YouTube is a world’s biggest video sharing website. There are a lot of other websites that share videos, and there are the naughty ones that share files, but YouTube is the biggest out of all of them. There are thousands of videos on YouTube and thousands of people visit it every day. It has a very large pool of people who could potentially see your adverts and your videos. So, as you can imagine, the marketing potential of YouTube is huge.
Your potential audience is massive
YouTube is not nearly as big as Facebook, and it is not even as big as the social media site in third place, Twitter (even though Twitter has a quarter of the audience of Facebook). However, the potential audience available on YouTube is massive, and far more than you can ever expect to see on your own website. Plus, YouTube videos feature prominently on many of the Google search engine results pages, probably because Google owns YouTube and want to see more traffic.
So, your pool of potential buyers is massive, added to which, the audience is quite diverse. It is not like Pinterest where the audience is mostly female or Twitter where the audience is mostly reading and micro-blogging enthusiasts. This means that you are likely to find some of your target audience nestled away within the audience of YouTube.
It appeals to people who are not too keen on reading
There are lots of people who are not keen on reading at all, and the Internet is not exactly a hostile place, but it is a place of limited uses. People who do not like reading will often use Internet tools such as social media or checking results, data, etc. Otherwise they will use it as a consumer. YouTube appeals to these people, but also appeals to people who are keen on reading too. There are very few people in America that can say they have never seen a YouTube video. To some people it is a second television, and why not, since many TV shows and even movies are now available on YouTube for free, (so long as you don’t mind unskippable adverts).
It attracts people who want to have fun when your competitors are creating adverts
YouTube is not there as a place to put adverts, but a lot of your competition are going to be doing just that. They are going to make videos under the pretense of them being a demonstration or how-to video, and are going to create adverts. People do not log onto YouTube to see adverts, they go on there to be entertained. This is where you can differentiate yourself from your competition.
You can create videos that are fun to watch and are engaging. Sure, they can still be promotional, but make sure that the promotional side of them is an afterthought. Let’s say that you sell ultra-strong windows. People would love to see videos of windows smashing as people throw bowling balls through them. Show people doing this and show it in slow motion, and then show a clip of the bowling ball bouncing off of your brand of window. It is fun to watch and helps to promote your products at the same time. If you can figure out a screenplay for your video that people would watch anyway, then all you need to do is convert it a little to make it promotional.
You can embed your videos onto your website
It is actually better if you embed your video into your website and stream it from YouTube. It is better than uploading the video to your own hosting service, as watching it will probably take up your bandwidth and it will most likely take longer to load on the user’s computer. Plus, uploading it to your hosting service will also take up space, whereas streaming from YouTube will take up a tiny amount of hosting space.
People have started using YouTube as a “how to” website
If somebody wants to learn anything from playing the piano to how to roll a cigarette with one hand, they visit YouTube. You can really take advantage of this and gain a solid and reliable audience if you create high quality “how-to” videos. It is preferable if you create them as tutorials on how to use your products, but it only needs to be vaguely related to your product. You can give guitar lessons with your guitars, carpet fitting instructions with your tools; you can even give tutorials on how to use your apps to get the best prices on things, etc.
Allow YouTube to help you with your creativity:
Have you started using YouTube for your business yet? What’s stopping you?
Image courtesy of jm3, Flickr.