Read our case study below to find out how one East Midlands business took a risk and embraced the potential of YouTube.
Why does your business have a YouTube channel?
A) Because everybody’s got one! We upload all our videos and hope people find and watch them.
B) It’s a great free hosting site for our website videos.
C) It’s an extra platform from which we link videos to our social media pages and feeds.
D) It’s a fantastic opportunity to position ourselves as experts, increase traffic to our own website via links and build our brand reputation.
If you’ve answered D, you’ve got it sussed. If A, B or C sums up your approach, you may not be getting the most out of your YouTube channel.
YouTube is a key search engine, which is a good reason to have a channel. However, we don’t recommend it as a way of hosting videos on your website. Competitor videos on the same subject are advertised alongside your videos. You will also get less analytical data in comparison with Wistia for instance. But, if approached in the right way, it is possible to maximise the potential of YouTube as a valuable marketing tool.
Case Study: CIE Group
Unless you’re in the AV industry, you won’t have heard of CIE Ltd. It’s a 50 year old market leading B2B company, providing products and technical expertise to the professional AV industry. As we all know, there is a digital landscape of opportunity out there, and CIE wanted to embrace branded content as part of their marketing strategy before their competitors did.
Knowing that sharing knowledge is essential, CIE have set up and sponsored a new branded content YouTube channel called howtoAV.tv. Far from being a chance to sell or promote their own products, this is a free knowledge sharing site.
The howtoAV.tv team (all experts from CIE) launched in June 2015 with 50 videos featuring all kinds of topics and questions that people frequently ask them. The plan is to continually update and produce lots more video content.
Two-way Interaction
A key feature of the channel is that people will respond and interact with the videos.
“Tell us if there’s anything else you need to know? Do you have any other questions you’d like us to answer? If so, we’ll create a video answer for you.”
The objective is, the howtoAV.tv channel will be the go-to place for professional AV information.
Rewarding Investment
Why has CIE invested in a YouTube channel and not promoted its products?
- Because it saves their experts time, by reducing phone time required to answer questions.
- It positions them as experts – and being perceived in this way is core to their business success.
- It’ll make them more famous among people who love and buy AV kit, and give them traction in the domestic market (new for CIE), which is becoming more sophisticated.
- It’ll provide a link to the CIE website, with its full range of products – after all, why go anywhere else when you know they’re the people with the know-how
- And finally, the interactivity gives them a way of capturing data about people interested in AV kit who are therefore, potential customers.
Vpoint.Tv's Involvement
CIE came to VPoint TV with this great idea. We researched the current YouTube AV market, analysed how competitors and similar markets promoted themselves on this platform, and developed a strategic approach for the development of the site. We also had an input into the marketing around it.
Core to this concept is having the videos presented by CIE experts, so we ran a presentation skills training course with the team, assessed how individuals performed best and devised a production strategy around their personalities. In addition, we also:
- Devised the brand look for the video content and YouTube channel.
- Managed the technicalities of the site, advised on SEO optimisation and how to drive viewers via tags, transcripts and backlinks.
- Produced a press release video (top), London launch event video (bottom) and channel promo, on top of the initial 50 videos produced for the channel.
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