YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the Internet (did you know that?), and, for that reason alone, it absolutely is a best practice to publish your marketing videos on your YouTube channel. Keep doing that, or, if you're not doing, start doing it. Make sure your YouTube channel has all of the links back to your site in it, and be sure you spend the time to fill out the description and other information that gets attached to every video you post. That too, is a best practice. (Check out the related video, linked on the right, for more specifics about using YouTube metadata to your advantage.) When people are searching, you want to be found if you can solve a problem or answer a question.
But here's the thing...
Don't take your leads off your site to YouTube to watch a video. Seriously. If you do that, you lose complete control over the lead. You're no longer guiding your leads at that point; they are guiding themselves, and YouTube helps them do that by providing recommended videos.
Don't ask me how they come up with recommended videos; to me there is no real rhyme or reason to it. When I go watch a business video on YouTube, I get recommendations that include cat videos. (The image on the right is an email I got from YouTube since I subscribe to the GenooMarketing channel - look at the bottom and see all the kitties. Ha.)
I love cats. I have two, in fact. But I don't want my leads off watching cat videos instead of learning more about Genoo, or marketing automation, or lead generation. I want to guide that journey - and it does not include cat videos.
Best practice number 1: Publish your videos to your YouTube channel. Check.
Best practice number 2: Embed those videos into your website (usually in a blog post), and keep your leads on your site.
Every YouTube video has an embed link. Use it. In fact, you can even create that link in such a way that it will not include "related videos" at the end. (I'll include this at the bottom of this post if you don't have the info already.)
When you embed your videos in your own site, you can include more "guidance" along with them - calls to action, additional offers, perhaps even your own related content. That is the beauty of embedding - your leads will be more likely to do what YOU want them to do, and not what YouTube thinks they should do.
How-to:
Find the embed code under the "Share" button below the video in YouTube. You'll get the code chunk from YouTube right there. It will look like this, inside angle brackets (<> replaced with square brackets so I don't embed the video right here): [iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z-ZvbrawR5o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen][/iframe]
To keep the related videos from showing at the end of your embedded video, be sure to un-check the box that says "show related videos." If you miss that, add ?rel=0 to the end of the video URL itself - so the code will look like this: [iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z-ZvbrawR5o?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen][/iframe]
