Here’s a little known secret: The most successful businesses on YouTube have never had a viral hit.

YouTube has a global, diverse audience; 850 million unique users visit the site every month. 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. If you’re trying to reach the YouTube audience in its entirety, that’s a lot of noise to break through.

Successful businesses understand that they don’t need to connect with the whole YouTube audience; they just need to engage with the right audience. Here are three tips to get you started:

1) Know your audience. For small businesses, the most successful videos are often the ones you’ve never heard of. If you’re a construction toy company like Rokenbok Toys, for example, you care about a specific market. This means that you don’t need to create a video with mass appeal. You need a video that appeals to people interested in purchasing construction toys. While none of their videos have gone “viral,” YouTube is now their number one source of web traffic, and has helped Rokenbok keep a flourishing business.

2) Videos need to be interesting, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be educational. There are three times as many searches for “how to” videos than there are for “music videos” on YouTube. Ceilume, a 40-person company that makes decorative ceiling tiles, uses YouTube to educate customers. Their instructional videos have generated more than a million views and boosted sales by 15%. Instead of focusing on being clever, focus on being relevant. Videos that engage your audience by showcasing product features or explaining a difficult concept can be much more impactful.

3) Videos don’t need to be professionally produced to gain views. Many small businesses shoot and produce videos themselves, using tools as simple as a handheld camera and the video editing features in YouTube. Since you can focus on reaching people that are most interested in your topic, content and relevancy trump production value. Orabrush, a small business that sells tongue cleaners, produced and posted their first video with just $500 and the help of a local marketing student. Their small investment helped them sell over a million Orabrushes online.

Provided by: Marshall Self, Head of Media Solutions, Google Canada