Taking advantage of YouTube to build your brand

With the emotional power of video, YouTube's global audience and Google AdWords' targeting tools, brands can reach millions of people and expand their markets with very little effort or cost. With 800 million viewers per month, YouTube is the No. 1 video site in the world and businesses that run a YouTube video campaign see an average increase of 20% in traffic to their websites. In South Africa, the opportunities for businesses to capitalise on YouTube remain open. Making use of YouTube to grow a business can seem like a daunting task, but it need not be.

Six top tips

Keeping the following simple tips in mind, businesses can leverage the power of YouTube to grow their brand presence.

1. Set goals for your video - What do you want your video to do. Generate awareness about your business? Drive traffic to your site? Increase sales? Answer customers' questions? With a clear goal for your video, you will be ready to shoot with purpose.

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2. Be authentic - The key to a great video is authenticity, so just grab the best camera you've got and press record. Not sure what to shoot? You can give a tour of your offices; tell the story of how your brand got started, or answer your most frequently asked questions. The opportunities are endless. Spend five minutes exploring YouTube and you will see that people have found dozens of ways to promote their brands. Quick how-to videos, customer testimonials or simply sharing a little about your brand's goals and values - these are constantly popular types of branded video. How you choose to display your brand depends on your goals, your audience and their needs.

3. Promote your video - Once your video is live on YouTube, promote it with easy-to-build AdWords for video ads. In addition, do not forget to include your video on your website and business cards, as well as sharing it on social networks. Another free and quick way to promote your video is to add a description, title and tags. You can do this the moment your video starts uploading to YouTube. Adding this information, known as "metadata," is a key step to helping YouTube know what is in your video. By giving YouTube this information, you help catalogue your video so people can find it and discover your business.

4. Explore editing tools - The idea of editing may seem like something best left to professionals, but that is not always necessary. With digital video, editing is easier than ever before. You can drag and drop your favourite takes, add music, and arrange your videos however you want. The best way to put your video together is to use editing software. Almost every new computer comes with a free video editor, like Apple's iMovie or Windows' Movie Maker. There are plenty of other web-based programs, too, like the YouTube Video Editor, which lets you piece together videos right in your web browser.

5. Keep it social - Encourage your viewers to talk about your business-online and offline-by keeping comments, voting, and other settings enabled after you upload a video to YouTube. The social-friendly settings listed below a clip are already active when you upload a video, so you do not need to change anything if you want your clip to be as interactive as possible and widely shared.

6. Explore the various opportunities open to brand on YouTube - While creating and opening a channel is what most brands think of first when considering using YouTube as part of the marketing mix, it isn't the only opportunity available. With audiences in the millions and engaged communities hungry for content, YouTube creators are attractive partners for brands.

The YouTube Partner Program lets YouTube creators monetise content on YouTube in many ways, including advertisements, paid subscriptions, and merchandise. Partner revenue is up 50% year on year - and YouTube has seen this level of partner revenue growth for three straight years. While great for the creators, this has also been a success for brands.