also means you can cue up several videos beforehand and schedule their posts so you don’t have to keep coming back to a studio every week.
Choosing The Right Schedule
The right schedule means not flooding someone’s inbox while keeping content refreshed regularly enough that people don’t forget about you. It is a difficult balance to maintain, and it will probably need tweaking after your first six months in response to feedback. This depends largely on two factors.
What is your business? Are people checking in regularly? Even if your business provides a product that customers buy only once per customer (at the extreme), that doesn’t mean you don’t need regular videos.
You can post about good home maintenance or changes in the housing market and it will interest your customer base. The important thing is to pick content that adds value because no one will watch a YouTube marketing video that’s just another commercial.
What can you maintain? In the same way that quality is a limiting factor in your release schedule, so too can your time and availability. If you wanted to release 5 videos a day, that would consume at the very minimum all of your time. Even then you would find yourself falling behind. To maintain even once a month for some companies is a burden.
If your videos are 20 minutes long, once a quarter could be acceptable both to your viewers and to your staff. You offer enough content keep viewers satisfied while the investment isn’t over burdensome. If your video is only 30 seconds, then it’s simple enough for you to post twice a week. The length is a decision that depends on the content and the viewership.
As a general rule of thumb, most YouTube marketing brands post between 3 times a week and once every 2 months. Anywhere you can fit within this range will be acceptable and ensure regular viewership. Just make sure when people come to your YouTube channel at 2 pm on a Wednesday there’s a new video for them to enjoy (if that was your scheduled posting time)!
Working with a Washingon DC Video Production Company can, of course, simplify the process of regular posting and building up a backlog. If you’d like to ask Foundation Digital Media about our own process, contact us.
