Online Business

How You Can Use YouTube to Market Your Business in Kenya

by
youtube for marketing learnerscoach

How You Can Use YouTube to Market Your Business in Kenya? Given the huge number of companies in Kenya that embrace YouTube videos, it should come as no surprise that there are a lot of different ways to use the site.

Every company has its own unique goals for their YouTube marketing.
Some companies use YouTube to generate brand awareness. Some use YouTube to promote a particular product or drive sales to their retail store or website. Others incorporate YouTube as part of their product or customer support mix, use videos for product training, or even use YouTube for recruiting and employee communications.

Anything you can say in person or to a group of people, you can say in a
video and distribute via YouTube.

YouTube for Brand Awareness

Large Kenyan companies and major advertisers often use YouTube to enhance the awareness of their brands. Instead of focusing on individual products or services, these videos push the company’s brand, often in the same fashion used in traditional television advertising.

In fact, online videos are better at imparting brand awareness than are traditional TV ads. A recent study by Millward Brown found out that online viewing led to 82% brand awareness and 77% product recall, compared to just 54% brand awareness and 18% product recall for similar television ads.

Experts believe this is because online viewers are more engaged than television viewers; the Web is a more interactive medium than the passive viewing inherent with television.
Brand awareness videos are typically entertaining, using a soft-sell approach to ingrain the brand’s name and image in the minds of viewers.

YouTube for Product Advertising

If you can use YouTube to push an overall brand, you can use it to push individual products, too. This requires a more direct approach, although it’s still important to make the video informative, educational, or entertaining.

To promote a product, you want to show the product in your advertising, as Nike (www.youtube.com/user/nikefootball) does with its Bootcamp Drill. You can show the product in action or used as part of a demonstration or tutorial. Just make sure you include lots of close-up product shots and link back to your own website—where more product information is available.

YouTube for Retail Promotion

You can also use YouTube to promote a company’s retail stores. These videos can be general in nature (which gives the videos a long shelf life), or more specifically targeted to shorter-term promotions (“check out this weekend’s specials!”).

But a video that is nothing more than a store advertisement probably won’t attract a lot of viewers. A better approach is to find a way to showcase the store without resorting to claims of 20% off and “this weekend only” specials. For example, you might want to record a short store tour or highlight individual departments or services within the store.

You can even produce educational videos that demonstrate the products or services your store offers. Make the video informative, and you stand a better chance of grabbing eyeballs.

Paid Surveys - Surveys for Money

YouTube for Direct Sales

YouTube is a terrific channel for generating direct sales for products and services. All you have to do is show the product in action or provide a clip of the service in question, and then ask for the sale by directing the viewer to your own website.

The key to converting eyeballs to shillings is to generously highlight your company’s website address within the body of the video. Put the contact information at the front of the video, at the end of the video, and overlaid at the bottom of the screen during the body of the clip.

Make it easy for interested viewers to find more information or place an order. (And, to that end, there’s nothing wrong with mentioning the product’s price somewhere in the video.)

YouTube for Product Support

Not many companies in Kenya use YouTube to generate new business; some companies do so to support existing customers. Consider some of the most common customer problems and questions, and produce one or more videos addressing those issues. If you can help your customers help themselves, you provide them with a useful service and reduce your company’s support costs—all with a free YouTube video.

For example, AutoDesk Inventor is a high-end computer program for 3D mechanical design from AutoDesk. Knowing that their customers need a lot of post-sales support, the company put together a series of YouTube videos showing how to install, configure, and use the program. It’s extremely useful—and helps to cut down on traditional tech support costs, as well.

Note
You can also embed your YouTube support video into your own website. It doesn’t matter where customers view the video, YouTube or your site; what matters is that they get their problems solved at little or no expense to you.
The same goes if you have specific product support or technical support issues.

If you’re a computer manufacturer, you might create a video showing users how to install more memory or connect an external hard drive. If you’re a car manufacturer, you might create a video showing drivers how to change a brake light or check their car’s oil level. You get the idea—use YouTube to turn a problem area into a public relations victory.

YouTube for Internal Training

Your company can also use YouTube for internal purposes. Take, for example, the issue of sales or product training. You have a new product to introduce and a sales force to train.

