How to use YouTube to grow your business

You can tell YouTube has hit the mainstream when the Prime Minister of our great nation, John Howard, uses it to broadcast his climate change message.  YouTube continues to take the world by storm, it has marketing benefits for savvy businesses of any size.

But to avoid the sort of technical issues which plagued the PM's climate change campaign, you'll need to know the best ways to maximise a YouTube campaign.

Initially, individuals were finding fame on YouTube as video bloggers, but now videos can give your organisation valuable exposure.  It doesn't matter whether you are a non-profit, local sports club, political organisation, small business or multi-national company.

With Google acquiring out YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, you can be sure that if done properly, gives you videos enormous discoverability.

You can use YouTube to demonstrate a product or service in a commercial, and it is far cheaper and has a larger international reach than television.  The signal-to-noise ratio and barrier to entry is still low enough on YouTube for you to make it a success.  Consider for example, a keynote speech, which reaches a limited audience of an auditorium, that same speech could be recorded and broadcast to thousands of people over the web.  If you spend your time doing repeated demonstrations or training, you could produce a video and pre-package it, saving you an enormous amount of time and effort.  I've used it, for example, for some of our Freestyler tutorials.  

Viral marketing, can enable news of your video to spread via word-of-mouth.  This can give your organisation enormous exposure.

Here are some of the benefits of using YouTube for your online marketing:

• Reduce Hosting Costs - In the past, streaming video from a website meant excessive hosting costs.  You can embed YouTube videos into your website and the streaming does not contribute to your hosting costs.
• Quick, Inexpensive Setup - In the past, setting up a video streaming facility required special equipment, programming and all sorts of conversion.  All you need now is a Digicam, webcam and some video editing software, or for slideshows you can just use PowerPoint or something similar.  YouTube accepts .WMV, .AVI, .MOV and .MPG formats which are the most commonly used for videos.  You can even upload low quality videos directly from your phone.
• Ease of Use - As most users have Flash installed in their browsers, downloads and proprietary plug-ins are no longer required.
• Marketing Statistics - YouTube provides built-in facilities for measuring the number of views to your videos and also for users to give feedback on what they thought.  What better way to measure your reach and appeal to your target markets ?

Don't be afraid to broadcast your videos up on YouTube and never think you have nothing worth broadcasting.  These attitudes can cause you to miss a potentially huge opportunity.  You can make a video of anything.  As long as it is interesting enough for someone to view, then it is worthwhile.

Now lets look at some tips for a successful YouTube campaign ....