subject: YouTube – an Effective Online Marketing Tool [print this page] These days, people don't just use YouTube to post videos of their pets making silly, human sounds. In fact, many small to mid-size businesses use the video friendly site as a marketing tool. YouTube attracts over 2 billion video views per day and has over 120 million US viewers, which is no small business. Best of all, it is free to sign up and easy to use!
In order to grow your brand by using YouTube, you can follow the following golden rules:
Making Your Video Attracting
Make your clips informative and entertaining to attract eyeballs to your video. Pure commercials that you see on TV won't work for the YouTube audience, but how-to videos are better. Create videos about relevant information that makes you an expert and viewers can use it to improve their lives. For example, if you're a doctor, film yourself or an expert in your office giving advice about preventing illness. Create your own YouTube channel and produce a new video each month so your content is consistent.
Adding Your Business Details
It's important to share your business's web site and contact information in your videos and on your profile. Add your business details to your video's intro and final slides. Also, type this information into the descriptions of your videos. Using tags and keyword rich descriptions helps to tell the search engines what kind of content is in your video so that when consumers are searching they find your video when it is relevant to them. Make sure to add consistent tags to every video to improve your search capabilities.
Using Viral Marketing
Once you create your video and upload it onto YouTube, don't stop there. Email it out to all your clients, family & friends and send it to connections on other social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Aside from YouTube, you'll also want to upload your video onto other video distribution sites like TubeMogul. Also called viral marketing, you want your videos to spread across the Web so that as many people as possible can see them and you can grow your customer/audience base.
Showcasing Your Products
If you're selling a product, like a t-shirt or new toothpaste, use YouTube to show off what it's all about and its potential impact. Customers are more likely to purchase merchandise when they see it in action, over just photos. Create a video of someone using your product or get footage from a trade show where it is on display and upload it to YouTube. Then link to it from your product pages on your site. Zappos.com does a great job with this on their site.
Creating a Sizzle Reel
If you are a small design or service business, then create a sizzle reel of the best business and success highlights of your services that you can link to from your site. Businesses often include news stories, interviews with current customers, big awards, etc. in their sizzle reels. YouTube visitors might not be as interested in your commercial content, but your potential business leads will. Try emailing them a link to your YouTube channel with your sizzle reel.
Producing Videos at Moderate Cost
In general, most people shoot video with $300-$500 cameras on YouTube and do the editing themselves on programs like iMovie or Final Cut. Or you can easily hire an editor and camera shooter on Craigslist or Elance for $40-$50 an hour. Audio however is key, so make sure to always work with a good microphone. No matter what, your videos don't have to be overly produced or have expensive production costs to be effective.
Thanks to YouTube's easy-to-use upload service, large audience and free marketing opportunity, more and more businesses are taking advantage of it these days. Video and commercials aren't just for the TV sets anymore. They have become effective online branding tools and part of our social media landscape.
