What if I told you that it is perfectly ethical for you to stand right in front of your competitor’s office or shop and pitch yourself directly to their customers and prospects before they enter through your competitor’s doors? Well, you can. Through YouTube.

Here’s how it works. YouTube has a ton of information about it’s posted videos and its viewers. Each time we post a video and watch a video, we tell YouTube more information about us and that information is collected and saved. Thus, allowing YouTube to create such a sophisticated audience selecting algorithm that businesses can be very specific about the type of audience they want their advert video to play for.

If you are in the health and fitness industry, you can choose for all your video ads to play in front of all other videos that are about health and fitness. People searching for anything along the lines of “health” and “fitness” will see your ad before seeing any video that fits their search category, which includes your competitors’ videos.

This assumes all channels are monetized. If your channel isn’t monetized then no video ads play in front of your videos, and so, your competitor cannot do this kind of advertising in front of your videos. “Great,” you may say. Not so great, my friend. YouTube values monetized videos/channels over non-monetized and so guess who get on the top of their search results?

We all try so hard to harness the value of social media and online advertising for our businesses. But we don’t seem to take YouTube all that seriously along this line. We’ve created a YouTube channel, added search tags to each video, bragged about the video on other social sites and hoped for the best. I’m just as guilty and I’m in the video business.

Here’s why we need to take YouTube much more seriously than we have been:

• YouTube is the second most popular website in the whole world and is THE MOST POPULAR VIDEO SITE… more popular than any of the other social media sites or Netflix.
• Last year, 54% consumers demanded more videos from vendors: product training and demonstration videos.
• 87% of internet traffic is video streaming (with, again, YouTube being the no. 1 video streaming site.)
• Only 9% of businesses are currently using YouTube ads as part of their marketing plan.

I, so firmly, believe in the YouTube direction for business advertising that I’ve decided to place my entire marketing budget for this year into YouTube ads alone. In fact, I’ve got my first video ready to launch this week.

Doing this is not expensive. If you’ve advertised on Facebook, then you’ll know how it works. You set the length of time for the campaign, then the budget you want to spend and finally the audience you want to reach. And you can set marketing plans for one week and $100.

It’s something for you to consider. You will certainly get more bang for your advertising buck.

Remember to stay safe and be kind to one another.

Danielle
(604) 786-3066