This guide helps you explore your options and make a decision.
As of 2023, YouTube has 2.7 billion active users, and over 122 million people visit YouTube every day. By 2025, it’s estimated that YouTube’s user base will grow to 2.85 billion.
Businesses benefit from using YouTube marketing in seven important ways:
- Rank better on Google, since YouTube is a Google product, and YouTube videos rank on Google Search.
- Reach YouTube’s massive audience of millions of daily visitors and billions of active users.
- Boost your brand credibility and keep your audiences engaged longer.
- Enjoy higher conversion rates with video content (sites that use video average a 4.8% conversion rate compared to sites that don’t use video, which only average a 2.9% conversion rate).
- YouTube provides a reliable channel for keeping all your video creatives online and organized.
- YouTube videos can be endlessly repurposed for your different platforms: your website, your other social media channels, your email newsletter, your YouTube Shorts for younger audiences, and more, including recreating your videos for your infographics.
- Reach a bigger audience with YouTube ads.
To seize these opportunities and claim the benefits of YouTube marketing, how do you develop and implement a comprehensive and effective YouTube marketing strategy?
First, you have to understand what YouTube marketing is and what it requires for success.
YouTube Marketing 101
YouTube marketing can be intimidating for brands big and small. It combines a key strategic principle – search engine optimization (SEO) – and one of the most resource-intensive but high-conversion media – video, which can be a complex process.
YouTube marketing is essentially the process of promoting your brand, product, or service on YouTube. There are three main ways brands and marketers use YouTube for video marketing:
For starters, brands who intend to engage in YouTube marketing have to know and get good at the following:
- How to create a YouTube Channel
- How to create videos for YouTube
- How to promote their YouTube Channels Effectively
- Understand and use YouTube analytics to optimize their channels
- Ably use and leverage YouTube marketing software such as VidIQ, Agorapulse, BuzzSumo, Social Blade, Unbox Social, Social Bakers, and Vidooly
- Do effective YouTube marketing
Brands also need to understand and know the different YouTube marketing opportunities to take advantage of for their particular channels and target audiences.
There are several things to think through and decide on. Do you invest in organic inbound marketing (a marketing strategy driving free traffic to your site to generate organic leads)? How do you do effective video SEO and make sure the right people find your videos? What’s the best video content structure for your channel? Should you consider investing more in paid ads instead?
Given these considerations and more for your business, if you want to invest in YouTube marketing, you basically have two options: learn how to do all these well or hire a pre-vetted YouTube freelancer to do all these for you.
Why Do You Need A YouTube Marketing Strategy?
YouTube fans consume more than one billion hours of video every single day. Google shares on its Ads and Commerce blog that 70% of YT viewers purchase something after seeing it on YouTube. This demonstrates how effective YouTube marketing can be for generating business revenues if done right with a good marketing strategy.
To take maximum advantage of these opportunities, you need to have a clear and feasible plan. That plan is your YouTube marketing strategy.
YouTube Video Shopping Trends and Insights
In addition, eighty percent (80%) of shoppers watch videos at the beginning of their shopping journey. Your brand has this huge opportunity to influence shoppers long before they decide to buy.
Think With Google featured three of its leading video creators to share their insights on shopping trends they see on the YouTube platform: Amber Scholl for shop videos, Carla Stevenne for haul videos, and Karen Yeung for first impression videos.
All agree that digital video is useful, not just for the research and buying action phases of shopping but also for shopping inspiration and vicarious experiences.
Amber Scholl shares, “While the majority of my audience loves shopping, there are people who watch purely for entertainment. Even then, though, I’ve heard from fans who had no intention of buying things in stores but ended up changing their minds when they saw how easy or fun it can be.”
Carla Stevenne explains, “I think it’s because they give people the opportunity to watch someone who isn’t an actor or model interact with things they might have seen on a website or a magazine. The format has evolved a bit over the years, though. In the past, creators would just quickly mention a product they bought and then move on. Now, they take the time to describe each item, say where they bought it, and explain why they chose it.”