How best to reach them? In the old days, you’d fly salespeople from around the country to a central office and put on a day’s worth of hands-on training.
Doing so, however, is both time-consuming and expensive. Instead, consider using YouTube for your product training. Create a series of short training videos.

All you have to do is upload the videos to YouTube and provide access to all your company’s salespeople. (They don’t have to be public videos.) Sales force personnel can watch the videos at their leisure, without losing valuable sales time trekking back to the office for training.

You save money, your salespeople save time, and you create an archive of product information that anyone can access at any time.

YouTube for Employee Communications

You can use YouTube for all manner of company communications. Instead of holding a big company meeting just so that the big boss can give his yearly state of the company address, have him record the address and post it on a private channel on YouTube.

Employees can watch the CEO say his thing from the comfort of their own desks, while they’re on the road, or even at home.

In fact, many companies find that YouTube is a fast and effective way to disseminate all kinds of employee information. Done right, it gets information out there in near–real-time, with all the benefit of face-to-face communication, which is a lot better than sending impersonal memos via email.

YouTube for Recruiting

Finally, don’t underestimate YouTube as a recruitment tool for new employees. If you have a company welcome video, post it on YouTube and make it public. Think of this as a PR exercise to attract new talent to your company, which means doing it up right—it’s as much a marketing project as it is something from the HR department.

You can link to the video from all your recruiting materials, even from any traditional ads you place. Don’t limit yourself to a single long puff video:

Produce separate videos for individual departments, as well as to illustrate company values, employee benefits, facilities, and the like.

Tip
Your current employees are your best recruitment tools. Include plenty of
employee interviews in your recruitment videos to help personalize your
company and to put a friendly face on the corporation.

Additional Useful Resource

In this book you’ll learn how to promote your videos on the YouTube site, insert pop-up notes and annotations, add clickable overlays to your videos, and create a customized brand channel.

Youtube for businessIt even addresses how to use YouTube for B2B marketing, which is always a hot topic. Know that the information included in this book is both strategic and technical.

That means you’ll find general marketing advice alongside specific technical instructions; you’ll learn how to use YouTube as a marketing tool as well as how to create, post, and manage YouTube-friendly videos.

If you do it right, YouTube can become an important part of your marketing mix and drive a lot of traffic (and sales) to your existing website.

5 Simple Online Business You Can Start With No Money

by
Online Business Learnerscoach

If you’re at all interested in starting your own online business, there’s no time like the present. We live in a golden age of wealth. Thanks to the internet and smartphones, the amount of commerce being conducted online has experienced explosive growth.

The internet is the great equalizer. In business specifically, it has leveled the playing field. Anyone can start a money-making online business—anyone with a computer, that is. But here’s the thing: virtually no technical experience is needed. Today there are plenty of tools you can use to build an online business that makes the technical work a lot easier than it was in the past.

Let’s consider five of the top ways to start an online business and make money online with little or no cost at all.If you want to succeed at building your online empire. Take note.

1. Drop Shipping

The basic idea behind an online drop shipping business is that, as a small business owner, you don’t have to maintain a large inventory (or any inventory whatsoever) of products or handle any delivery to your customers.

That eliminates the financial cost and risk of having a warehouse full of stuff you might not sell, and the hassle of arranging to send orders all over the country or the world. In fact, you don’t have to manufacture or store any products at all.

The only thing you have to focus on is marketing and advertising to find the customers and make the sales. Once the sale is made the rest is handled by others. Your only cost is the expense of marketing and advertising to acquire a new customer.

Once that is done, you’ll work with a company that specializes in drop shipping. Here’s how it works:

  • You list products for sale on your website or a platform like Amazon, eBay, or Shopify.
  • When one of your customers makes a purchase, you purchase the product from a third-party company (the drop shipper, usually a manufacturer or wholesaler) for a lower price. This process is as simple as forwarding the order from your customer, a process that can actually be completely automated. (Remember you don’t have any risk here of buying inventory because the sale has already been made).
  • Your drop shipper then sends the product to the customer.

Easy enough, right? With drop shipping, you can offer a wide range of products, so the operating expenses for your business are super low.

