Creating quality content and linking to it is a great way to increase your visibility on the web, but has your business considered having a presence on YouTube? YouTube has become the second largest search engine, and its viewership has been growing rapidly. Building an audience on YouTube doesn't require making a Harlem Shake video, though. Watch our Daily Brown Bag to learn why having a presence on YouTube can really help your business, and how to create videos to build an audience and get your business out there!
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Hello, and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today, we wanted to talk about YouTube marketing and whether it’s worth the time and effort. I’m Chad Hill and I’m joined by Adam Stetzer.
Yeah, good morning, Chad. So, there’s been a lot of discussion in our reseller forum about using video as a marketing tool and all the efforts involved. Video is definitely increasing on the internet in terms of its popularity, both with marketers and especially with consumers. We’ve seen this trend over the last several years. Seventy-five percent of marketers in a recent survey now say they plan to add video to their marketing budgets from the past year, so this is definitely on the hockey stick trajectory in terms of new marketing efforts. YouTube is the clear leader and the most popular site when it comes to finding video online. In fact, it’s second only to Google for the number of searches that are conducted on any specific site.
Here’s a few numbers for you, Chad. More than a billion unique users visit YouTube every month, and there are more than four billion video views every day, which is really mind-boggling. We always highlight what’s happening in mobile in a lot of our videos here, Chad. It’s interesting to point out that 4 million views each day are from mobile devices, and I know that trend is on it’s way up as well. So, a lot of viewers are there, and marketers are probably confused. Certainly, putting video together seems a little harder than sitting down and writing a blog post. So, is it worth it? What’s our advice for internet marketers?
That is a great question, and I think a lot of people are a little confused by it because they immediately think of very expensive production studios, but we’ve talked about this in the past. The set-up we use here on a daily basis is a very inexpensive solution, so video is approachable and of course Google makes it very easy with Hangouts. The numbers do speak for themselves. The numbers are staggering! A lot of people are consuming video, and the nice thing about video is that people prefer video. They want to sit down and have a face and somebody talking to them about an issue. There are a lot of products that are relevant to videos, especially when you’re dealing with product reviews and other things where people want to look at the product and see what it looks like. You have to understand that if video is right for you, there are segments like this that discuss topics, there are other kinds where you can be more focused on putting yourself in the actual environment where the product is used, so that’s definitely a reason to use video.
Another big thing is that video is very accessible these days. It’s something you can watch on your phone as well as on a desktop computer. We also talked about how easy it is to embed videos. It used to be that you had to go out and buy some expensive subscription service to video streaming technology. Now with YouTube, you post it on YouTube and that thing can be embedded almost anywhere, so it’s very easy to get it on your blog or where you want people to see it. Of course, you can’t really talk about YouTube without realizing and knowing that it’s part of the Google family, and so there are some preferential connections there where Google certainly shows YouTube video results in their search results page a lot more quickly than they do with other video streaming services. So, there are a lot of reasons that I think video is important and you should incorporate it into your marketing strategy.
Yeah, and I think it’s interesting that we were just talking to our creative team yesterday about those small businesses who just aren’t that exciting and don’t feel like they have anything great to share with the world or certainly aren’t funny or won’t go viral or won’t be a point of interest. I think what they were trying to urge small businesses to think about, and I think we agree with this, Chad, is that you don’t view video necessarily just as an advertising platform. Also, realize there are many, many ways to leverage video for content dissemination, so we’ve chosen a format that we’re comfortable with because we feel like we have information to share and don’t mind guiding it straight into the camera, but I know a lot of small businesses aren't comfortable with that. That’s okay.
If you look at YouTube, there’s a lot of content on there that isn’t someone talking into the camera. There’s all sorts of collages people put together with different images and informational messages, and I think this is where it kind of bleeds into SEO and content marketing a bit. I think almost any business can, at least tangentially, find something for video content that could be interesting and get a few viewers. It won’t be a marketing message, and that’s where small businesses get hung up. They think, “Well, if this video isn’t directly marketing my business and driving sales directly, it’s not worth it.” I think our pitch here, as we say in SEO and in content marketing, is that’s old thinking and that’s not where things are today. Today, it’s about awareness, getting your brand out there, and shares. The more you can do that, and that’s often by not hard-sell, it’s much more soft-sell or no-sell at all, just share content or be interesting, or funny, or creative, then it will help your overall footprint and your site and bring business in an indirect way. So, video’s really helpful for that. We recommend hiring a team to create transcripts for your YouTube videos to give them an SEO boost.
We’d like to hear your stories, particularly if you’ve got clients or your yourself have tried to turn the corner on making videos or are trying to get your head around this idea of video marketing to help improve your overall marketing strategy. We’d like to see you back here tomorrow and we hope you subscribe to our YouTube channel. We make these every day and we’d like to see you here again.