Karen Yeung provides these insights on the popularity of impressions videos, “In first-impression videos, a creator either buys a product for the first time or buys from a store they haven’t shopped at before. They’re essentially really authentic on-the-spot product reviews, which is what sets them apart from other shopping inspiration videos, where creators have already interacted with a product, or at least formed an opinion on it.
Seeing a real person try out these products in real-time can help inspire a viewer’s next purchase, especially when this ‘real person’ is a creator who they trust will tell the truth.”
Developing A Strong YouTube Marketing Strategy
Crafting an effective YouTube marketing strategy takes a significant investment of your attention, time, energy, and material resources. You can’t leave it to amateurs at video marketing, especially YouTube video marketing
For starters, you have to have a successful track record for these --
- You need to produce what your target customers want. Not what you think they want, but what they really want. You need good audience research and competitor analysis for this.
- You need to make sure the right people find your videos. YouTube is basically a search engine, so you need to optimize your content for the YouTube algorithm, just like what you do for Google search engine optimization (SEO).
- You need to know how to conduct good keyword research.
- You need to be good at strategizing your content plan.
- You need to know how to set up your YouTube Channel, upload and describe your videos well, understand your video analytics, and optimize them to get more views and engagement.
- You need to know how to optimize your channel to gain more subscribers.
- You need to understand and leverage YouTube influencer marketing.
- You need to know how to do YouTube advertising well.
Of course, you can do all these or assign members of your in-house team to learn and do these well. You can also save yourself the costs of the steep learning curve of YouTube marketing and hire your YouTube freelancer now.
What Does A YouTube Freelancer Do?
YouTube can help you significantly boost your brand awareness and reach. You don’t have to stress over your YouTube marketing campaigns if you hire an expert YouTube freelancer to do it for you.
Here are what your YouTube freelancer can do for you and your business:
Conduct audience research and competitive analysis.
Audience research is studying the people you are trying to reach with your content, while competitive analysis is identifying your competitors in your industry and identifying their marketing strategies.
When done well, audience research helps you know who your audience is and what they want, so you can create the content that best resonates with them and satisfies their wants. Audience research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Your YouTube freelancer would know how to ask the right questions and identify the audience to ask the right questions so that you will have information that’s relevant and meaningful to your own business needs and goals. Audience research is the foundational point of a good marketing strategy.
A good competitive analysis helps you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses compared to your own so that you can find a gap in the market that optimizes your strengths and minimizes your weaknesses. This helps you more clearly think through, develop, and fine-tune your overall business strategy and marketing strategy, particularly your YouTube marketing strategy.
Develop your YouTube marketing strategy.
In developing your YouTube marketing strategy, your YouTube freelancer will first help you clarify and define your goals in measurable terms. Then, they will do a marketing analysis and outline a strategy and a set of techniques for your marketing plan. They will also help you explore different strategic options given your current and available budget, as well as your marketing goals and objectives.
Craft your YouTube video content plan.
Given your overall marketing strategy and YouTube Channel goals, your YouTube freelancer will help you:
- Plan themes for your content
- Brainstorm campaign and post ideas
- Decide on your content mix
- Decide when you will post your content
- Assign task responsibilities to your team if you have one, or do the task themselves if that’s what you contracted them to do
- Create or source your design assets to create a cohesive look for your brand identity
- Schedule your content in advance to be automatically posted when it’s time.
Create and optimize video content.
Before you start filming and creating your videos, your YouTube freelancer will help you decide what type of videos would help you achieve your business and YouTube marketing goals.
