When should I use YouTube in my video marketing strategy?
YouTube is a powerful video hosting platform and the number 2 search engine behind Google (its parent). Its business model is to use your content and then sell ads around it. It wants to keep viewers on YouTube so they watch more ads. All of this is fine and can work to your advantage, if you plan for it. Planning means knowing “why”, “where” and “when” to use YouTube. Creating videos can be expensive and time consuming, so you want to get a good ROI for the effort. It is a great place to run an engaging and fun video ad so that people are thinking about you. But make sure to include enough information to get them to your site. You need to understand how to use YouTube for marketing your product and website. Otherwise, you are just creating free content for YouTube.
If you are serious about generating internet sales you ultimately want visitors to come to your site. YouTube can be an excellent point to start that awareness and get viewers to your site. But be careful not to send your visitors back to YouTube once you get them to your site. A common mistake is to embed your YouTube video on your own site, while this might seem like a cheap easy option it often creates one of a variety of problems:
- Viewers is shown ads for your competitors
- Viewers are distracted by other content and leave your site (YouTube wants them back!)
A better solution is to put videos in YouTube, plus use a private video hosting solutions that will not pull your viewers away. Use the private hosting provider to embed videos onto your site. A couple of the best options for video hosting are Togotiki and Brightcove.