Using YouTube Successfully for Content Marketing
It may become more important for your brand or company to be on YouTube than to be advertised on TV. For some, that day has already arrived. comScore data from August 2011 showed that YouTube is used for about 14% of all searches on the Web.
Then there are the hugely successful viral campaigns by commercial organizations, such as Blendtec’s Will It Blend? series that we referenced previously in this chapter. This is a brilliant video series on running various household objects—including marbles, rake handles, and even iPods—through a Blendtec blender.
Blendtec isn’t the only company that has had success with YouTube. WestJet scored a big hit with its video, “WestJet Christmas Miracle: Real-Time Giving”. In this video, people were filmed sharing their Christmas wishes with Santa via a video feed in the airport. While the passengers were on their flight, WestJet employees rushed off to stores to buy all the gifts they had asked for.
Once the passengers landed and made their way to baggage claim, they saw the first items to come around the conveyor belt were gift-wrapped packages addressed to them. They opened their gifts, and to their amazement, found what they had asked Santa for only hours before. Their reactions were also filmed, and the resulting video received over 33 million views.
Another stellar example of YouTube marketing is the online retailer Vat19.com. Its product videos are brilliant and well integrated into the company’s product catalog. For example, the five-pound gummy bear is a must-see. Vat19’s channel has more than 850,000 subscribers, with more than 440 million views.
YouTube has been used effectively for brand damage control as well. For example, the CEO and founder of JetBlue Airlines posted an apology video on YouTube following a Valentine’s Day winter storm incident—a campaign that was well received. One product that got some excellent brand recognition and building from being on YouTube was Smirnoff’s Raw Tea. Smirnoff produced an uproarious music video called “Tea Partay”, with preppies rapping.
The problem with most popular YouTube promotions is that YouTube gets the links, and the original site usually does not. That means the search engine visibility benefits do not usually transfer to the company’s website. Even without creating your own site or hosting your videos on your main site to draw links, YouTube offers much in the way of brand visibility when the campaign is well executed.
That doesn’t just mean posting a great video; marketers must also know how to take advantage of the social nature of the site to build up friends and get on user subscription lists. Make copious use of tags on your videos (ensuring, of course, that the tags are relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks who are searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance, and All Categories) to match your title and description.
Implementing Guest Posting Successfully
The article netted well over 30,000 social shares. What made this article such a success? Certainly being placed on the Huffington Post helped, but the title was a big key to the success of this content. It drew people in, as everybody wanted to know the answer to the question.
Last word
In fact, the answer was quite simple: employers search on your name before asking you in for an interview. Yet the simplicity of the observation did not diminish the value of the article, because the observation was not completely intuitive.