As you can see there is no risk on your part because you don’t even purchase the product (at cost) until the actual sale is made!

Cons For Drop Shipping

What are the downsides to the drop shipping business model? You have to find a reputable drop shipper you can count on to deliver to your customers. If an order is late or doesn’t go out—or a product is of poor quality—you get blamed, as your company is the one representing the product and customer experience.

Also, because this market is so competitive, the margins—that is, the difference between the wholesale price and how much you can sell a product for—are lower, so this will be a high-volume type business to generate a serious income. But still, it is a worthwhile low or no-cost startup option.

One way to stand out from the competition with a drop shipping business is to private label your products. This simply means you put your own label or brand on the products that the manufacturer is creating. That way you’re not selling the same product brand and just competing on price; rather you can use your own brand and face less competition.

Think about when you’re looking at medicine at the pharmacy; the brand names sell for higher prices and people think they are different from the generic brands even though the ingredients are exactly the same. Consider these important factors when looking for a good drop shipping product.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is somewhat similar to drop shipping but with some key differences. With this e-commerce model, you again don’t maintain an inventory of your own products, and you don’t have to worry about shipping products to customers.

Related: What is Affiliate Marketing?

Basically, you pick a profitable niche for your online business, and then you find an affiliate partner who has products available in that niche. Some of the most popular affiliate sites are Clickbank.com, Amazon.com, and CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction). Between them, they offer just about any digital information product (like ebooks, audio files, video files) or physical product you can think of. Many big name companies and brands like Wal-Mart and Home Depot run their own affiliate programs.

Related: The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs To Join

With affiliate marketing, you offer the products for sale, for example, on your blog or e-commerce website. Each product has a unique link that tracks back to your account with your affiliate partner. A prospect who clicks on the link is taken to your partner’s shopping cart for checkout. Once they buy, that purchase is recorded and you receive a commission.

Commission amounts vary depending on the affiliate partner, but is generally 5 percent to 25 percent, or 50 percent or more with digital information products.

As you can see, there’s little risk on your part and virtually no investment needed either. Just like with drop shipping your only costs will be marketing and advertising to drive traffic and generate the sale.

The key difference between this and drop shipping is that the business model is even more hands off. All you have to do is provide a link for the customer to click on and the merchant handles everything; billing, order fulfillment, customer service, etc.

All you have to do is handle the marketing to get your prospects to buy (through social media, email marketing, blogging, or whatever method you choose). But after they click the affiliate link, it’s out of your hands. You don’t have to ship products or handle any customer service questions. And you certainly don’t have to maintain an inventory.

All you have to do is focus on paid and free ways to market your online business. Affiliate marketing really is one of the most “hand-off” types of online businesses you can start.

Affiliate Marketing Cons

  • You’re responsible for driving web traffic to the affiliate link (no traffic means no money)
  • May need to spend money on advertising and marketing

3. Blogging

If you have the expertise or a passion or interest for a subject, you’re ready to start making money with a blog. With a service like Blogger (www.blogger.com), you can start up your blog totally free. You can also create your own site and secure your own hosting for a low price, which is generally the route I recommend, as many free blogging sites have restrictions on what you can say or do, including making money or advertising.

Related: How to create a wordpress blog

You may think blogging is all about writing. And it can be if that’s what you want to do. But written blog posts are just the start. You can post photos, videos, and links to other sites, you can even repost news and other articles… anything is game, really, as long as it relates to your niche.

The key is that you want to post original content that is useful to your target audience and to post on a regular basis. That is the best way to get ranked in the search engines and to also get your audience to take action.

What sort of content should you provide? Anything that is engaging to your prospect. How-to topics, top-10 lists, commentary on trends in your niche, tips and tricks articles—basically, you need to provide useful content. There’s no shortage of ideas for your blog.

You can make money in a variety of ways with an online business blog.

Google AdSense.
Have you ever been to a website and seen an ad on it? Chances are it was an ad being run through the Google advertising network.

These pay-per-click ads appear on your blog. Every time somebody clicks on an ad (which is supposed to be about a subject related to your niche), you make a few cents or more. Small amounts each time, but it adds up. This is extremely hands-off. You just need to get a code from Google, place it on your website – and the ads will automatically appear on your blog.

