Why you should have a different video marketing strategy for YouTube videos than website videos
Grant Crowell of ReelSEO.com had a great interview with Mark Robertson, publisher at ReelSEO discussing important issues to be aware of when using YouTube for E-Commerce and SEO. While he discussed the topic of “cannibalization” of search results by using YouTube, another important theme that surfaced is defining the value of YouTube to your marketing strategy. (Also, FYI cannibalization is the concern that a YouTube video link will appear higher or instead of a link to your own company page on the search engine results page).
The LOTS of video content that YouTube displays
YouTube has its strengths but also its limitations. By definition of being a sharing platform, YouTube is designed to share LOTS of video content. What does this mean for you? It means that while your video is playing on YouTube, YouTube is actively trying to distract the viewer from watching your video, and click on another video.
From a marketing perspective, this limits the value of YouTube to creating awareness (largely via SEO). The most important aspect of this limitation is knowing about it – make sure the goal of the videos you put on YouTube are designed to generate awareness, not sell products.
There are other ways to motivate the user to take action and purchase. The best way is to host the video yourself (or through another platform like Vipe), so when you embed videos on your webpage, they do not re-direct the viewer.
Another option is to pay for a promotion campaign on YouTube (Adwords for YouTube search results) AND then to pay for call-to-action overlays in your video that you pay for on a CPC basis. The downside here is that you can ONLY have call-to-action overlays that direct a viewer away from YouTube if you are ALSO paying for a promotion – so you end up paying twice. Once for each time someone clicks on your video in a search and again when someone clicks on the call-to-action. Though there are other solutions designed for using video to take action from the ground up, this is probably not a bad environment to test in – similar to starting with SEM to test key words for SEO.
Video is proven to be one of the most effective forms of online communication, the key is understand what options you have, define a strategy, and get started creating videos for marketing.
Here is a link to Grant’s interview of Mark.
I stand corrected – apparently you don’t have to pay for clicks on your overlay if they viewer has clicked on the paid promotion to view your video. Testing video promotions could definitely be an interesting way to drive traffic to your site.