When people, especially small business owners, think of YouTube, the first thing that comes to mind is those viral videos where people play with Mentos and Diet Coke. Sometimes it conjures up images of famous advertisements for other, larger companies.
When you think about video marketing this way, it becomes hard to see how YouTube can be essential to your small business marketing campaign. But this article will tell you how you can benefit from having this in your strategy.
Why YouTube?
YouTube is the most effective tool for video marketing because it is the most viewed video website. Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has garnered the largest market share. It has been able to get such high traffic in such a short time. After the first year since it started, there have been 38 million people who visited it. This puts YouTube in the top 10 websites online.
It became so popular that Google opted to buy it in 2006 for an amount of 1.65 billion dollars. YouTube did not stop growing and that is why it is in the top 5 websites that you should consider especially if you are doing video marketing. May 2010 was a record month for YouTube because it had the most videos viewed, with 14.6 billion.
There are many other websites you can use for video marketing, such as blip.tv, Yahoo Video, Revver, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and Break. But all of these still can’t compete with the market share that YouTube was able to gain. It would be very beneficial for you to store your video marketing ads on YouTube, especially if you want to expand your market.
YouTube can also integrate with social networking websites, making your video marketing efforts much easier. YouTube has a community and population of its own, but they are further enlarged by expanding to Facebook, Twitter and others. Twitter is also a good way to get referrals for your video marketing ads.
YouTube continues its efforts to integrate with the iPad and Android phones. Placing your video marketing efforts in these places will further increase your market base.
YouTube also has plenty of web tools to help you measure your video marketing strategy. Once you sign up, you will be given a channel or profile that will serve as another website for you. You can see which videos are successful or not based on user traffic. You don’t need to spend on web development expenses, nor do you have to pay for web hosting.