A lot has been said about optimizing marketing strategies on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. However, YouTube has not been emphasized that much and yet it’s a powerful marketing platform.
“YouTube is not only relevant to comedians, celebrities, and artists who want to launch their careers, but also for marketers.”
With a good marketing strategy, marketers can use YouTube to their advantage. This article reveals six stories when YouTube videos have helped marketing.
Tutorial and Explainer Videos – Slack
Explainer videos are marketing videos explaining in detail how a product should be used and the distinct components of that product. Tutorials can address the questions raised by customers or explain the features of a new product.
Explainer videos have many benefits including:
- Using video content to improve SEO rankings.
- Increasing conversions
- Repurposing various needs for email signatures, investor pitch, and so on
- Enabling users to learn about a product because videos are easy to share
- Keeping viewers on a webpage for long
Slack created a video to reinforce the busy work life, a common phenomenon in the work environment today. Slack’s video demonstrated how their product is relevant in the busy work-life scenario without being so promotional. The visuals were creative, enticing, and bright to capture the attention of their targeted audience. Slack did not use any spoken word in the whole video that lasted 53 seconds.
Event Videos – Adobe Summit
Event videos are a great way to communicate to a large audience concerning a major company event or product launch. Marketers also use event videos to host major events and conferences and to host Q&A sessions. They easily capture the event and ultimately achieve the goal of spreading brand awareness and brand authority.
A typical example of an event video coverage is the Adobe summit 2020. Adobe delivered highly-polished content that was streamed via various social media platforms including YouTube. The attendees were highly involved with hashtags, and the event yielded massive user engagement in just five days. The company facilitated connections at the online events to increase event value despite being online.
Customer Testimonials – Fulfillment by Amazon
Customer testimonials are brief interviews with customers who are satisfied with the products or services being offered. The testimonials are aimed at building product credibility. Marketers leverage customer testimonials because many customers consider product reviews before buying.
“Companies that have used video testimonials have enhanced their brand credibility and trustworthiness.”
Customers help to explain product benefits and processes from different perspectives, which is appealing to others.
Fulfillment by Amazon is a success story where YouTube videos have helped in marketing. Amazon demonstrates how to appeal to an audience by highlighting choice statistics instead of throwing lots of promotional materials to their audience.
They highlight a few impressive statistics to show how much they can help their customers. Amazon does it well to ensure that the content is relevant to their brand such that they strike a balance between being informative and being promotional.
Video Blogs – Hubspot
Video blogs are released weekly or daily and they document events or daily life. Marketers record videos summarizing or highlighting blog posts to allow their audience to have multiple ways to digest the information. They consider whatever is worth writing a blog post about also worth creating a video about.
Companies that have created video summaries of blog posts have been successful because short videos get lots of engagement and can easily be posted on YouTube.
The “about us” videos are also useful because the “about us” page is the most visited webpage after the homepage. A short video explaining what a company does gives it a touch of personality. Hubspot created the “our story’ video on their “about us” page to educate users about who they are.
Expert/Thought Leaders Interviews – Drift
Interviews with experts can help to amplify the credibility of a company in a given industry. Thought leaders’ videos can effectively help to establish an organization’s or individual’s authority in a particular niche. Thought leaders can create podcasts about aspects such as storytelling in marketing, word of mouth in marketing, blogs about SEO, and so on.
Thought leadership videos provide an educational perspective on an idea. With the right speaker and content, videos can engage the community while making the voice to stand out as an industry leader.
Releasing high-quality video content on a YouTube channel regularly allows a brand to stand out and gain valuable exposure. As shares increase, more people are encouraged to learn about the brand. The vice president of content and community at Drift offers tips on how to use their conversational marketing tool and sharing job openings.
Conclusion
YouTube videos have had an impact on marketing in the recent past. Businesses are leveraging on YouTube live, tutorial videos, event videos, customer testimonials, video blogs, and expert interviews. These have created an impact of engaging the audience, driving web traffic, and increasing conversions. Effective YouTube videos must be optimized for search by considering the title, description, tags, category, and thumbnail.
—- Susanna Balashova is an experienced campaigner in the marketing field working as a part-timer for professional essay writers. Reach out to her on Twitter and Linkedin.
