YouTube is a great platform for small businesses to use. With YouTube, you can create content for your target audience, which can lead to more sales.

When using YouTube for small business marketing, there are a few things you should do:

1. Determine your target audience
2. Determine your primary goal(s)
3. Create a content strategy
4. Optimize content following YouTube SEO best practices

Let's dive a bit deeper.
 

1. Determine Your Target Audience

Before you can create any videos, you need to determine who you are creating videos for. You must determine who your target audience is, as the content you create will be created to serve this audience.

In most cases, you will already know who your target audience is. However, it's not a bad idea to re-evaluate this area of your business before you start creating content. After all, you don't want to create content for the wrong audience!

2. Determine Your Primary Goal

A lot of small businesses start YouTube channels because someone in the marketing industry tells them they should. The problem is, starting a YouTube channel just "because" is a recipe for disaster.

Before you create any videos, clearly determine what your primary goal is for operating a channel in the first place. Is your goal to generate leads? Maybe you want to create helpful content to help your audience? Whatever the case may be, make sure you clearly define it, as everything you do on YouTube will work off of your primary goal.

3. Create a Content Strategy

After determining who your target audience is and why you'd like to operate a YouTube channel, you can now start to create a content strategy.

Creating a content strategy isn't as difficult as it might seem. All you need to do is develop a list of topics to create videos about. "But how can I know what topics I should create videos about?" Well, this is why you clearly defined your target audience earlier. All you need to do is create videos on topics that your target audience is likely to be searching for.

TIP: Utilize YouTube's autocomplete function to find out what people are actively searching for on YouTube. Try thinking of things that your target audience would search for on YouTube, see what keywords/topics YouTube suggests when you start typing things in and create videos on these topics.

4. Optimize Content Following YouTube SEO Best Practices

When you have finished creating some videos (I recommend batch-recording, by the way) your next objective should be to optimize them follow YouTube search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.

This process is easier than you might think. Simply do the following:

• Include your target keywords in your video titles, descriptions, and tags
• Include related/secondary keywords in your descriptions and tags

Seriously, it is that easy!

Conclusion

Perform this 4-step process and creating videos for small business marketing will become a simple and straightforward process. Just remember- building an audience on YouTube takes time, just like on every other platform.

By the way, don't worry about recording equipment- work with what you have. Take out your phone or use your webcam and start recording. You can always upgrade your equipment down the road (though you won't have to if you have a mobile phone made after 2015).

P.S. Thanks for tagging me @Hatty Bell 

@Yee Trinh the ROI for businesses would depend on the strategy being used and what is being defined as the return.

For example, if the focus is on generating targeted leads, the ROI can be huge. However, if the focus is on simply having a presence, then it will be difficult to generate an ROI if the return is money-based. Of course, some brands would define the return as having a presence, but this doesn't seem to be present among small businesses (with good reason).

In regards to whether or not certain industries are better suited towards YouTube than others, I think this can be the case- but it doesn't have to be. Meaning, many businesses struggle to get creative when creating content, which is sometimes necessary depending on the industry in question.

When it comes to how much has to be invested towards YouTube marketing, this depends on the strategy being employed. If the strategy is focused purely on organic marketing, then the costs will all be related to video production. If the strategy has paid elements involved (paid advertising) then this will also impact cost.