YouTube and Your Business

There are a thousand different ways to leverage the Internet to build brand image, but none are more powerful than online video.

The growth in the popularity of online video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion present a unique marketing opportunity for businesses with small advertising budgets. But what exactly are these opportunities? In this post/article we examine some of the reasons why small businesses should be considering the use of online video to build brand awareness.

YouTube, by far the largest of the online video sharing sites, is considered the Mecca of online video and for good reason. Recent viewing statistics for YouTube point to an upward trend amongst Internet users for video content. Here are some key stats for YouTube courtesy of http://www.website-monitoring.com:

1. YouTube has more than 2 billion views everyday

2. The average YouTube visitors spends 15 minutes per day viewing videos

3. Seventy percent of all YouTube traffic comes from outside of the USA

4. Partner ad revenue has more than tripled in 2009

5. YouTube is monetizing more than 1 billion video views globally every week

6. The number of advertisers using display ads has increased 10 fold during the last year

7. Hundreds of millions of YouTube videos are watched every month on mobile devices

8. YouTube player is embedded across 10’s of millions of websites

9. YouTube video consumption across social media networks:

• Facebook – 46.2 years of video watched everyday

• MySpace – 5.6 years of video watched everyday

• Orkut – 12.7 years of video watched everyday

• Hi5 – 1.2 years of video watched everyday

With YouTube’s large audience penetration, it is not difficult to see why so many large and small businesses are choosing online video as part of their advertising effort.

Contrary to popular belief, online video is not difficult or expensive to produce. Video production companies, such as Contrast Design, can produce high quality online video for a modest investment, an investment which is certainly within the reach of most small businesses. Moreover, uploading video to YouTube and other video sharing sites is free.

Many video sharing sites offer small businesses and marketers a number of packages for building brand awareness. The most popular of these is YouTube’s Brand Channel. Using YouTube’s Brand Channel, however, doesn’t come cheap at $25,000 per channel.

If your marketing budget won’t stretch to $25,000, don’t worry there are other options available such as YouTube’s standard user’s package.

YouTube’s standard user’s package costs nothing. And whilst it doesn't give you access to the same features as Brand Channel, you can still create a fan following for your brand by using targeted video content.

An alternative to YouTube is the French based video sharing website Daily Motion. At the time of writing, Daily Motion gets over 72 million viewers per day, not as many as YouTube but still quite a significant number in terms of a viewing audience.

Daily Motion has 26 categories for listing uploaded videos, including a business category aimed at helping small businesses to build brand awareness. Unlike YouTube’s Brand Channel, building brand awareness on Daily Motion requires no media investment. It is free. The only costs you are likely to incur will come from creating riveting video content for your audience.

With over 50 video sharing websites available to marketers, the potential for building brand image is enormous and need not cost your business an arm and a leg.

Contrast Design - About Author:
http://www.contrastdesign.co.uk

Article Source:
http://www.articleside.com/marketing-articles/youtube-and-your-business.htm

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