What Is a YouTube First Strategy?

Over recent months we have been talking to a lot of brands, globally, nationally and regionally, about YouTube first strategies, and it is worth explaining what that actually means. Flip it around: if you are a business with a website or an e-commerce site promoting mainly through PPC and a bit of social, your main driver is getting people to land on the website, using pay-per-click, essentially a set of words that gets you onto page one when someone searches on Google, whether you are paying for those ads or getting there organically through social. That is fine, but it is one-dimensional, it does not work back anywhere else, because it is a single tactic. The same is true of Facebook ads: yes, you drive people to your website, but it does not bring any other benefit beyond that.

A YouTube first strategy is different, because YouTube is the best platform for showing what your brand, products and services are really like in an authentic way. It is the second biggest search engine in the world and the fourth most watched channel in the UK, and people go there to search, and to be entertained, with video increasingly the way consumers prefer to take in information. Video also gets ranked very highly by Google, so if a lot of people are watching your videos, Google will rank you higher and place your videos on the home page, which helps from an SEO perspective too, and bringing Q&A into your YouTube videos gets ranked again on top of that. There are multiple reasons why a YouTube first strategy drives a lot of engagement and spreads benefit out in many directions, whereas other channels typically only go one way. YouTube spiders off into lots of different benefits for a business, and we have some good statistics and techniques on how that helps. So do not think of YouTube as flat or one-dimensional, it is probably one of the best channels available, and it brings benefits in plenty of other directions for a business.