While it's true across every industry, manufacturers, in particular, usually have the wrong approach to YouTube.
What we find most often with industrial companies is that YouTube is being used solely as a video hosting service, or a way to embed videos on your website. While YouTube is great for this, there is tremendous potential for organic search and video discovery that most manufacturers don't realize.
In this article, we'll discuss the potential of YouTube and how it can fit into your overall industrial video production strategy. Need help creating or getting started with videos? Let us know.
Industrial Video Production - YouTube Strategy
At the core of any YouTube strategy, your videos should be addressing the intent of your target viewer. What are they searching for? What do they want to watch? Your videos should provide some sort of value to the viewer, usually in the form of education, entertainment, inspiration, or information.
The example below is a video we created for Flexaust that combines both entertainment, information and education into a short video.
If you’ve ever created how-to videos or videos specifically for YouTube, you’ll often notice that they perform better than your traditional about us or company overview style videos.
These traditional marketing videos are important, but they don't perform well on YouTube. They are more suited for your website, where your customer is further along in their buying journey.
If you can create videos that address the problem or search intent of your customer, early on in their buying journey, you'll generate brand awareness and establish your company as an authority on that topic.
This is the saying “Show, don't tell” in full effect. When you can demonstrate your expertise through a video, it becomes much more effective than just telling someone you are great at something - which a lot of traditional marketing videos do.
Industrial Video Production - YouTube Ideas
A great way for manufacturers to come up with video ideas for YouTube is to write down the most common questions your sales and customer service team get. Answer each of these questions with one longer video or better yet, make individual videos that address each of these questions.
You can also come up with ideas by just searching in the Youtube search bar. When you start typing, you will notice that YouTube will autocomplete searches. If something comes up in autocomplete, that means there is already search traffic for it and that you should create videos for it.
Across the board, though, how-to videos, tutorials, list videos, demonstrations, and behind-the-scenes style videos tend to do well on YouTube for manufacturing and industrial companies.
Once you start creating content for YouTube, you will start to notice what videos do better than others, or you may start getting comments about particular content topics. When you start noticing trends like that, you can double down on those ideas.
YouTube Organic Traffic Opportunities for Manufacturers
Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, only behind Google?
What this means for you as an industrial company or manufacturer is that you can create videos specifically targeted to what your target customers are searching for. If your business is already doing SEO and blogging, video and YouTube are basically the same as this.
When a video is well-made, optimized for a search query, and the viewer tends to watch a majority of it, the video will start to rank. Not only will it rank in YouTube, but it will also rank in Google search results. In addition, relevant videos embedded onto a blog post or website page further increase the effectiveness of both the video and the page itself.
Video paired with blogging, SEO, and YouTube makes it a win-win-win marketing strategy.
Your Industrial Video Production Partner
Capture is an industrial video production company that equips businesses like yours with strategic, effective, and brand-supporting videos for websites, YouTube, and digital marketing.
If you need help developing a YouTube strategy for your manufacturing business, we can help. Contact us or give us a call at 616-930-2222.