There are basically eight types of YouTube videos to create:
- Customer testimonials – short-form interviews with your satisfied customers to help build your brand and product/service credibility
- On-demand product demonstration videos – short pieces of content showing the benefits of your product or service and how to use this product or service
- Explainer and tutorial videos – longer, in-depth videos exploring how to use a product or service, explaining a new product/service feature, and answering customer support questions
- Thought leader interviews – interviews with experts or thought leaders in your industry to strengthen your authority and boost your credibility
- Project reviews and case studies – reviews cases of successful use of your product or services, often supported by well-researched data and statistics, to further educate your audience and amplify your authority and credibility
- YouTube Live – Live videos allow you to share unfiltered moments with your audience and let your audience participate with real-time reactions and comments, which help boost audience engagement and connection
- Video blogs – daily or weekly videos documenting daily life, events, or reports/updates from your business.
- Event videos – in-person experiences at a conference or expo highlighting your brand, product, or service and showing how crowds are responding to it
Provide SEO support.
Search engine optimization (SEO) factors for Google Search can be different for YouTube, as YouTube has its own algorithm.
Your YouTube freelancer knows what these important SEO factors are and leverages them in creating and structuring your video content. They will also help you with keyword analysis and research, writing SEO-friendly video descriptions, and applying other optimization techniques and tools to help you get maximum views and engagement on your YouTube Channel.
Schedule your video posts optimally.
With video marketing, timing is crucial. Your YouTube freelancer will help you find the optimal times to post videos to your target audience for maximum reach and boost the opportunities for your videos to be shared and promoted at the right time. They will help you make sure that you’re consistently creating and posting videos that capture the largest audience’s attention at the best times.
Manage your YouTube Channel.
Your YouTube freelancer can help you not just set up your YouTube Channel but also set it up in a way that is optimized for search engines. They can create playlists, organize your content to make your videos easy to find for your target audience, manage comments, and promote your content across different marketing channels in alignment with your cross-channel marketing goals.
Monitor your video analytics to optimize your videos and channel.
Regularly monitoring, understanding, and using your analytics reports are critical to optimizing your online presence in general and your YouTube Channel in particular. Your YouTube freelancer will closely watch the key components of your marketing strategy and the relevant metrics and insights for these.
The eight essential YouTube metrics they will particularly focus on will be:
- Traffic sources
- Impressions and Click-Through-Rates (CTRs)
- Watch time and average view duration
- Watch time for subscribers
- Key moments for audience retention
- Likes, dislikes, and comments
- Audience demographics
- Returning and unique viewers and subscribers
Benefits Of Working With Your Own YouTube Freelancer
Having your own YouTube freelancer gives you a strong competitive edge in your industry. Your YouTube freelancer already has the experience and track record for implementing your YouTube marketing efforts effectively, at less time and cost to you and your business.
You don’t have to waste resources learning YouTube marketing, experimenting, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and optimizing your YouTube Channel, which you would be doing if you did it yourself.
Among small businesses in the United States, only 9% use YouTube for their video marketing strategy. If you are a small business owner or a marketer serving small businesses, this represents a huge untapped opportunity to gain a significant competitive edge over other small businesses in your market.
Sixty-two percent (62%) of companies use YouTube for digital marketing, but few know how to use it correctly. If they did, there wouldn’t be YouTube freelancers and so many freelance marketplaces out there offering YouTube marketing services.
With your own YouTube freelancer, you can:
Improve your video marketing ROI
Since implementing an effective YouTube marketing strategy takes up considerable attention, time, energy, and other resources, it is just right that it should also deliver sufficient returns on investment (ROI).
For video marketing in general, 92% of marketers experience favorable ROI. For YouTube marketing in particular, a meta-analysis of 56 case studies across eight countries shows YouTube to be more effective than television in ROI terms for both online and offline purchased products.
A top-quality YouTube freelancer can provide you with step-by-step guidance, using tested-and-proven techniques and tools to seize the ROI potentials of your every video. Using a methodical, data-driven process that they’ve fine-tuned as experts in YouTube marketing, they can guide you through mastering your strategy and gain the most from your YouTube marketing efforts.
Access precious video marketing insights and expertise
YouTube marketing has its own unique dynamics and nuances that are vastly different from other search engines and social media channels. The best methods and techniques you employ for your other marketing channels will probably not work, or not work as well, on YouTube.
