In this short blog post and video, I’m going to show you the correct way to use YouTube to drive more sales leads and phone calls for your local business.
Whether it’s your own business or it’s one of your clients, doesn’t really matter.
Now, the thing is, when it comes to YouTube, so many people do it wrong.
They want to get more people in the front door.
They want to get more phone calls for their plumbing business, for their hairdressers, for their restaurants and all of that other stuff.
And they teach people to get their videos ranked on YouTube.
I typed in a keyword phrase, emergency plumber, Cambridge.
Now it could be any local business and it could be any geographic location in the world.
Who do you know that comes to YouTube to look for a plumber?
Almost nobody.
And this is shown by the amount of traffic that a lot of videos get.
I mean, ranking number one’s great, but look at this.
We’ve got three views in four years.
We’ve got one view in three years.
So these videos aren’t getting any traffic because no one’s on YouTube looking for an emergency plumber.
No one’s on YouTube looking for a dentist or a lawyer either (add random local business here)
What they are doing, if they want one of these things, is they’re using Google.
So let’s go to Google.
If we type in the same phrase, emergency plumber, Cambridge, again, it could be any town.
What do we see here?
If you scroll down you’ll also see Yelp and some other websites.
We don’t see a video.
Now, depending on the location, depending on the kind of business, you might find a video, but it’s very rare that a video is on page one of Google for a local biz.
Now if you’re on page one of Google, that’s great because that’s where you want to be.
If you’re ranking on top of YouTube, no one cares.
So you probably think we can’t use YouTube to get more clients for our local business.
And this is where you are wrong.
YouTube is incredibly powerful, but we need to venture into the world of YouTube Ads.
YouTube Ads for Local Business
We need to create what’s called a custom audience, and we’re going to create an audience of people that have been searching for specific terms on Google.
Then we’re going to target them on YouTube.
So of course you do need a Google Ads account.
So assuming you have one, you want to come into your audience manager.
You then make sure you’re in custom audiences and not remarketing.
This works for any local business.
So let’s just pretend we’re doing plumbers.
So I’m just going to call this audience plumber.
And we want to come down to the second option; people who searched for any of these terms on Google.
And as we start typing things in, this is going to grow.
So for example, if I want a plumber and I want a plumber now, I’m probably going to type in something like emergency plumber near me.
Google will populate these ideas.
- Emergency plumber service near me.
- 24-hour plumbing service near me.
And you want to just basically go through and click a bunch of these things.
If you are in the plumbing business or you’ve got clients, you should really know the kind of phrases that people are typing in.
As you go, you’ll also see some demographic and geographic data about your audience.
Setting Up a Campaign
So we are ready to set up our YouTube Ads campaign.
Now, you’re presented with a bunch of different options, which may seem overwhelming.
And the natural thought is to think, well, I want more leads.
I want more sales. I want more traffic.
So I’ll click on one of those.
That’s fine, if you’ve got a lot of conversions in your account. But if you’re new, and I presume you are because you’re watching this video, then you want to choose either website traffic, or create a campaign without a goal’s guidance, because that’ll give you more options and you can play around with a lot of stuff.
And as you’re new, it’s just going to work better.
Now to understand the ad set up, it’s best if you watch the video on this page as there is a walkthrough on it.
As you can see from the video, this makes much more sense than trying to rank a video for a term almost no-one is searching for.
What Next?
Custom intent targeting is great but you can also target placements, keywords and of course run remarketing campaigns.
If you would like a getting started course, then Tube ads kickstart is the prefect place.
As always, I would love to hear to your thoughts on this.
Please let me know below in the comments and share this post too.
Thanks for reading and good luck using YouTube for local Business.
