Top 9 Benefits of Using YouTube For Business

YouTube is a social platform that has had explosive growth in the last thirteen years. Launched in 2005, it’s the number one website for online videos. Whenever marketers think of viral marketing, they think in terms of YouTube. You can’t afford to overlook it as a marketing vehicle. 

In fact, today some marketers liken it to a TV network both in terms of its importance to consumers and its potential reach. (Not surprisingly, YouTube itself has noticed this and launched “premium channels” that function just like TV channels.) 

But what is probably even more interesting is that with 1.9 billion plus monthly visitors to YouTube from around the world and 300 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, if YouTube were a cable network, it would be the largest one.

What some marketers seem to forget is that developing a social media marketing strategy for YouTube is no less important than it is on Facebook or Twitter. You have to look at it strategically, in terms of both the community on YouTube and its potential reach. Although YouTube started out as a fun site, its marketing value has risen dramatically. This article looks at the benefits of using YouTube for your business.

1. YouTube has a lot of traffic

YouTube is massive. With more than 1 billion users visiting the site every month and 400 hours of video content uploaded every minute, YouTube is more massive than you may at first think, especially when you consider that both those numbers are increasing. YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world, after, of course, its big brother Google.

People watch videos on YouTube on their computers at home, their tablets during dinner, on their mobile phones, with friends on a TV screen in the living room, and even on gaming consoles. 

YouTube is everywhere, and it’s set to be (if it isn’t already) the most watched format in the United States, beating out TV for time spent viewing.

2. YouTube is the most powerful video platform available

Whether you’re an established marketer or just starting out, it’s important to regularly review all the channels available to you, decide whether they can help deliver to your goals, and choose how you’ll spend your time, efforts, and budget.

Many marketers, especially small businesses and independents, may start with digital channels like Facebook and Instagram. These channels provide easy, self-serve solutions to get started and typically require only simple creative, such as an image, text, and link. 

This simplicity is great, but sometimes YouTube is left until last to be explored and exploited by marketers, primarily because creating video takes a bit more work. As evidenced by the fact that Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels are increasingly turning to video as part of their offering, it’s rapidly becoming clear that video is a required component of any marketer’s plan. Given that video is becoming an essential in all marketing plans and YouTube is the most powerful video platform available, YouTube needs to be a part of your mix.

Sure, you have to make a lot of choices. You need to make decisions about your media spending and production budget, work through your resources, and decide what video you can make.

3. YouTube’s big data helps deliver cost savings to marketers

You may have read a lot of articles about the benefits of big data for marketers, but sometimes the term big data is used without it being really clear what it means. Big data can mean a few different things:

Volume of data: A massive volume of data reveals things like audience content consumption habits and confirms them with the sheer volume. Think of YouTube as a giant survey where people are voting for the content they like every day. That’s a powerful tool to have access to!

Velocity of data: Velocity in big data means that enough data over a set period, often a short period, of time reveals when something is trending or emerging. For example, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) uses data from Google’s search engine to help track flu outbreaks in the United States. The YouTube equivalent would be the trending videos pages, which uses data to float to the top the videos with the most velocity of views.

Variety of data: Big data can simply mean variety. If YouTube is a survey tool, it’s asking millions of questions every day about everything; what people want to watch, how and where they watch it, what makes it shareable, which devices they use, and more.

YouTube is so big, it has some of the biggest big data around. It has volume, velocity, and variety of data and uses learnings from its data to deliver advantages to marketers.

YouTube’s big data helps deliver cost savings to marketers; you have the choice to reach specific audiences who will convert into a click or purchase best, ultimately benefitting from cost savings as you’ll only be buying the media that works best for you. It is no longer the case that any part of your marketing campaign’s performance is unknown.

You’ll find efficiencies in the time it takes to create and execute marketing campaigns, tools, and features that do the thinking for you, such as where media should run, how much money should be spent to give the best return, and analyses of which creative works best and why. 

These features and options are born from deep research based on YouTube’s big data repository. YouTube develops things like advanced audience targeting methods that are so sophisticated and yet easy to action, making your marketing budget work harder and more efficiently.