As a Google property, too, like Google, YouTube constantly changes its algorithms that powerfully influence how visible and impactful your video content will be.
It will be challenging for you to stay updated with the latest YouTube guidelines and algorithm changes if YouTube marketing is not your core expertise. Your YouTube freelancer will have more understanding of and experience with the YouTube ecosystem and can do this for you instead.
Employ specialist skills
Your YouTube freelancer should already have at least five years of YouTube marketing experience and have developed the necessary knowledge, skills, and track record to do YouTube marketing effectively.
So, they can help with each and every aspect of your YouTube marketing campaigns. Your YouTube freelancer can:
- Conduct market research
- Develop your marketing strategy and create your content plan
- Create and edit your videos
- Post your videos in a timely manner
- Optimize your channel and videos for SEO
- Understand and interpret your data analytics reports and leverage them for optimizing your YouTube Channel
Save time and money
You will save yourself precious time and money by hiring an expert YouTube freelancer rather than doing it on your own or assigning an employee to do it and figure out everything by study, trial, and error.
There is the cost of the learning curve to consider, aside from the opportunity cost of giving up other things you or your employee can productively do as you learn new knowledge and skills in effective YouTube marketing.
With your YouTube freelancer, you can streamline the process by letting them do what they already have expertise on, as you and your employee also focus on your own core expertise to grow and scale your business.
Amplify your creativity
You or your employees can only do so much. Imagine investing precious attention, time, energy, and money in coming up with ideas for your video content, then producing them regularly and in ways that resonate with the needs and interests of your target audience. Then, imagine consistently finding ways to make them more engaging for your audience. After a while, it can stretch your resources thinner than you’ve bargained for.
With your YouTube freelancer, you’ll never run out of ideas. They’re used to consistently monitoring market trends, researching audiences, and examining competition to power and fine-tune your marketing strategy.
Why Choose A YouTube Freelancer?
With a good YouTube freelancer, you and your business can enjoy the benefits of:
- Developing the right YouTube marketing strategy for your intended target audience
- Correctly setting up your channel for SEO
- Regularly creating and optimizing your video content
- Expertly promoting your channel across cross-channel platforms
- Learning from your analytics to optimize your channel
- Enjoying higher returns on your investment
More specifically, choosing to hire a YouTube freelancer for your video marketing campaigns provides you with the following:
Quality expertise
YouTube freelancers have a quality track record to protect and keep. Their freelance status implies that their career is largely dependent on satisfied clients, repeat projects, and glowing referrals.
So, with your YouTube freelancer, you can expect a professional commitment to deliver excellent quality outcomes in all your projects with them.
Versatile skills
You can choose different YouTube freelancers for different aspects of your YouTube marketing: from market research to the development of a marketing strategy and content plan, to setting up your YouTube Channel for SEO, to creating, editing, and posting your videos, to channel management, to monitoring analytics and channel optimization.
You are not tied down to any one freelancer on a long-term contract, so you can change freelancers as your YouTube marketing needs to evolve. You can also hire several freelancers at the same time for different aspects of your marketing campaign.
This affords you a degree of skill versatility that you would not enjoy if you were to do it on your own or hire a team of your employees to do it for you, on top of their existing jobs.
Flexibility
Instead of a rigid 9-to-5 work schedule, freelancers can work according to the mutually agreed-on schedule that’s best for both of you. They’re able to perform their best work at their best times, and you get to have your projects done according to your own unique timelines and deliverables. As long as your communication lines remain open, you’re better off working with a YouTube freelancer.
Creativity
A YouTube freelancer brings a fresh perspective as well as nuanced expertise to your content plan and videos. They possess wider insights into the market, a keen understanding of your audience and your business, and the expert eye of a professional. All these combined help you and your brand to deliver more innovative and relevant content to your target audience.
Cost-efficiency
Hiring a YouTube freelancer is more cost-effective than hiring an in-house marketer, as you won’t have any overhead costs to pay for. You simply agree on a fee with your YouTube freelancer, subject to certain deliverables and timelines. You won’t even have to pay for training, as your YouTube freelancer already comes to you with training, experience, and a track record to show for it.
