Is YouTube Right for Your Company?

YouTube is one of those amazing platforms we all use pretty much daily. Much in the same way that we jump on Google when we have questions, YouTube is there for tutorials, informational videos, funny distractions, and so much more. However, it is also a platform that can be a great marketing tool for a variety of different business types. But is YouTube right for your company? At Render Perfect Productions, your video marketing experts in Baltimore, Maryland, we wanted to help you answer that question today.

Questions to Ask:

With a few of these helpful and guiding questions, you can determine if YouTube is the right platform for your company.

Is Your Audience on YouTube? Who are they?

The first part of this question is easy; we can even answer it for you. The short answer is — yes, your audience is absolutely on YouTube. With over 2 billion active users, it’s safe to say any business can find and reach a relevant audience across YouTube.

The second part is where it gets a bit more nuanced. Before we can move on to understanding audience behavior on YouTube, we want to be sure you understand your audience.

Surveying your existing audience is a great start for some quantitative data. How many of them regularly visit YouTube? What accounts do they follow or frequent? What type of content do they look for on the platform? What qualitative information do you have about these folks?

Customer and personal interviews are a proven way to get more qualitative feedback. Some companies might build this research into ongoing audience development, but it doesn’t have to be that formal. For example, ask your sales team if they’ve ever come across prospects looking for info on YouTube, and ask them to dig deeper during their calls if the right moment strikes.

What is Your Audience Watching on YouTube?

Simply knowing that your niche is on YouTube — and a little about who they are — isn’t sufficient to gauge whether you should devote resources to this channel, and it certainly doesn’t give you any guidance on how to do so effectively.

It’s time to dig deeper. Add questions around what type of YouTube videos your audience watches into your customer research process and use that feedback as a starting point to see where your company videos might service a need or grab their interest.

Competitive intel can also be an excellent step toward understanding your audience. Are your competitors active on YouTube? What size is their audience? What type of content are they producing? If you aren’t finding a ton of overlap between businesses in your industry, this could be an opportunity to fill a gap. If the space you’re in seems crowded already, this will give you intel on what’s working and resonating across your shared audience. You’ll have to get a bit more creative in order to stand out, but that’s good to know before you start.

Can You Make Content They’re Looking For?

To harness YouTube successfully for discovery and engagement, you need to find the overlap between what your target audience is currently consuming and what content you can and want to create.

For example, if you sell accounting software and your prospects are heavy YouTube users but they’re only watching NBA highlights, you might be better off with an advertising-only strategy. It’s not likely these avid sports fans will actually go to your page and watch your full-length videos, so targeting them with a YouTube ad might be the next best thing.

Be strategic. Simply uploading your existing video assets and hoping for the best is not good enough. Neither is assuming that stellar content will be seen eventually, or that your content should be company-centric. No one is going to YouTube looking for your company testimonials. You can optimize keywords and descriptions until the cows come home, but you will not drive significant discovery with content that your prospects aren’t looking for.

Instead, make video content specifically to match the search intent of your prospects.

Is anyone on YouTube searching for videos about how exceptional your company is? Sadly, no. That’s why we recommend focusing attention on the things your target audience is trying to learn on YouTube.

People go to YouTube for entertainment and education. If you’re thinking entertainment is the way to go, we encourage you to reconsider. For the average company, competing with Comedy Central, Red Bull, and music videos on the entertainment side is a losing battle.

You can, however, compete on the education side.

Educational videos will be most effective if they are related to your industry or field of expertise — but again, not about your product in particular.

Can You Use YouTube Advertising?

If you are committed to growing brand awareness and driving discovery on YouTube, you should almost certainly plan to supplement your organic efforts with YouTube’s paid advertising. YouTube advertising is self-service via Google Ads and there are no minimum budgets, making it accessible even for small companies.

Even if you can’t make relevant content for YouTube, you can still do advertising or re-targeting there. Basically, you can follow an “advertise only” strategy.

Despite the attractive CPMs, many digital marketers struggle to see results from YouTube advertising because of the limited targeting options. For example, you can target pre-roll ads (the most abundant of YouTube inventory) based on geography, basic demographics, broad interest areas, and specific videos or channels.

If you are a large B2C brand like Nike, these targeting options are probably sufficiently granular. For example, Nike can target any female aged 18–25 who is interested in athletics and living in the U.S. and feel relatively confident that the audience they are reaching comprises many prospective customers.

If you’re a B2B brand selling enterprise accounting software, however, you are going to struggle more with targeting. There isn’t a way to target CFOs or any other job function with YouTube advertising.

Instead, you’ll need to spend more time looking at your buyer’s personal research. Maybe lots of people who buy enterprise accounting software also watch World of WarCraft videos on YouTube. Maybe they are mostly women aged 35–50 and living only in Atlanta. Both scenarios give you better criteria to use to target prospects on YouTube and highlight why it’s important to know as much about your customers as possible.

In the end, targeting your audience as precisely as possible will always be the most efficient approach. If you’re targeting everyone in accounting, you will probably hit many potential prospects, but you will also pay for lots of useless impressions. So before launching your next YouTube advertising campaign, evaluate how you can reach your audience with YouTube’s targeting options.

Do You Need Prospects to Reach Your Website?

This ultimate question helps you tie your efforts on YouTube to your broader business goals. After all, building a YouTube channel with lots of viewers and subscribers is only a means to an end — which means you need to identify what your ideal end state is and whether it involves people visiting your site.

YouTube is great for brand impressions but less effective at driving traffic directly to your website. The large B2C brands make a living keeping their product top of mind, increasing the likelihood someone buys their product on their next drugstore visit simply because they recognize it or are now familiar with it. YouTube fits neatly into this context because it’s another touchpoint with no immediate follow-up action required, very much like a TV ad.

If you’re looking for more than brand impressions, you will face a significant challenge on YouTube. Like a casino, YouTube is explicitly designed to encourage viewers to stay put, consuming more videos and, subsequently, more ads.

You can certainly add links in your descriptions and video annotations, but getting a consistent traffic flow from YouTube is rare. Phil Nottingham of Distilled analyzed 95 of his clients’ YouTube channels and found an average referral rate to external sites of 0.72%. Take this into account as you establish realistic goals for your YouTube channel.

About Render Perfect Productions:

Render Perfect has been built from the ground up to service growing businesses and help them realize their full visual storytelling and digital marketing potential. We’ve created a service offering and skill-set that spans video production, post-production, motion graphic design, 3D animation, web development, and video marketing strategy. Our insight and experience allow us to help clients make better planning decisions and get more out of their video production effort.