A study finds size doesn't matter where smart video marketing strategies are concerned. Small businesses are surpassing their larger competitors with agile content campaigns.

By now, most businesses have figured out how important written content is for online marketing success. Fast Company estimated that 62 percent of marketers blogged or planned on blogging in 2013, and that figure is only going to grow this year. There are customers for every product and service looking for information and answers to their questions, and businesses are realizing they need the right strategies to connect them to target audiences.

Marketers need to get to the same place with video content. The situation today is comparable to where the written word was a decade ago: There are people anxious and hungry for content, and they’re finding it online. Unfortunately, they aren’t necessarily getting it from businesses.

David, Goliath and video

Pixability just released a study of the shakeup taking place in the beauty product trade thanks to YouTube. This $265 billion industry is being turned on its head because of the voracious appetite consumers have for video content – regardless of who’s producing it.

The top 25 beauty video blogs, or vlogs, have 115 times more subscribers and 2,600 percent more comments than the biggest beauty brand channels. It doesn’t hurt that the most-viewed beauty vloggers publish content on YouTube seven times more frequently than beauty brands.

This might seem irrelevant – after all, it’s SEO value and ROI that really gets companies to try new strategies. But the little guys are wiping the floor with established beauty businesses (those worth a combined $111 billion). These major brands only show up 2.5 percent of the time in YouTube searches for popular beauty keywords.
YouTube marketing is the next big thing and marketers are in a good position to pounce.

Find your company’s fans

Not every business is fortunate enough to be selling beauty products in 2014, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also sitting on a gold mine of potential content marketing value. There are over 1 billion unique visitors to YouTube every month, so there are plenty of chances to engage with a huge and devoted consumer base the way that smaller beauty companies and vloggers do. Some of the most valuable types of videos include:

  • Presentations. Niche services or unique products are probably not going to feature a lot of in-depth video presentations. Corner this market with informative, industry-specific demonstrations.

  • Answers to questions. Ever since Google released the Hummingbird algorithm, it’s become more important to provide valuable answers to the questions searchers are asking, no matter how complex.

  • Spokesperson videos. Many vloggers, including those who focus on beauty products, build close relationships with their viewers. Establish trust and a rapport by addressing followers on the topic that brought them to your videos in the first place.

Video is one of many coals in the fire

Using YouTube as the be-all and end-all of a content marketing strategy would be a mistake. The small beauty companies and independent vloggers that are running laps around larger competitors also have social media presences. Yet they’ve found that their core fans and customers live and breathe video. In the event that a business is looking to improve its SEO and engagement game, video might just be the missing ingredient.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.