Many businesses use YouTube to market their products, from their own channels to sponsoring videos, putting out branded content or just direct advertising. Building and maintaining a channel for your business, though, remains an underutilized but high-reward marketing strategy.
YouTube is an all-inclusive platform. It serves every audience, virtually anywhere and in almost every language. It is also inclusive to businesses. Whether you are a household name, a young upstart, a startup or a local mom-and-pop shop, everything from slickly produced advertisements to one-take ramblings about tips on how to handle two-by-fours has a place and an audience.
YouTube lets you find an audience and lets them find you, just as a company blog does the same. But what YouTube also does is let you have a much more personal touchpoint with them: video is more intimate and expressive. It brings businesses and customers much closer together.
Why YouTube vs the other options
There is nothing wrong with the other big or small video platforms and nothing should stop you from having channels on those. This article explains why, however, YouTube should come first.
YouTube had more than 2 billion active users in 2022: it was launched in 2005 and became the definitive video-sharing platform. Today, it remains the definitive online library of video content, despite the proliferation of streaming services and the prominence gained by other video-sharing platforms (think TikTok or Vimeo). Many of the latter have become raging success stories and changed the way people consume video content, but Youtube still towers over all.
It is (arguably) still the easiest app to watch videos on, share videos from, upload videos to and offers creators an incredible studio of options for editing, monetization and targeting. On top of all that, it is owned by Google, which plugs it into one of the most formidable advertising tools ever created. In short, YouTube maintains its position by being the easiest platform for everybody.
If you like to watch live sporting event streams in 8k resolution on an enormous OLED television, you can. If you live in an area that got its first cellphone signal three weeks ago and your phone is an Oppo handset that can barely send and receive texts, you can still watch compilations of cat videos. YouTube includes anybody and everybody.
How does it work when business videos go viral?
Many companies have big followings on YouTube and for some it can be a crucial channel for exhibiting the work they do in a way that lends gives their work virality.
Hardly any of us is likely to have heard of the robotics firm Boston Dynamics without their YouTube channel and it is extremely unlikely we’d ever be a direct customer of theirs; but if you have ever seen a clip of their robots in action (and you almost certainly have), performing increasingly complex tasks - that came from their YouTube channel.
In an industry that requires a huge amount of investment to develop the emerging technologies they are based on - with payoffs years or decades down the road - the brand awareness and fundraising utility of Boston Dynamics’ YouTube channel is priceless. When they put a video out, it racks up tens of millions of views in just the first few hours, and people from Boston to Shanghai are talking about it that same day.
That is the point: brand awareness. Your following does not need to be enormous for your YouTube channel to give your business credibility. It is an online library of your brand, your products, your services and your expertise: whether it even references them directly or not.
Even if only half a dozen people ever watch your videos, the likelihood is that those first people will have done so specifically to understand what face you show to the world, and it will have been worth the effort to have reached them.
Red Bull puts a huge emphasis on brand awareness and brand association with its propagation of extreme sports events around the world, and the YouTube videos it creates are breathtaking pieces of content that push the edge of what it is possible to film just as they keep pushing the boundaries of human achievement.
Red Bull’s exploits on YouTube run the gamut from one continuous drone shot of an extreme mountain biker racing at top speed on a downhill course through a favela in Brazil, tracking skydivers, cliff jumpers, wingsuit flyers or, most extraordinarily and famously: Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking freefall from outer space to Earth.
The latter might have also been broadcast on CNN - but that was a YouTube event. It also gives an insight into another benefit of YouTube virality: Red Bull’s videos are monetized - so its record-breaking, world-beating marketing channel actually generates revenue.
YouTube is the domain of small businesses, but good for all businesses
Red Bull’s story is a great example of what can happen when virality strikes and the same happens - often - for small businesses or sole traders that make money from the channel, as well as advertising or sponsorships and from capitalizing on their success by merchandising.
Don’t believe me? Just watch Mousetrap Monday for a few hours. Normal people and small businesses have charm. Charm is authentic and hard to fake: and authenticity is what made YouTube the giant it is.
Think of the very first YouTube video, ‘COM-TEST’ (no, not ‘Me at the Zoo’, although that example works well) or one of the first viral videos, ‘Charlie bit my finger!’ - these are real, authentic moments. COM-TEST was a real test, that guy did go to the zoo and Charlie knows EXACTLY what he did.
Those are anomalies, but business YouTube channels are almost always a success anyway: they are a reference point for people to get to know you. The cost for uploading is a great leveler because it is the same for everybody: the effort to do it. However, big businesses have to worry about brand image in a way small ones just don’t.
For huge brands and companies with tight controls on how their brand is represented in the public eye, their YouTube channels are generally quite sterile. Usually, they are a library of adverts and fairly standard corporate videos, useful just to those who need them and journalists doing research, or as a marker of past events.
Where it gets really interesting is the intimate look it gives people into small businesses they otherwise would never be exposed to. There are countless examples of business channels that have found success through sharing videos, from local pest control companies to legal firms, safety inspectors, beekeeper associations, driveway cleaning or rat-catchers.
If you want to learn more about how to start and grow a channel or any kind of content as a small business, check out other stories on our website.
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