From its inception in 2005 when Lapitsky and Kim uploaded the first video ”Me at the Zoo”, You Tube has become the world’s most popular online video community with over 3 billion videos viewed each day.
It is a hub for communities and individuals to distribute original content to connect, enlighten and stimulate a global audience. It has a more diverse demographic than you might think with 20% of its viewers over the age of 55, it really is reaching out across all age groups.
It is proving to be a fertile ground for advertisers with producers of online videos making money as You Tube partners or individuals. The largest advertising companies in the world are running campaigns on You Tube and display ads have increased 10 fold or more in the last year.
Whether you want to entertain, inform or persuade is a decision that will affect how much popular appeal your video has but your decision should be weighted by what your target audience wants or needs to know and appreciate how they prefer to find their information.
For viral marketing you only have to look at the “Susan Boyle” effect. The UK advert Channel posted a video of her singing on ‘Britain’s got Talent’ which to date has had 75,681,181 views not accounting for the myriads of video placements found associated with Susan Boyle, other performances, comments and interviews. What was incredible about this from a marketing perspective was the speed at which the video sharing occurred. Were you one of this millions that viewed or shared the video? I know I did.
So how should you approach You Tube as a company wishing to promote itself and what are the benefits of using it?
Approach
- Identify your viewers and what they want, make it helpful and informative. Aim to become a trusted expert in your field.
- Consider becoming a You Tube partner. This will help you become featured on their homepage.
- Create your own channel and grow your viewer base which you can use to email about events or promotions.
- Consider product placement in You Tube videos.
- Be consistent with your message and publish engaging content on a frequent basis that has relevance for your audience.
- Use YouTube tags so users can easily find you.Recognise that this is part of an overall marketing strategy , plan accordingly.
- Realise that it is an opportunity to reach consumers who are searching for information about a brand or related products and services. This is even more relevant now given that Google owns YouTube.
Benefits
- It can help increase your site visibility since videos can leap to the head of Google’s search engine.
- It is a powerful direct marketing tool, when considered as part of the marketing mix.
- YouTube tags help users easily find you.
- You Tube now makes it easy to share video socially.
- More than 500 tweets per minute contain a You Tube link. There are vibrant communities and specialist groups communicating and sharing.
- Helps humanise your brand. Home Depot and Wholefoods are two examples.
- It’s a bandwidth saver option for your website’s streaming content though your website links should highlight its availability if you choose this option.
Above all, what all You Tube business users need to realise is that it is a discriminating intelligent community .Whatever your meme or interest, open access content is providing us all with insight, entertainment or breaking news whether it be the recipe for the perfect Mayonnaise, watching Maradona attack an Al Wasl fan or learning how to use WordPress Blog. With Kuwait, Saudi and the UAE amongst the top global You Tube users video marketing cannot be neglected as part of the marketing mix.
If you want to learn more about how your company can leverage Social Media Marketing as part of their marketing mix, ISM are running their Social Media Marketing course in October.
This is my favourite Summer video,let’s hope Wii gave them some free goodies..