For all the talk and theories about how to take advantage of the YouTube explosion – few can agree whether the billion-hits-a-day site is mostly Internet TV, search engine, digital university, or social media – it might be that answer has been with us all along. That’s because, rather than thinking about YouTube as a marketing medium, it’s better to see it the way users do: as a series of channels and clips.
Some viewers go to YouTube for entertainment; others to learn, or to stay in touch with their favorite teams, shows, and characters. But what makes them so great isn’t that they are uniform (they aren’t), but that they’re self selecting.
In other words, as with Google or Yahoo, users will tell you what they’re looking for by entering in a search term or visiting a certain channel. But on YouTube, because they’re searching videos, rather than web pages, you can even more closely guess at what they’re hoping to find… and then give it to them.
If the people who are likely to find your videos seem to be searching for an informational resource, provide them with one. If they seem to want to be entertained, wrap your marketing message in something silly and light. But no matter what you do, don’t treat titles and descriptions as tools to simply reel them in. You need hits to gain attention, but you need to hold that attention before you can persuade anyone to do anything.
YouTube works best as a marketing tool when it’s treated with the same common sense as any other online medium. Remember that attention leads to action, and then make a point to give people just what they want … along with a taste of your marketing message – they’ll reward you by not changing the channel.
As we noted a few weeks ago, YouTube is currently gathering more than 1 billion hits a day, effectively making it the world's second largest search engine (behind Google), and a hot destination for online marketers looking to spread their message virally.
Like a lot of things in life, however, marketing on YouTube is a lot easier to talk about than it is to actually accomplish. That's because viewers go there looking to learn or be entertained... but rarely to be sold to.
For that reason, the marketing message has to be wrapped up in something more interesting – like medicine that tastes like candy, it needs to be fun before it can be effective. You can only take this idea so far, though; videos of your employees falling down the stairs might get lots of hits, but they aren't going to bring many sales.
With that in mind, here are the five items on your YouTube marketing checklist. Don't upload a video without them:
A crisp, relevant, and interesting topic. The most impactful videos are short and to the point. They should show off your expertise while teaching the viewer something special they can use in their work or home lives.
A script. A lot of marketers are tempted to “wing it” and produce their videos without any script or rehearsal, but it’s not something we would recommend. While you don’t want your clip to be so practiced that it seems unnatural, it’s a good idea to at least run through your thoughts a few times before you shoot the final version.
A catchy opening. If the first 5 or 10 seconds of your video are boring, no one is going to bother watching the rest. Aim to capture attention quickly.
Good production. Shooting quick videos with a handheld cam is a great way to save money… except that it usually costs you future customers. If you don’t have the equipment to produce and edit sharp-looking video, find a creative partner who does.
Contact information and a call to action. Invite viewers to visit your website, download a free report, or take some other action. Otherwise, they may click away to the next video and never return.
Recently, we posted an article pointing out that YouTube – with more than a billion daily hits – had effectively become the world's second-largest search engine. But as much as we'd love to take sole credit for the idea, it seems that we aren't the only ones who noticed.
It’s difficult to find solid numbers, but estimates suggest that users are adding more than 200,000 new videos every single day, or about 13 hours worth each minute. While lots of those undoubtedly involve house pets dancing to modern hits, many of the new additions are coming from savvy online marketers just like you... and the trend is only gaining strength.
Here at Blue Beetle, it reminds us of something.
It wasn't that long ago that regular old search engine optimization was the hot new thing. Companies had just started figuring out that fresh content was the key to working your way to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing), and so they got into a mad rush to add articles to their websites. In many cases, this was a great thing, because it brought valuable information to the Internet. But just as often that meant marketers who were trying to make a quick buck posted poorly-written collections of key words they called articles, making it difficult for searchers to actually find the useful pages they were looking for.
The same thing is beginning to happen on YouTube. For all of the wonderful advice and entertainment that has already been uploaded, we are starting to see badly-produced videos coming from marketers looking to take shortcuts. A few of them might find a way to make money from this strategy, but it's bound to fail in the long term because people don't go online looking for junk—they're searching for quality advice and insight.
With that in mind, we are going to tell you something you probably already know: the goal of your video marketing campaign shouldn't be to have the most YouTube videos, but the most effective. Post material that educates and entertains, not clips that take up a few minutes while parroting your sales message again and again.
One good video on YouTube can bring you millions of views and thousands of new customers, but a badly done piece only costs everyone time and aggravation.
