Getting Your Dealer Started With Youtube!

YouTube is one of the largest video hosting services in the world. A place for “how to” videos, news, funny content, and soon to be the place hosting your dealerships content! This article will guide you through the process of setting up your dealerships account and outline good practices to help you achieve a greater reach with your target audience. First, we’ll outline why you should be leveraging YouTube for your dealership, let's dive in.

Why YouTube.

If you’ve been on the internet, the chances you’ve used  YouTube is almost guaranteed. It is now the world's third most popular website (behind Google and the social networking site Facebook) and the second largest search engine (after Google). According to recently collected data, this video sharing network receives over 1 billion monthly visits. Videos submitted to this platform have the potential to reach more Americans aged 18 to 34 than all of the cable networks now in operation. The purchasing power of the millennials and generation Z is well over 3 trillion dollars and growing, and the majority of them are using YouTube daily, so being able to utilize YouTube will give you a very powerful tool to help reach this massive audience segment and get you the exposure you need.

Now the question is; how do you want to use it and which route will you go? You can use it to place pre-roll ads in front of popular content creators, or post content of your own. Let’s start with setting up your account.

Getting started

The first thing you’ll need to do is create a Google account. Google owns YouTube so their platforms are linked via the email you use for both. So once you land on YouTube's homepage, you’ll be greeted typically with something that looks like this.

Once here, you’ll want to look to the top right on the page and click sign in. If you’re using the browser Google Chrome and are logged in, you should already be signed in to YouTube. If not, go ahead and refer to the first step. After you’ve logged in, you should be brought back to the homepage. Once there, click your profile icon in the top right of the screen again and you should be greeted with a “create a channel” option. 

Once there, select this option and you’ll be prompted with this screen.

Make sure to choose a channel name that best represents your dealership, as well as an easily recognizable profile picture. Once you take care of those two steps, click create channel! It should take you to your channel’s landing page which looks like this.

Once there, there’s a few things you can do to get your channel prettied up. Go ahead and click the “Customize Channel” button you see in the top right corner of your screen. It should lead you to this page where you can start to add different elements to your channel. 

Here you can add a short video that will be brought to the top of your channel for the world to see. It should be something short and sweet that quickly briefs the new viewer on your channel and what you guys are about. Make sure it's quality content! Now if you look below that, you’ll see they have a different portion that will show your returning subscribers the current content you’ve posted, getting them back in the flow of your channel. 

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let's focus on some key steps that you can utilize to maximize the efforts of your channel.

Optimizing Your Channel With SEO

So now that you have your channel up and running, let's focus on getting your SEO optimized. SEO, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It's the practice of optimizing your page so it ranks higher on search engines when people go to look for relevant terms related to it. You can do this with your youtube channel as well! It is critical to creating searchable titles with relevant keywords. You may utilize AdWords to identify what people are looking for and tailor your titles to your target market. Make sure your title is around 50 characters long, as this is the YouTube soft cap for titles, and anything longer will hurt your ranking. Also, while uploading, remember to include MetaTags; these assist in categorizing your work and making it easier to discover.

Organic Promotion

In the car industry, the old adage goes “There’s a butt for every seat”, the same can be said about content. There are many niche groups for promoting your content across the web that is completely free. When you figure out your target audience, do some research to see where they also are and bring the content to them! Reddit, Facebook Groups, and forums across the web are great places to cross-promote your youtube content and are a great free way to drive organic traffic to your channel. Organic promotion is not only great for driving traffic, but it's a great way to engage with your audience and create relationships with them before they even buy your product!

Using CTA’s Through Youtube!

Youtube allows you to link out to products, services, and anything you’d like, really. Using their Youtube Creators Studio, you can add these over your video at specific times, or you can even put them in your video bio. It’s a great tool to encourage interaction from your audience and is super simple to do.

Ads Ads Ads!

Last, but certainly not least, is advertising on youtube. Youtube has one of the most robust ways to advertise your product or service to your targeted audience through a few different ways: Sponsored Cards, Display Ads, Pre-Roll Ads, Bumper Ads, and Overlay Ads. Each one of these is strong in its own way and has its own utility. We have a few articles breaking down what these are, and how to use them. Not only can you have text and display ads populate for specific keywords that focus on your target market, but you can also include 15-second and 30-second video ads that highlight your dealership, inventory, and why-buy messaging, similar to the ads you see when viewing videos on your personal profiles.

Well if you’ve made it this far, you probably see why YouTube is an extremely effective tool for getting to your target audience and creating brand awareness through content. If you follow these steps you’ll be on your way to being a YouTube pro!

Also, We wanted to leave you with an example of an awesome channel that has worked wonders for them, and whom better to show than the G.O.A.T.'s themselves, Galpin! They have a large presence on youtube, with nearly 52,000 subscribers, and overall views in the millions. They keep to good content and create something their viewers want to watch. It's been an amazing brand awareness tool that they're reaping the benefits of. You can check out their channel here!