My YouTube Experiment For A Tampa Car Dealer Is Paying Off. See The Results So Far
It’s a fact that YouTube is the third most popular website in the world, right behind Google & Facebook. It’s basically a video search engine, and it is owned by Google.
Use Faces Instead Of Vehicle Screen Shots, Your Views Will Rise. It's That Simple
On this blog post I will give you my results so far for the YouTube Channel for Park Auto Mall I made. As of today, here are some stats:
- The YouTube Channel is only 42 Days Old
- Our videos have been watched 5,193 times
- 2,212 of the views were local
- 27% of the views came from our channel
- 35% of the views came from an embedded player (our car blog and Facebook page) We do embed videos on our website, but we just started that 2 days ago.
- 5% came from a mobile device
- Only 7.1 % came from a YouTube search (let’s face it, people don’t go to YouTube to search for vehicles to purchase)
- Only .56 % came from a Google search. Too much competition in Tampa for YouTube
All of those stats can be found in your “insights” page when logged in to YouTube.
Now before I even started our YouTube Channel I looked all around Tampa Bay to see what other dealers were doing. Their views were unimpressive, so I knew we had to try something different. Here is what we do differently:
1) We make sure our freeze frame shot is a face, not a car. Whenever you upload a video to YouTube, you will have the option to pick a screenshot when the video is fully rendered. YouTube will only give you 3 choices, so if a face is available select it. People will be more prone to select a face than just a vehicle. See how it sticks out here?
- Note The Difference In Views From Other Local Dealers (Click To Enlarge)
- Select A Face Thumbnail If One Is Available
2) Use proper tags when uploading. Be sure to fill in your tags, and make sure whichever tags you use are in your title and/or description. You will be surprised of the amount of local websites your video will automatically appear on when tagged properly.
3) Add Outtakes. We had our video guy make us a beginning and an end that we reuse on all of our videos. I added an outtake to the end of a video a few weeks ago, and play them after the close. People love them!
3) Hire Some Personality. Most people are self conscious about being themselves on a video, and it takes a little time for them to relax. Besides obvious reasons to hire somebody, we look for unique skills that they don’t even realize they have. We want our future customers to get to know us, and they will!
Our internet staff is so good, 40% of our customers give us a video testimonial! I know some vendors suggest to create a separate YouTube Channel for testimonials, but we decided not to. We mix them all together.
I know by now your thinking about time, cost and personnel. This is all it takes:
- A Decent Digital Video Camera: $500.00
- Video Editing Software: $500.00+ (I use Sony Vegas)
- 2 People (1 to shoot, and one to demonstrate)
- 10 Minutes Of Time To Shoot The Video (2 people)
- 20 Minutes of time to edit the video (1 person). It used to take me longer, but it’s become so repetitive I’m a lot quicker. The video will take some time to render, but I can do other things while it’s rendering.
We have 86 videos so far, and you can expect more. I let each person pick the vehicle they want to do, that was they’ll have more to say. All of our employees have a unique way of doing the videos, but this one is our best yet:
If you have any YouTube Tips for car dealers please leave some feedback below. This is a dofollow blog, so you can earn yourself a nice backlink for each comment.
