YouTube Advertising for Small Businesses
With large national brands already taking advantage of YouTube as an advertising platform, small local businesses have struggled to use the immensely popular social site. Those small businesses who have tried, have done so by creating low-budget videos to promote their products and services. Thanks to YouTube’s newest initiative, they will now be able to better target their audience with these videos.
YouTube is positioning their new service as a low-cost alternative to the reach advertising might incur during the Super Bowl (a bit far fetched, we know). The site does boast impressive numbers though. According to a post from Google’s blog, “With a global audience of 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business.” However, YouTube estimates that 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, which is a daunting number for a small business trying to reach its audience. YouTube hopes to help these small businesses break through the forest of videos featuring cats and laughing babies.
The key addition to YouTube’s advertising service is a new Google AdWords feature for videos. This allows small businesses to bid on certain keywords that relate to their spots. When users search anything including one of those key words, that company’s video will pop up in a specified ad category. Advertisers will only pay for the videos that are actually watched, although it’s unclear how long the videos need to be viewed.
YouTube is using numerous tactics to promote this new feature. To encourage trial of the new service, they are offering $50 million of free advertising to 500,000 companies and new users will receive $75 towards their advertising. YouTube is also using hand-picking certain small businesses to act as ambassadors for the new service.
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Nice post! I encourage all businesses to have a YouTube presence, but havent done much with YouTube advertising. I heard that it is cheap, but I wonder how effective it really is.