You also get access to constantly evolving tools that help you uncover insights about your audience, giving you a deeper understanding than in the past. YouTube comes with incredibly sophisticated analytics tools, developed from millions of experiments and tons of feedback, to learn what you can do to deliver more results. YouTube has used its big data to create the simplest solutions for marketers to get the maximum results.

4. YouTube is pretty stellar when it comes to driving awareness and reach

YouTube is pretty stellar when it comes to driving awareness and reach because it offers an easy way to reach an enormous number of people on several occasions over the course of your marketing campaign.

Simply put, brand awareness is the extent to which a consumer can recognize and recall your brand. Reach refers to the number of people who are aware of, know about, have seen and recognize, and are able to recall the brand communicated by the campaign.

Every few years, an industry magazine or blog will publish a list of the world’s most recognizable brands. These brands use marketing to maximize their awareness. The idea behind awareness is that if you know my brand and can recall it better than others, you’ll be more likely to purchase it. 

For example, Coca-Cola is arguably the most recognized brand in the world, with its iconic red and white color and script logo. Indeed, if you were asked to name a soda, chances are you’ll say Coca-Cola first. 

A key concept of awareness marketing is the idea of reach and frequency, two simple metrics that mean “How many people did you reach with your ad?” and “How often did they see your ad during the marketing campaign?” These traditional metrics for awareness marketing assume that if you see an ad, say, five times, you’re likely to be aware of the brand, product, or service.

5. YouTube has tons of options to deliver engagement-focused marketing campaigns

Even though you may think YouTube is a place to post a video to be watched at any time, it’s also a social media channel and community space. The only limit to how you engage your audience in more direct and one-to-one moments is your imagination.

For example, you can start a weekly video blog (vlog) where you respond to consumer and viewer comments, questions, and suggestions. You can engage in text-based discussion with your audience on your Discussion or Community tab on your YouTube channel. You can stream a live video, such as an interview with someone from your company talking about a new product feature, and then post that video later to be viewed anytime. The idea here is that you’re using YouTube to deliver directly engaging experiences with your audience, measuring that success by how many people watch, comment, like, and participate.

6. YouTube videos can drive conversion

If you’re looking to drive sales of your product or service, your campaign goal may be conversion. Conversion is the idea that your target audience saw your video ad or piece of content and then took an action to convert — for example, to make a purchase, sign up for a test drive, or open an account online.

YouTube uses signals of intent to determine whether someone is in the market to do something, like buying a car. The idea behind using signals of intent in your marketing is that you are delivering your ad or content to a target audience based on their signals to buy or consume your product or service, which is an incredibly effective approach for conversion campaigns.

Say, for example, that you’re interested in buying a new car. You log on to Google.com on your desktop computer and search for certain makes and models of cars, watch some car review videos on YouTube, visit comparison sites, and maybe even use a car loan calculator to determine financing options. 

Later, you use your mobile phone to look at photos of cars on Instagram, post on Facebook to ask your friends for recommendations, and use Google Maps to search for a local dealership to visit. Perhaps you then visit that dealer’s website and sign up for a test drive that coming weekend.

Marketers may use some of those signals to send you advertising messages about cars, offers and incentives, new models to consider, and more. Your digital footprints provide signals of your intent: the digital channels you visited, such as Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, now know you are in the market to buy a car, and marketers can buy advertising that will reach you based on these signals. Don’t worry: They don’t know it’s you. All these signals are anonymous and aggregated — for example, “target people looking to buy a car.”

Whether your marketing message is to let someone know about the makes and models of cars you have for sale at your dealership or to offer them a specific deal on a model you know they are searching for, YouTube can help drive intent marketing by the way in which you buy paid advertising media.

You can buy paid media on YouTube so that your ads are seen by people who search for certain things on Google.com. 

For example, if I search Jeep Wrangler on Google.com, you can buy media on YouTube that targets me with your ads for Jeep Wranglers. You can tap into a consumer’s intent with Google and YouTube’s advertising platform in quite a few ways — for example, by targeting people based not just on search, but by their interests, by topics they are consuming, and even by retargeting, which is the ability to show your ad to someone who, for example, visited your website. 

You can go even further by customizing the call to action that appears on the video ad. Perhaps you want to show a video about your car dealership to anyone in market looking to buy a car, but you change the call to action to a specific make and model based on what they’ve been searching for!

