In my last blog I talked about why your business might want to have a presence on YouTube and I shared a few details about what I consider that platform’s strengths to be. But a lot of business owners want to know how to use it to support your business?

Your YouTube videos can be everything from a company overview that gives people a strong sense of what your company does and how you do it, to instructional videos aimed at showing potential customers how your product or service works. Some of your videos, therefore, should be focused on expressing your company’s brand promise, while others might better be focused on converting viewers to buyers. Ideally this takes a strategy.

And, at this point in time, a relatively large budget.

Yes, YouTube is accessible to anyone with an iPhone and the technical skills that allow you to edit and post your video to YouTube. But in a perfect world, you want your videos to be professionally produced and edited. It’s worth the investment. This is your brand we’re talking about, and we live in a world where people have been conditioned by Hollywood, network television and big brand name companies to expect stunning videos with high production values. In fact, one of my colleagues runs a video content marketing production company and he is constantly frustrated by the fact that most people do not understand how far the dollar will actually go in the video world. Clients will send him links to marketing videos they’ve found online that they like. They want their $15,000 company video to be just like it. But the one they like was quite possibly a $100,000 video that used numerous locations, plenty of different cameras, studio work and sophisticated graphic treatment.

Yes you can do it with an iPhone and yes there are stock video companies out there now where you can find snippets to add in to your video. But you still want someone who knows what they’re doing with equipment that will reflect well on your brand to manage your video production program.

Any videos you produce for your company might fall into a number of categories, including:

• Thought leadership: Videos that show you or another company representative speaking intelligently about issues that are important in your industry. This might include content of a more academic nature (speeches, seminar material) or tips about a specific area relevant to your company.
• Tutorials and How-to’s: You can get instructions on doing almost anything on YouTube and almost any business can create a video that demonstrates some aspect of how to do something that falls within its area of expertise.
• Advertisements: There is certainly the opportunity for paid advertising on YouTube and although paid ads don’t help with content ranking, they can add authority to your channel.
• Brand Support: A company overview or a short history of the company might fall into this category.
• Video News Releases: Video news releases (VNR’s) add extra shine to your news and can increase your chances of media pickup.

Implications of all of this activity:

YouTube is a fabulous way to generate brand recognition, thought leadership, leads and search engine attention.  A presence on this platform gives you another way to show up in the search engines, and another way for people to search for you, find you, and get an impression of your business and your brand. YouTube is a powerful platform and, if you nurture your presence there with professional videos, it can be a great option for developing business opportunity.

Me and my team members have plenty of other ideas for using YouTube for business and if you would like to talk about how we might be able to support you in growing your YouTube or other social media presence, please contact me at susan@crossmancommunications.com and let’s book a conversation about how we might be able to help.