Consumers (read your potential customers) love online video. And online videos are fabulous instructional and marketing tools. (See YouTube Rocks for Advertising Your Business, for instance.
But actually, YouTube is not where your video should be. This week's edition of the Warrillow Weekly News presents evidence that small business owners prefer to watch online videos on corporate websites. (Fifty percent of small business owners go to watch online videos for business on YouTube while 71 percent go to corporate websites.)
If numbers alone don't convince you, consider that online videos still tend to spread person-by-person, through one person passing on the link to a video to another. As Warrillow points out, wouldn't you rather have people passing on a link to your website rather than a link to YouTube? I would.
More on Using Online Video to Promote Your Business
But actually, YouTube is not where your video should be. This week's edition of the Warrillow Weekly News presents evidence that small business owners prefer to watch online videos on corporate websites. (Fifty percent of small business owners go to watch online videos for business on YouTube while 71 percent go to corporate websites.)
If numbers alone don't convince you, consider that online videos still tend to spread person-by-person, through one person passing on the link to a video to another. As Warrillow points out, wouldn't you rather have people passing on a link to your website rather than a link to YouTube? I would.
More on Using Online Video to Promote Your Business
- Pump Up Your Traffic With Website Videos
- Online Video: Successful Marketing Tool or Fun Waste of Time?
- How To Produce a Promotional Web Video (About.com Desktop Video)
While I agree that your video should be on your website, the smart money is to post it on YouTube for the search engine optimization benefits and also because videos can use a great deal of bandwidth and storage space.
Let YouTube pay the hosting costs and use their code to insert your video in your website.
Just make sure that you search engine optimize your videos by using your primary keyword phrase in the title and description of the video.
Get more Online Marketing tips…
I agree with the previous comment. Think its a good tip. Its best to put any video you have on YouTube anyway. It promotes any kind of viral marketing activity you may want to encourage particularly if its a little bit different.
As the previous comment states, definately put the video on your website as it will increase its attractiveness and start the process of your site being a little interactive!
Yes, I agree with above two comments. This is a strange piece of advise ‘not to use YouTube’. Actually the Warrilow Weekly News only stresses the fact that having online video’s on your own website may be more effective to reach target groups than only having video’s on YouTube. It does not say you should NOT have video’s (hosted) on YouTube. And indeed storing the video’s on YouTube and linking them into your website is by far the best strategy.
That’s an excellent point, Nicholas, and one that I missed in my zeal to make the point that your video needs to be “on” your website. Just like Online Marketing consultant says, using YouTube as a host and using their code to insert your video on your site looks like the best solution for small businesses…
I also think it’s strange to advise small businesses not to use YouTube. You could definitely save a lot of bandwidth costs by having it hosted there. It would probably be wisest, IMO, to post the video not only on your own site, but YouTube and lots of other video sites like Vimeo and AdWido as well, just to maximize the potential exposure you can get for just one video.