How Small Businesses Can Benefit from YouTube
Online videos have transformed the entertainment world with TV shows and movies all available for viewing. By far the most popular video site is YouTube with a video audience that is multiple times that of other sites like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon etc. It also has the distinction of being the fourth largest website on the Internet.
The YouTube success story is difficult to replicate with a presence in 25 countries with 43 languages and used in abroad age band between 18-54 year olds. With over 13 million hours of videos uploaded in the year 2010, the average comes to 35 hours of video uploads in a minute-this means that YouTube gets more video uploads in 60 days than what other sites get in over sixty years. The implication is clear, that phenomenal amount of time is spent on YouTube by a huge segment of the global population on diverse channels of the site.
This goes on to prove that YouTube offers the ideal platform to small businesses for advertising. Advertising can be done in the following ways:
Branded channel creation- Creating a video channel involves creation of a home for a business on YouTube. This helps businesses to involve consumers and acquire subscribers so as to move traffic towards the ecommerce website. The branded video channels are based on the same concept as Facebook fans. Merchants are provided multiple options like featuring playlists, other channels and their favorite videos. Each time a user opens a brand channel the featured video begins to play automatically. Videos often have written descriptions including the name of the company and the link to their website. Discount coupons are often included and other promotional information is added from time to time. Video channels come free or at premium, with the former available in restricted amounts. Premium channels offer a lot more options but cost more than what most small businesses can afford.
Promoted Videos on YouTube
Branded video channels offer the advantage of running YouTube Promoted video campaigns. These are similar to Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising programs. The promoted video advertisements come along with the videos appearing as part of the search results, in a right column. The advertiser has to pay only when someone clicks on the ad. The promoted video campaign is simple-all that it requires is selecting a video, add some text as promotional information, and fix the daily advertising budget. The performance of the campaign can be checked through the free analytics tool called YouTube Insight. This provides all the specific statistics like sources of traffic, video hotspots and demographics.
InVideo Ads
This is another way of advertising on YouTube, which involves selection of a video in which the ads will appear and the ad comes on the lower bar of the video comprising of the image and the text. To see the ad the viewer has to click on the ad, which pauses the video and the advertising has to pay on cost-per-click, or alternatively cost-per-impression. Once the ad is clicked, the various options selected by the advertiser come in to play. Either the landing page of the website will open in a new tab or the video ad will begin. As the ad ends the video resumes. The overlay ads needed and the banner advertisement can be created with Google’s self-serve Display Ad Builder. InVideo ads are linked to Google AdWords, and therefore an AdWords account becomes necessary.
Research reveals that InVideo is one of the most successful methods of advertising on YouTube since it has click rates 8-10 times higher than other advertising methods.
Video Targeting Tool
This tool is a dashboard that allows advertisers to identify the most targeted videos, and choose targeting options like keywords, channels and categories, which are then carried to AdWords to create an advertisement.
Each of these will help to steer traffic to the website of the small business.
This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Motorola MC75 and Zebra ZM400. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.