Google will only show ads that are relevant to your blog so it’s a good experience for your visitors and maximizes the number of clicks you get, meaning more income.

Blog ad networks.
You can also work with ad networks other than Google, like Blogads, and run banner ads on your blog. Same as Google Adsense ads, you place the code once on your website and when your visitors click on the ads then you get paid. In addition to banner ads, you can also run video ads on your site.

In many cases you can make more money with blog ad networks, but they tend to only work with blogs that are getting tens of thousands of visitors a month or more; as opposed to Google Ads where you can start right away regardless of the amount of traffic you get.

N/B: At a minimum try to aim for one new post, video, or other forms of content a week. You could start a blog in less than an hour. But it takes time to make money as you build readership, and only a small percentage of those folks end up buying your products.

Blogging Cons

  • May take a long time to begin making money
  • Creating and posting content can be time-consuming

4. Online Video

Have you watched a YouTube video lately? Of course you have! This is one of the world’s most popular websites, with more than 2 billion users watching hundreds of millions of hours of video each day.

You can leverage YouTube’s reach to make money online. No, you’re not trying to create a viral video, so to speak, although if it does go worldwide and is seen by millions, that’s a good thing.

Instead, you’ll be following a proven strategy for maximizing views of multiple videos on a regular basis. You’ll be creating useful content—something engaging that people want to watch. And it works in many, many different niches. It could be a how-to video or a talking-head video on a topic of interest for people in your niche—the sky is the limit.

You make money with ad revenue. Your first step is to create a YouTube account and start uploading videos. Then you enable monetization on your YouTube settings. Basically, this gives Google the go-ahead to include short AdSense ads with your videos, which you’ve seen if you’ve watched a YouTube video. When viewers click on those ads, you get paid.

Another opportunity to make money with a YouTube channel is through paid sponsorships. Build a large enough following and companies will be more than happy to pay you to promote or mention their products and services in your videos.

Some tips to create professional-looking videos (no expensive pro equipment needed):

  • You can use your smartphone or a simple video camera. But make sure the lighting is good so that everything in your video is clear and easy to see.
  • Make sure the audio is clear. You don’t want an air conditioning hum, construction noise, or other distractions.
    Use simple editing software like iMovie to put titles at the beginning of the video and to edit out any flubs.
  • Above all, remember that your videos can be simple and don’t have to be slick. Just provide useful content and be engaging and interesting. Funny helps, too.

And to extend the reach of your videos, be sure to post them on your Facebook business page, Twitter, your blog, and other channels. Let people know you’re in the video business now.

In addition to ad revenue from YouTube videos, you can also use your YouTube channel to drive traffic back to your website, where visitors can read your product reviews, click on the ads on your website, or even get onto your email subscriber list—where you can make multiple sales with your email list.

Online Video Cons

  • Creating and posting videos can be time-consuming
  • It may take a while to begin making revenue

5. Information Products

When you have an internet business, it doesn’t have to be about selling physical products. In fact, digital information products are one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money.

There’s no shortage of ways to create information products, but the most popular formats include:

  • Audio: a recorded teleconference, interview, course, or some other spoken-word product
  • Video: a recorded webinar, a how-to, an interview
  • Text: an ebook, an instruction booklet of some sort, a travel guide
    In each of these categories, you can really get creative and make any type and format of content, as long as it’s engaging and useful.

No matter which way you do it, it’s passive income — money you earn while you sleep because you put these products up for sale on your website and a customer can buy and download them any time of day or night, automatically. All you have to do is check the sales periodically to see what topics or types of products are selling best so you can make more of those.

Information Products Cons

  • Creating a product takes some upfront work and time
  • You may need to invest some money initially

Parting Shot

The trick with any online business is to make sure you’re in a profitable niche market. So be sure to keep an eye on trends, check out bestseller lists on sites like Amazon, and consider what people are discussing on social media.

Take Home: One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to restrict yourself to just one of these e-commerce opportunities.

Start out with one and get it going. Then add new revenue streams as you’re able. That will grow your income and ensure that you have something to fall back on should one business start going south.