Between managing a website, posting content to social media, running a brick-and-mortar store, and networking with future customers and business partners, companies, especially small businesses, have their hands tied with marketing. This is especially true given the limited resources a company has that must be efficiently divvied up amongst these tasks. This being said, adding yet ANOTHER facet of marketing to the equation seems both superfluous and impossible. However, it is imperative that your company implement a video marketing strategy via YouTube for many reasons. If it seems like it is too much to take on right now, consider dropping one of your less-effective social media accounts to free up some time. Having a mediocre Facebook page is far less effective than having a great, interactive YouTube channel. Here’s why.
According to a 2015 article from Digital Sherpa titled 25 Amazing Video Marketing Statistics, 50% of users watch business-related videos on YouTube, and 75% of those viewers go to the business’s website after watching the video. Additionally, 90% of consumers say that seeing a video about a product helps them in making a purchase decision and, for those of you in the Real Estate business, a listing with a video receives 403% more inquiries than a listing without a video. These stats heavily support implementing some kind of video marketing campaign for your business to increase exposure of your brand, improve interaction with your brand, and increase web traffic.
Our YouTube Channel, Davies Media Design, is also a testament to t
he effectiveness of having a channel that supports your line
of work. As of right now, traffic from our YouTube channel accounts for almost 11% of the total traffic to our website. The channel functions as an inbound marketing source where people can learn different graphic design and marketing techniques, building on our company’s credibility and levels of trust with our customers. It showcases that we are experts at what we do, while empowering customers to learn certain skills themselves to try to tackle projects on their own. If they can’t do it themselves, they are encouraged to visit our website thanks to the cross-promoting we conduct by putting our URL in all of the video descriptions. As of November 2016, our channel receives approximately 28,000 views over a 30 day span, along with over 100,000 minutes watched and more than 275 new subscribers added. By placing ads on our videos, we are also able to earn some extra revenue to pay for other initiatives. Once your subscriptions surpasses 1,000, YouTube will give you the option to create a paid subscription channel (see our new DMD Premiere channel for an example).
Videos can showcase the products you sell or the homes you are listing. They can help people learn the software that accompanies your product or provide customer support via help tutorials, which add to your value proposition and can drive a purchase decision. They can also simply demonstrate your company’s culture through casual vlogging (video blogging), making your company appear more human to current or future customers. If you offer a service (like we do) it can demonstrate the knowledge and expertise you possess about the service or industry via tutorials or educational videos. See the bottom of this page for an example of one of our tutorials.
YouTube also acts as a “review” or “feedback” source as people can like or dislike your videos, and also leave comments. I have seen some companies disable comments on their videos – this is not a good idea. I highly recommend that you allow people to leave comments as you will get quality feedback from your audience (and if I see comments disabled it tells me people really hated that video and were bashing it). If your video is getting so many bad comments that you have to disable the comments, I recommend just taking the video down altogether. These comments are often filled with product feedback, testimonials, or questions about your product or service. Google (who happens to own YouTube) will start to see that people are interacting with your channel/business and will begin to rank your videos and website higher. In fact, according to that same Digital Sherpa article, you are 50 times more likely to end up on the front page of Google if your page includes a video.
Implementing successful commercial video marketing takes careful planning and research. Be sure your videos don’t look or sound too amateurish and aren’t too long. Also be sure that the “talent” (the person in the video) isn’t painfully boring or distracting in their appearance, inflection, and/or tone. Just because you are the CEO of the company doesn’t mean you are the best person to be in the video. You might have another employee who has a knack for being on camera and is better received by your audience. Be sure to pool all of your resources together (camera, editing software, script, talent, YouTube Channel for uploading, graphics to go in the video) and enact a posting schedule so that people will want to subscribe for fresh content. You can either film multiple videos in advance and schedule them to post on your channel, or simply film one or two per week and put them up once their finished.
You’ll find that creating a video is actually quite easy and cost effective – you can even make videos by yourself and for free if you already have the editing software! If you decide to take the plunge, but aren’t seeing the results you wanted to see, be sure to send us an email on our contact page and we can help you out with our YouTube exposure services. If your business is not on YouTube yet, it needs to get on there with haste.
Below is our most popular tutorial:
