How to use YouTube to find new customers and build your business

Amanda Perelli

Oct 8, 2019, 18:27 IST

How to use YouTube to find new customers and build your business

Entrepreneur Sunny Lenarduzzi shares tips on how to build a business using YouTube on her channel, which has 320,000 subscribers.
Lenarduzzi helps clients figure out how they can use YouTube to sell products and programs, looking at how to take viewers and make them customers.
Lenarduzzi outlined for Business Insider how someone can build and scale a business using YouTube, from figuring out what to sell to creating content that will get views.
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Sunny Lenarduzzi wants to inspire her followers to ditch traditional careers and be their own bosses online by using YouTube to scale their businesses.

Lenarduzzi shares tips on how to build a business using YouTube with her 320,000 subscribers. The Vancouver resident walks business owners through how they can build an audience, from marketing to sales tools, and turn that audience into paying clients.

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Programs like Lenarduzzi's are popular on YouTube and creators like Kevin David, Benji Travis, and Amy Landino are among those who have built similar external programs off YouTube fame.

In an interview with Business Insider, Lenarduzzi shared tips on how to build an audience on YouTube and direct that audience to whatever you are trying to sell online.

Ad revenue and brand sponsorships aren't the only way.

"I noticed that most people who were doing YouTube were talking about it from the perspective of being a creator and getting views and subscribers," Lenarduzzi said. "I've never approached it that way."

Lenarduzzi approaches YouTube by thinking about how she can take her viewers and make them customers off the platform. She doesn't care about AdSense or sponsorships, she said, and prefers to create a consistent business from YouTube without relying on either method.

She's worked with a sponsor in the past, and said the experience was "painful" because of how drawn-out the approval and payment process was, and that she still "had a boss" who was in control.

Figuring out what to sell.

The hardest part is narrowing down what you want to sell, she said, and knowing that it's actually profitable.

Lenarduzzi sells an online course, and said she used the website Thinkific to build it. There are a ton of great "plug and play" platforms online to help you build a course like this, she said.

Start with YouTube and the traffic that comes with having a channel.

Once you understand your product, you should build out a machine that consists of pieces and parts that will ultimately turn a viewer into a customer, she said.

Start with YouTube and the traffic that comes with having a YouTube channel. Then use that to drive viewers to an email list, then a free training sent over email. Lastly, pitch them your programs or other full product.

Create an offer and don't worry if it's not perfect.

There's an issue around perfectionism when it comes to building offers, she said. You don't need to focus on making everything look perfect. Her webcam videos are her most successful videos because she said she cares more about impacting the viewer than how it looks.

Formulate an offer for your client based on what you know and can give. This should be a prototype that you continue to improve as you go along, she said, year over year.

Find your clients in multiple ways.

She said there are two main ways she finds new clients online: evergreen and on-demand.

On-demand client attraction is about finding people who are interested in your topic by searching through keywords and hashtags on social media, she said. Once you have found them, you can build a relationship with these people (direct messaging, email) and they will begin noticing your content and eventually will start buying from you, she said.

Evergreen client attraction using YouTube and its power as a search platform. If you can rank your video as the number one result for your keyword, that is impactful, she said.

For example, you want to be looking at 100 to 1,000 "search per month, search volume" she said, which means how many videos exist within that search. Aim for fewer than 100,000, she said. There's less competition.

"Look up a keyword," she said. "See who the top 5 ranking videos are, and see if there's videos older than 1 to 2 years. If there is, you have an opportunity to pop to the top with brand-new content on that topic."

But make sure people are searching for the topic. If a video has been near the top for five years, and has only 40 views, then there isn't much demand for that topic. If it's been there for a year and has half a million views, then there is a huge demand, she said.

The ultimate goal is to turn these viewers into clients, she said. But YouTube search can be a way to get them in the door.

For more on how influencers are profiting from their success online, according to industry professionals and creators, check out these Business Insider Prime posts: