Leveraging YouTube for Wedding Vendor Marketing

Kristina Stubblefield: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another exciting episode of WedPro Business Solutions. I'm your host, Kristina Stubblefield, and today we're diving into an incredibly powerful platform for marketing, YouTube. 

I know I've talked a whole lot about short form video in recent episodes, and that's exactly why I wanted to talk about YouTube since I've been talking about video recently. We're going to explore how wedding vendors can leverage YouTube to connect with engaged couples and promote your services. So grab your notepads and let's get started. Now, you may already know this, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world with billions of active users each month. Engaged couples are turning to YouTube to seek inspiration, get information, and do [00:01:00] research, but also discover vendors for their special day.

Don't worry, it's not too late to utilize YouTube in your marketing efforts. I want to share with you just a couple statistics, because you know I'm all about if you're going to invest time or money or both, that you want to make sure it is where your target audience is. Well, let me share this with you, right now 31 million people have YouTube on their phones. Wow, how many of them are engaged? We all know how much people use their smartphones. We talked about it in previous episodes. When it comes to your website, you know it's got to be mobile friendly. It's got to be a responsive website, especially for tablets and phones.

It's no [00:02:00] different with social media, and of course this number tells us that a lot of people use YouTube on their phones. So how can wedding vendors, professionals, like you use YouTube in their marketing. We're going to dive into some actionable steps to get started so you can take advantage of this platform.

So where we're going to start, step one. You know, I'm going to mention this. What's your purpose? What is the purpose of using YouTube? So if you do not already have a YouTube channel, of course you should create one. It's free to do pay attention to the account that you're connecting it with, the email address, and you want to go in and create a YouTube channel.

And almost always you would want it to be your business name. Now that we talked about that, what's the purpose? What are you going to do on your YouTube channel? [00:03:00] Are you going to showcase events and weddings from the past? What your business can do for engaged couples? Are you going to offer tips, information, resources?

Whatever it is, you want to make sure you keep in mind your target audience. I know we talk about that a lot, but you want your videos tailored to your target audience's needs and interest, keyword there interest. So you want to make sure you define your channel's purpose. Step two, content strategy. You want to develop a good strategy, and you probably know when I'm getting ready to share with you, but consistency is key.

On YouTube as well as other social media platforms and Google. And one of the things I would encourage you to do is to batch videos. And what I mean by that is not just create one video, edit it [00:04:00] and upload it. We're going to talk more about that in a minute, but do three or four videos because it's not such a hurdle.

Each week or every couple days to record a video for YouTube. Now, I've talked a whole lot in the past about repurposing. There are so many opportunities to repurpose video for YouTube, your website, social media, Google all the things, and you can get that information from a past episode, but you want to have a content strategy and you want to make sure however often you're going to post.

Is that once a week, twice a week, two times a month? I'm not here right now saying what you should or shouldn't do. What I'm suggesting is don't leave this platform out. Of your marketing strategy because engaged couples are using this platform. So when you come up with [00:05:00] your content, is that going to be behind the scenes footage?

Maybe it's going to be tutorials, how to, or helpful information. Maybe it's going to be client testimonials, or you can even do q and A sessions. And what I mean by that is I always tell people, FAQ sections on your website are great. You can take the questions that you're asked on a regular basis, notate them down, and that can be a page on your website.

But also each one of those questions can be content for social media. But also for YouTube, you can also mix up your content. You always want to provide value, you want to let people in, showcase your personality, who you are, but also your expertise. You definitely want to showcase your expertise and engaging videos will build trust and position you as an authority in the industry.

[00:06:00] Now, don't let that overwhelm you. The same things that you put up on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google. You can take one of those videos and repurpose them. Or if you're not doing videos, you can set just your phone up on a tripod and record a video about the same topic that you're posting on Instagram or Facebook.

Don't overthink it. These are just some steps to help you get started with utilizing the platform. Now , do you want to optimize your videos? Of course, you want your videos to be found. You're recording the videos and uploading into YouTube to increase your reach. Maybe you want to increase your website traffic or the amount of leads that you get, or you want to book more events, so you want to optimize your videos so they can be found on YouTube now to reach engaged couples your videos need to be discoverable, [00:07:00] so they shouldn't be private on YouTube. You want to make them public, but also you can utilize a keyword research tool. For example, Google Keyword Planner. It is a free tool that you can use to go out and find popular search terms in your industry. Since I'm talking about YouTube, I also mentioned TubeBuddy.

It is a tool that you can utilize to find search terms that potential clients might use, and where can you use these keywords? Well, in the video title, in the description, or even the tags to increase visibility. Step four, you're probably thinking to yourself, okay, what kind of videos like, does it need to be a big production?

