Our Spidersnet Learning Hub is full of useful tips and advice on a huge range of digital marketing topics. We’ve covered plenty of aspects of social media along the way, however, one such subject that we never get asked about is YouTube. Why so many car dealerships are ignoring YouTube baffles us.
We thought we’d take some time out to cover this fantastic tool and write a nice guide on how you can use YouTube to help drive new leads and keep people engaged on your other social media channels.
Let’s start at the beginning…
Why Youtube?
The best way to explain why YouTube is such a powerful marketing tool, is by running through some facts and figures…
Number Two!
Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google? Over three billion searches are made on YouTube a month, which means that it is larger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and AOL combined! Therefore, if you focus your SEO efforts on optimising your site for traditional search engines, but aren’t present on YouTube then you may well be missing out on some great opportunities.
400 in 1
400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That is a figure so large it is almost impossible to comprehend. In one day 576,000 hours of video are added to the site, meaning over 4,032,000 hours are added in a week and 209,664,000 hours of video are added in a year. Over 209 million hours in one year! This goes to show just how powerful YouTube is.
In one day…
If you thought the above statistic was impressive, wait until you hear this one: 1 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each day (365 billion hours a year). And whilst a lot of that may well be funny cat videos, it goes to show that there is potential for your dealership to make the most of this fantastic tool going forward.
Setting up and optimising your account
There are a few things to bear in mind when you set up your dealership’s YouTube page. For example, you don’t want to go in with the attitude that all you have to do is upload videos of your stock to drive leads. There is much more to YouTube than that.
You want to think about your YouTube page as its own standalone website for your dealership. You may be uploading videos to your actual website, but what if someone comes to your YouTube page first? Will they have enough information from you to be able to get in touch if they do want to make a purchase?
“Ensure that your dealership’s YouTube page offers up as much information as possible. Remember that this page may be the first interaction someone will have with your business, therefore they need to be able to get in touch if they’re interested in what you have to offer.”
Adam Rowden, Spidersnet
Sure, you will most probably have a link from your page to your website, but many people won’t click on that link. Therefore, it’s vital that all of your dealership’s contact information and opening times are present on your page, along with any other useful info including a bit of blurb about your dealership, your company logo and links to your other social pages. You’ll also want to ensure that you’re adding relevant keyword tags to your page. Make sure you’re selecting terms that would be used to find your dealership.
Other things to bear in mind:
- Use your dealership’s name as the YouTube profile name
- Make sure your ‘channel art’ fits in with your company branding
- Be sure to check the ‘visibility’ box so the public can see your page
Which videos to post?
Once you have your page setup you’ll want to ensure that you’re posting the right videos to generate leads. Whilst it would be tempting to simply upload videos of all of your stock, your YouTube strategy should include much more. That’s not to say in-depth stock videos aren’t an extremely valuable and useful commodity, because they really are, but you need to find the balance.
As with all social media, true success comes from being able to balance content that hooks people in and entertains with the more practical stock videos, which are essentially used to sell a product. Consumers don’t want to be sold to all the time.
If you want to engage an audience then you’ll want to create videos that people will enjoy watching and share on Facebook and Twitter. This way, your content is getting spread around the web without you having to do too much work. Here are some ideas for videos that you could create for your dealership:
How-to videos
How to videos are extremely popular on YouTube, in fact, how-to searches are increasing by 70% year on year. With customers citing that they are 4 times more likely to watch a video about a product than read about it. If you have an MOT and servicing centre, then why not make the most of this and make a number of videos showing people how to change their oil, swap tyres and more? If your videos are of a good quality then your dealership will come across as an authority figure that can be trusted. Also, lots of people will be searching for these videos online, so creating your own increases your chances of getting found online.
Here is a great example of a how to video that Renault UK put together. We know that you don’t have the same budget as Renault, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also create something of a similar quality.
If you create these videos then we’d highly recommend that you also add them to your dealership’s website. This is usually pretty easy to do and adds more useful content to your site. If you write blog posts to accompany the videos then you could increase your dealership’s chances of appearing high up in Google’s search results pages for related search terms.
