It is time to face the facts. YouTube is where it’s at. Not only are they backed by Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world, their popularity has skyrocketed in recent years with faster internet connections and cheaper video cameras. But how can you take advantage of this in your marketing efforts? If you are dedicated to search, whether it be local, organic or PPC, you need to be thinking about YouTube. According to Forrester Research: “On the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.” Are you kidding me!? That is a statistic that is impossible to ignore.
So let’s get practical. Here are 3 things you need to know about YouTube to start marketing effectively with it and bringing in more business.
- It’s free. There are so many free services on the internet that we often take them for granted. Take a moment to consider the horsepower required to run a website like YouTube. Engineers, file encoding, warehouses full of servers. It’s a serious operation that we are able to take advantage of for free. You don’t have to pay the competitive rates for TV ads that you can’t even track or target. How could you not get excited about that?
- It’s huge. Every day, YouTube gets 2 billion hits. Every minute, 36 hours of new video is uploaded. Every second, 400 YouTube videos are tweeted. The chart below is a bit outdated but you get the point. YouTube has seen enormous growth, and with Google backing it, don’t expect it to slow down.
- It’s here to stay. If you can find any statistic that points to the decline of web video in
the next 10 years, email me. No internet marketing tool is as effective right now. It shows up in search, you can embed it on your site, it builds trust and boosts conversion rates. It’s the ultimate tool. Take advantage of it or prepared to be left behind.
If you want to see how pros handle video marketing, check out the Fairfax Video Studio. To learn more about how to use video in your marketing, get a free copy of the book I wrote with Tom Foster “The Small Business Guide to YouTube”.