So many times people think to put video on YouTube, their website, that it has to be this bigger, elaborate production, all this lights and equipment and all of this. in many places, [00:08:00] online, offline, it doesn't matter. You can get additional equipment to use.

My point to you is you can start with your phone and if you're watching on YouTube right now, you see I'm holding up my phone. That's where you can start. It does not have to be a Hollywood level production. It does not need to be that. However, I'll mention a couple things. Clear audio, that's important, proper lighting. It could be natural light from a window. It could be light from monitors, as I mentioned, or a ring light. They make ring lights that clip onto your cell phone, they make ring lights they are on a stand. So many options, but the point of it is, is you want good quality videos. You want it to be engaging.

You want to capture people's attention. You want to pull your audience in and you want to encourage them to stay engaged with your content. That's why you're doing it. It's all about the content. [00:09:00] Putting out valuable content that's most important. I'm giving you some tips in regards to good quality videos, clear audio, proper lighting.

Here's a tip, you can go and stand in front of a window facing the window. Don't have your back to the window, and use that light from the window as your light source. Very basic things to get started. So I will share what I use in the podcast episode show notes, or if you're watching this on YouTube, it'll be in the description at any time, you can go to the website, wedprosolutions.com, and there is a resource section. That shares with you all of the different software and equipment that we use and that we help clients set up. So you always have access to that resource section. So next, let's talk about collaboration. I just recently [00:10:00] recorded a podcast episode about relationship marketing.

You can collaborate with other wedding vendors. Do videos together. Maybe it's vendors that you work with on a regular basis. Maybe it's ones that you have partnerships with, maybe it's venues that you work at a lot. There's so many options to collaborate with others in your industry, and this is going to help expand your reach.

What you can do is. You can upload the video to your YouTube channel, but also the person collaborating with you, they can upload the video to their channel, and then you can do cross-promoting on other social media channels. And this is going to help you tap into a bigger audience, but also gain credibility within the industry.

I mentioned just a little bit and this is the next step, engaging with your audience, and this is key to building a following. You want to respond to comments on videos [00:11:00] promptly. You want to thank viewers for their feedback and answer any questions they may have. Don't forget to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel. They can like the video and also share your video. Remember, the more engaged your audience is, the more likely they are to recommend you to others. And that brings me to my next. Reminder to you, it's not just the person watching the video, it's the content, the valuable content they're consuming, they're going to share that with someone else.

So just because that engaged couple that's watching it, they may not use your services. How many other people do they know get that's getting engaged? Or maybe there's other wedding vendors watching your content and they can refer you business. It's so much more than just the person watching the video.

Next step, this probably isn't going to surprise you if you've listened to past episodes, I'm all [00:12:00] about getting the most return outta your time and your effort. So when you start putting videos on YouTube, Once you put some videos up and you're posting videos on a regular basis, you want to pay attention to how those videos are doing.

There's analytics built into YouTube and why you want to pay attention to that information is it's going to tell you about your audience, demographics, how long they are watching videos, which is called watch time, but also their engagement level. This information allows you to change and evolve your content strategy.

You can also find out what topics are popular, more popular than others with videos you've uploaded, and you can change your future videos, not necessarily change them, but you can take all this into consideration with [00:13:00] your future videos to cater more to your audiences preferences. And this is a big thing is you can think, you know what people want to hear about what they want information on, but when you start looking up and researching keywords, phrases that people are using on Google, on YouTube. 

There are free, like that free tool I already mentioned. They're free tools like the Google keyword planner that you can utilize to get that information. That just helps you cater more towards your target audience and what they're watching, what they're searching for. And there you have it, we just covered seven steps to help you get started with YouTube for your wedding business.

Now remember, building a presence on YouTube takes time and consistency, so make sure you come up with a content [00:14:00] strategy that is doable for you. As I mentioned before, if it's once a week, twice a week, twice a month, make sure you stay consistent and don't bite off more than you can chew. It takes time, but I will share with you, engage couples are waiting to discover more about businesses like you to consider for their special day.

I hope that you found this information helpful in harnessing the power of YouTube for your wedding business. If you're not already part of my free Facebook group, I encourage you to join. It's called WedPro Business Community, I would love to hear your feedback. If you have questions, you can post in there.

In addition to the podcast episodes, I also drop different strategies, softwares, tools, resources, and more. If you need someone to work one-on-one with you [00:15:00] to deep dive into your business and work through a strategy session to figure out where are you, where do you want to go, and what is in between?

How do you get there? Whether that is coming up with a content plan for social media, Google, YouTube, search engines, or is it helping you with systems and processes because you struggle with wearing all the hats in your businesses? I love helping wedding professionals simplify their business and marketing.

You can book a free discovery call, just go to wedprosolutions.com and schedule a free one with me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, take care.