Best Buy, Zappos, Rakuten, Etsy and other well-known e-commerce stores actively use YouTube as part of their marketing strategy.
Some perform product analysis, others choose to partner with influencers, develop educational content or storytelling, etc. In all these strategies, the ultimate goal is to sell on YouTube, and although e-commerce uses different ways to achieve this, we recognize a number of good practices, which are worth discovering.
They emphasize SEO optimization of titles and descriptions, the use of subtitles to improve reach or audience peaks to improve the impact of their campaigns.
If you want to know in depth some of these practices, you have an appointment with the following lines:
These practices and tips will help you sell on YouTube with your e-commerce
Optimize title and description for SEO
Today, organic traffic plays a key role in the commercial performance of e-commerce stores. In fact, most Amazon shoppers do not come from paid advertising, but from the organic results of Google, Bing or Yahoo!
Its importance to sell on YouTube is remarkable since the internal search engine of this platform is the second most used in the world, only behind Google (both companies, incidentally, are owned by Alphabet).
But how can e-commerce stores improve the organic positioning of their contents in this social network? Optimizing the title and descriptions. These fields, easily modifiable, are a good opportunity to include keywords and long tails related to our business or our products.
It is also possible to catapult into recent trends with the use of hashtags. However, the length of titles and descriptions has its limits: 70 characters for titles and 1000 characters for descriptions.
Commitment to short-term content
One of the most interesting trends in video marketing is the use of short, dynamic and concise videos.
When selling on YouTube, e-commerce stores should not disregard this advice. Whether your contents are recipes, demonstrations or analysis of your own products, their duration should not exceed 2 minutes, nor be less than 30 seconds.
Of course, rules are meant to be broken, aren’t they? Certain content may require a longer duration, without fear of damaging its performance or impact on the audience.
Take advantage of Youtube Cards
Since most of your content will revolve around your e-commerce products, why miss the opportunity to link them?
Although this is already possible in the description of the video, YouTube has launched a very interesting resource to boost clicks: YouTube Cards.
They are defined as interactive elements that can be inserted into a video and show products, links to the store or even other content of interest.
Partner with famous YouTubers to make unboxings
The channels of unboxing have grown like foam in recent years.
For Amazon, Best Buy, Zalando and other e-commerce, these influencers offer a great opportunity to market a product on YouTube with the support of their subscribers.
But how do you do it? It’s as simple as partnering with them and coordinating when launching offer campaigns and new products. If a major YouTuber unboxes a few days before the launch, it could boost sales of that product.
Create very attractive thumbnails for your customers
When users search and select videos on YouTube, the title and description aren’t the only elements they stop at.
Thumbnails are even more important. In fact, a wise choice of these images will help attract more clicks than any title or SEO optimized description.
Take advantage of audience peaks for your campaigns
When selling a product on YouTube, ‘what’ and ‘how’ matter as much as ‘when’.
This platform is no different from Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. It has its own primetime, and ecommerces should know it if they want to improve their business performance.
According to Frederator Networks, a media company that operates more than a thousand YouTube accounts, the best time to publish from Monday to Wednesday is 2 pm to 4pm according to the Eastern Standard Time (EST, hereinafter).
On Thursday and Friday, however, 3pm EST is the best time to launch campaigns, while the idea weekend runs from 9am to 11am EST.
As it could not be otherwise, each e-commerce must find out what is its particular primetime, that is, the time of maximum activity of its audience on YouTube.
Improve the reach of your campaigns with the help of subtitles
And if you are still wondering how to sell your product on YouTube, you should know that the use of subtitles is an excellent resource for online companies.
The use of subtitles in videos allows ecommerces to leverage the reach of their content. This functionality, however, will be of little use to stores targeting local or national markets.
According to Google, 6 out of 10 YouTube video views are subtitled (in a different language than the one used for the content, of course). And is that selling on YouTube is the last frontier of e-commerce stores.
If you already do it on Facebook, Instagram, POS (point of sale) and other channels, what are you waiting for to connect with the users of the second most visited website in the world, according to Alexa data?