Customer testimonials
If you have a happy customer then we’d always recommend taking a photo of them with their purchase to post on Facebook and Twitter. However, why not see if you can take this a step further and ask them if they wouldn’t mind featuring in a quick video testimonial?
All you need to do is sit them in, or in front of, their car and ask them what they think of their new purchase and how much they enjoyed dealing with your business. A video testimonial is a fantastic marketing tool and you should be posting all of these to Facebook and Twitter as well as adding them to your dealership’s website.
There are few things better for your business than actual people endorsing your brand!
Behind the scenes footage
You can give your dealership a bit of personality by uploading fun and entertaining videos of what goes on behind the scenes. Perhaps it’s one of your sales team’s birthdays and you’ve bought a cake. Why not quickly film everyone singing Happy Birthday and post it to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter?
You could also film any days out that you take your staff on. If you’re all off to the races, why not make a little video of everyone having fun? The possibilities are endless. Take a look at our customer MJ Warner showing off their garage:
Stock videos
And then, once you have ensured that you’re making interesting, entertaining and informative videos, you can start to add stock videos too. You’re in business to sell cars, so we would recommend you make videos for all of your stock. You want to show people the car in its entirety including any features and other information that might come in handy.
This is easy to do and offers plenty more information than just a photograph of the car. Once you’ve created this video you should be adding it to your ad details page on your website and sharing it to all of your social media channels.
As with all forms of social media, and blogging for that matter, it’s important that you’re updating YouTube regularly. Not only will this keep people happy, but it is also great for SEO.
Review videos
A step up from your stock videos, why not take on Top Gear and start creating videos of you reviewing your stock. This type of video will take a little bit longer to create, and maybe a labour of love, but the end product will be worth it. A really engaging, informative video will draw people in and make them love a car (and hopefully make them want to buy it! One of our customers MJ Warner has started to create reveiw videos, and we think they’re really great! Take a look…
This is easy to do and offers plenty more information than just a photograph of the car. Once you’ve created this video you should be adding it to your ad details page on your website and sharing it to all of your social media channels.
As with all forms of social media, and blogging for that matter, it’s important that you’re updating YouTube regularly. Not only will this keep people happy, but it is also great for SEO.
Optimising your videos
When you consider that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, with over three billion searches being made each month, you can see why it’s so important to optimise your videos. Just as you would optimise your website and blog posts for Google, your videos should be created and put together with YouTube’s search in mind.
For example, you will want to ensure that the titles of your videos are search-term-friendly. When writing the title for a video, think about what someone would search in order to find it. Words like ‘how to’, ‘tips’, ‘best’, ‘top’, are all good as they are likely to be used by people when searching.
“Tagging is essential; titles and tags are a major factor in making your videos more discoverable. YouTube currently has no way of understanding video content, so associating you video with text is an important way for you to rank for specific keywords in your tagging, and try you best to avoid irrelevant tags even if it’s tempting.”
Search Engine Watch
Video descriptions
As well as optimising your video’s title, you should also ensure that you’re writing a nice amount of good quality copy in the video description. Make sure that you write a good description that sells the video and ensure that you include a variety of relevant key terms too – these will help your video to rank in the search results pages. However, when it comes to adding key terms to your descriptions – and any online content for that matter – it’s very important that you keep the writing natural. Don’t stuff in as many terms as possible, making it clunky and hard to read.
You can also add in some search friendly video tags, which should be all of the relevant terms that relate to the video.
In conclusion
Hopefully, you have read this useful guide all the way to the end as opposed to just skipping to the bottom of the page. However, if you did skim read this piece, then here are some snippets to take away with you.
- Ensure your YouTube profile page is well optimised and features all of your dealership’s relevant information
- Be sure to post interesting and entertaining videos as well as generic stock updates
- Video testimonials are invaluable
- Share all of your videos on your other social channels and embed them onto your website for added SEO benefits.
- Optimise all of your videos for search to ensure they are discovered