When marketers think of which social media platforms they should use to reach audiences, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are often what come to mind, but YouTube should also be in consideration. According to ReelSEO, YouTube reaches about 39 countries and hosts videos in 59 languages, making it an expansive network that speaks to a variety of people. Marketers who learn to leverage YouTube’s power can benefit from the site’s easy sharing capabilities and its social atmosphere.
As Brafton reported, both female and male audiences respond well to video content in SERPs, and with Google controlling YouTube, the search engine makes sure a few clips show up in appropriate results when possible. In fact, women are 28 percent more likely to click on links that include video thumbnails and men are 46 percent more likely to perform similar acts. More, recent comScore data shows YouTube, saw 126 million unique visitors in October 2012. Because of this, brands that publish custom content through the site gain access to Google’s active audience.
Video marketing: Everyone is doing it
Video marketing could become a standard content delivery practice moving forward, and brands capable of producing their own clips can further distribute their content via YouTube.
Google is currently in the early stages of developing and testing a new shopping experience through YouTube. The new beta feature attempts to drive in-stream sales. While shoppable video remains a small market, it shows just how innovative marketing practices have become over the past year, and brands that want to tap into this emerging space must develop video content production capabilities.
“With YouTube external annotations, we’re trying to make it a very seamless process,” said Lisa Green, industry director at Google to ClickZ. “If while you’re watching it, you see something you really want, you can click … We’ve allowed the user to make the decision to make the purchase in the video.”
YouTube’s shoppable video content displays a rectangle in the middle of the user’s screen whenever a product appears. Viewers who roll over the embedded link see the product’s name and a link leading to an ecommerce site. Brands that want to take advantage of YouTube’s new video marketing solution need their own productions first, and third-party content marketing services provide much needed support for businesses with little knowledge of how to conceptualize effective video content outreach programs.