One of the best examples of all-time as to how YouTube videos can drive conversion comes from Dollar Shave Club. Its videos blur the line between advertising and entertaining content, with “Our Blades Are <expletive> Great,” which has more than 25 million views, and its second most popular video, “The Shopping Experience,” which has more than 6.8 million views. The Dollar Shave Club’s videos center on its founder Mike describing the amazing features of its products and its reasonably priced subscription model, often in a comedic and absurdist style.

When the company launched in 2012, Gillette dominated the razor market with a whopping 72 percent of the U.S. market. Entering a saturated, established category seemed like a crazy idea. However, thanks to its new model and in large part due to its success with viral video marketing on YouTube, Dollar Shave Club took off and grew. It grew so large and so fast that Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion in 2016. That’s a pretty great conversion!

7. YouTube can encourage and maintain the loyalty of your company’s biggest fans

While marketers are always looking to reach new audiences, they also stay mindful of existing customers who are loyal to their product or service.

Loyal customers come back to you time and again, repeatedly buying from you regardless of what competitors may be saying or doing. They’re often your highest value customer.

Although loyal customers and advocates often don’t require additional marketing dollars to be spent to acquire them, finding ways to keep and reaffirm their loyalty and encourage their advocacy with your marketing activities is a good idea.

YouTube can play a role in encouraging and maintaining the loyalty of your company’s biggest fans. In fact, YouTube is natively built with loyalty in mind with features like channel subscriptions.

If loyalty is your key campaign goal, a metric for success may be how many visitors to your channel have turned into subscribers. When people subscribe to your channel, they may see your newly uploaded videos in places like on their YouTube home page. A bell icon, when clicked, notifies your audience through email with a link to each new video you post. Imagine that! The moment marketers post a new video, their audience is alerted, for free, and encouraged to go watch it.

In 2016, Kleenex, the brand of tissue products, made a video titled “Wrap a House in Love.” The video tells the story of Nick and Shelby Nelms, who both served their country in the military and who were given a mortgage-free home by Operation Finally Home, a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to building homes for wounded, ill, or injured veterans and their families.

Kleenex “wrapped the home in love” by having friends and family members write notes of love on the walls before the drywall was put up and the home was completed. This beautiful piece of content tells both the story of hardship and of people rallying to support their loved ones, in a way that thematically connected to Kleenex’s brand — that is, the idea that when someone needs a Kleenex, you hand them one, and that the tissue itself “wraps you in love.”

These kinds of videos may reaffirm a sense of loyalty in Kleenex brand fans that this company is one they’re happy to be loyal because they care and give back to those who are in need.

8. Build your email list in YouTube

With YouTube, you can grow your email list. Business owners have a tremendous opportunity to generate more leads using YouTube, the second largest search engine in the world.

Lead magnets are the first thing you need to create.

Lead magnets are valuable incentives that you offer to your YouTube viewers for free in exchange for their email addresses. A lead magnet is typically a downloadable piece of content, such as a free PDF checklist, a report, an eBook, a whitepaper, or a premium video.

Lead magnets with content upgrades are among the most effective. Specifically designed for YouTube videos, a content upgrade is a lead magnet.

Using a call to action in your videos will help you promote your lead magnet after you create it.

If you ask your viewers to take action, such as “Please like this video!” or “Subscribe to our channel!”, you are using a call to action (CTA). The lead magnet, however, is what you’re asking for here.

9. Make money with AdSense for your YouTube videos

If you connect your YouTube channel to your AdSense account, you can decide which videos to monetize and what types of ads viewers will see. To monetize the video, just go to your Video Manager and select its ad settings.

In your Video Manager, you can see which videos have been monetized (based on the green dollar sign next to them) and modify their settings at any time.

Joining the Youtube Partner Program is a way for regular YouTubers to monetize their channels.

However, you don’t need to be a partner to make money on YouTube (just setting up an AdSense account and getting views is enough to handle that), but being a Partner makes it a lot easier.

There are multiple streams of income available to YouTube Partners, including video ads, YouTube Premium subscription fees, and features like Super Chat, channel memberships, and merchandise sales.