Posted by You’ve spent the hours building up your key offer and are ready to unleash it on a waiting world. The next, crucial step is deciding which marketing channels to use. Are you an Insta kind of product, are your customers the Snapchat generation or perhaps they’re found scrolling on Facebook? You might be using tools to schedule posts across all of them but is that the right choice?
Most often the answer is a mix of two or more channels, determined by a thorough investigation of who your customers are and where they can be found. Marketing personas are the foundation for any good social media campaign, offering insights into not just demographics (age, gender, job, location etc) but psychometrics (beliefs, opinions, political leanings) and things like device usage. All necessary to build an accurate image of who you’re talking to, informing channel choice, content type and timings.
Any well designed social media campaign will dedicate sections to creative elements and auditing any assets already available. Got a template in Canva? Use that to create engaging Insta, Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter content. But wait, your CMO is talking video?
Marketers know that video is fast becoming the most widely consumed form of social media and here are the statistics to back that up:
- 68% of YouTube watchers watched the channel to help them decide on making a purchase. Source: Think With Google
- YouTube has 31.4million subscribers. Source: Socialblade.com
- YouTube has one billion video views per day. Source: Omnicore agency
The stats go on and on. It’s a behemoth of a medium and while consumer attention spans threaten to get ever shorter, platforms like YouTube are ready to adapt with short-form, attention-grabbing content that spans the generations.
But if you’re the CEO of a small to medium enterprise (SME) or are looking to grow from being a sole trader, why should you plough your hard-earned dollars into this channel? Here are seven compelling reasons why:
1. Small Investment For a Large Return
Yes, there’s likely to be a need for some initial investment. Shoot on your phone, yes, but you’ll still need some editing software to knock it into shape, not to mention some decent lighting. And who’s going to carry out that editing for you? In-house or agency? Perhaps it’s a skill you’ll take on yourself. A little bit of training but worth it.
In general, using a PPC (pay per click) model, YouTube adverts work out cheaper than display ads served by Google. In fact, the average YouTube ad works out at about five to 10 cents which, when you can pay up to $50 for an online keyword search, is extremely cost-effective.
But we’re not just talking advertising here either. By uploading helpful, free to view content you can make some serious headway with organic traffic to your site too.
2. Audience Size
Unlike other platforms, YouTube’s audience is extremely diverse and has a global reach second to none. Naturally you’ll be tailoring your content with a specific audience in mind, but the chances of it being discovered are far greater if you think of it less like a social media platform and more like a visual search engine.
With only 9% of US businesses making use of this resource, that audience is yours for the taking!
3. Establishing Your Brand Voice
As mentioned earlier, video is the perfect opportunity for your business to establish itself as a helpful voice of authority. With millions of users searching for guidance on everything from unblocking a u-bend to fixing a car engine, YouTube is like having a helpful expert by your side when you attempt some DIY or an oil change.
When you figure out the pain points your customers are experiencing and provide the solutions for those problems, your content becomes extremely powerful and compelling.
Provide consistently useful videos and it won’t take long for your channel to gain traction and help boost you in the platform’s algorithms. It does require this level of commitment and consistency but it’s almost always worth it.
4. You Can Still Repurpose Content
You might think it’s harder to re-purpose video content but in fact it’s the perfect way to create helpful blogs using the transcript from the video, pushing a link to your video from other social media channels and using key takeaways and snippets for Facebook, Insta stories/ reels, Tik Tok and Twitter etc.
Use YouTube as your leader and iterate ideas from there, you’ll find the content almost writes itself.
You might even consider using your YouTube tutorials to train your own staff, particularly those new to your product or service.
5. Testimonials
It’s not just about advertising and organic content, you can use YouTube for third-party content too and what’s more compelling for your potential lead than a testimonial from a satisfied customer?
Yes, it’s a big ask but you get that first-hand account of how great you are on camera and that’s worth every bit as much as a paid-for advertising campaign. Leverage it across social media to push views on YouTube or through your website and you’ll only add to your reputation as a trustworthy business that delivers on its promises.
6. Get Customer Insight
Guessing what your customer wants and actually knowing what they want are poles apart. Guess work sometimes pays off but more often than not it’s simply a drain on your resources. Like all social media, YouTube offers some great, in-depth audience analytics.
Take a look at the stats that reveal how your latest ad campaign has worked out, how those views converted into sales and so on. Equally as importantly, drill down and see what types of content appeal to your target audience most. Perhaps your helpful step-by-steps generated the most leads or maybe it was your live demonstrations that got people watching for longer.Depending on what your goals are, different content will have different effects. Driving up brand awareness will optimize well with one type of video while actual click throughs to your website will be pushed by a more sales-oriented, call to action, video.
What’s great about YouTube insights is that you can very quickly see what’s working, who’s viewing, when, where and on which device.
7. Because Video is Here to Stay
Quite simply, video content is going nowhere. With the rise of YouTubers engaging a whole new generation of fans, YouTube is here to stay. Getting in now is a great way of establishing your brand amongst the crowd.
Creating engaging, useful content is not an easy task but it is a skill that you can build on very quickly. Making sure you know who you’re talking to, engaging on a one-to-one level and providing content that your custom really needs is not a strategy doomed to failure.
Yes, it requires careful planning, consistent productivity, strategizing and adapting but get it right and you will see some great returns over time. Don’t be afraid to let your brand personality shine through this medium. Video is meant to be entertaining and eye-catching. While, on occasion, you might miss the nuanced tone of a tweet, that’s not the case when it comes to video. It’s the perfect opportunity to give your business a character and bring that character to life.
Get that YouTube account up and running and step out of your social media comfort zone.
Caroline Kelly is a journalist and copywriter who loves to write and run. Trained up in the newsrooms of her native East Sussex, England, she has lived and worked in Switzerland and Singapore. Obsessed with research and story-telling, Caroline writes in financial niches for print and online publications. Her website can be found at: https://carolinekellywriter.com/
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