Scalability
You can scale your YouTube marketing team up or down according to your evolving needs. You can start with one YouTube freelancer and then add more as you expand your marketing efforts, or you can trim your team down when you want to cut back on your efforts due to budget constraints.
Grow and scale your business faster by freeing up your attention, time, energy, and other resources to do what you’re best at. Leave it to your YouTube freelancer to do what they’re best at.
How To Choose And Hire Your YT Freelancer
There are many YouTube freelancers and freelance platforms out there, but ultimately, it boils down to who you trust and can rely on. Not all YouTube freelancers are equal.
Since you don’t have close supervision of a freelancer like you would have with an employee, tracking the time invested by a freelancer is not feasible.
Here are key tips on making sure you select and hire the best YouTube freelancer for you and your business --
- Clarify your needs and goals. Know exactly what kind of support you will need. Are you currently focusing on channel creation and development or channel promotion? These would require different skills.
- Be clear about your project scope. Think about timelines and deliverables for your YouTube marketing campaign. What will it cover and not cover? This will help you determine not just the freelancer expertise you require but also the number of freelancers you will need.
- Determine your budget. How much are you willing to invest in paying for your YouTube freelancer’s support based on the timeline and deliverables you have set?
Be careful, though, about automatically selecting the freelancer with the cheapest rates. Generally, the cheaper the rates, the lower the skill level, expertise, and quality of output.
YouTube freelancers who know the value they deliver price their services commensurate to their valuable contribution to your business. They will also have fewer other projects from other clients to attend to, so they can focus on yours.
- Examine their skills and experience. The best YouTube freelancers will have a portfolio of their best work or have readily available reviews and testimonials from satisfied clients.
- Test communication. You should both be committed to open, transparent, and regular communication. They should be able to promptly answer any questions you may have and be available to contact you when you need them. You can test this in your initial interactions and interview by finding out their communication style, communication channels, and availability for consultation.
At Growth Collective, we’ve made this easier for you. We personally invite, vet, certify, and hand-pick our talented pool of marketing experts, such as YouTube freelancers, based on these specific criteria:
- At least five years of related experience
- A 5-star track record of client satisfaction
- A true expert in at least one marketing tool (YouTube for a YouTube freelancer)
- Excellent communication and timeliness
All you need to do is create a role, let our all-new platform match you with a selection of top YouTube freelancers, and choose the YouTube freelancer you want to work with – all within 48 hours. Book a free consultation call now.
Growth Collective believes that the right expert can change the trajectory of your business. This is why its platform has built a network of pre-vetted specialists across every major marketing channel, tool, and vertical.
Our experts have proven track records working with such diverse top brands as Amazon, Airbnb, Citrix, Dow Jones, Facebook, Ghirardelli, Google, IBM, Pokémon, SnapTravel, and Visa, among many companies.
Should You Hire A YouTube Freelancer?
Ultimately, your decision comes down to this: do you do YouTube marketing on your own or with an employee, or do you hire a YouTube freelancer instead?
If you want to do it on your own or with an employee, you’ll need to set aside time and energy to define your brand’s goals and plan for how your videos can specifically achieve these goals. You’ll also need to have the time and expertise to plan, film, edit, market, and analyze your content consistently. If you can devote the required amount of time and energy to your YouTube marketing efforts and create engaging and shareable content for your audience, then do it on your own.
If you decide to hire a YouTube freelancer, you can try many freelancing sites, vet their available freelancers yourself, and see which one works best for you. However, you probably don’t have the luxury of time to do this, and time costs money. You don’t want to spend more time and money on something you’re not even sure of.
Your best option is to hire a YouTube freelancer from Growth Collective who is pre-vetted, with proven expertise, track record, communication skills, and timeliness. This saves you a lot of time, effort, and money while you reap the benefits of professional and expert YouTube marketing services for growing and scaling your business.
Get started now.
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