January 15th, 2018

3 Reasons Your Business Needs a YouTube Channel

Author: Eric Lynch
Eric Lynch
Partner & Director of Business Development

3 Reasons Your Business Needs a YouTube Channel

There are 5 billion videos watched on YouTube every day, and 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. While it may seem like jumping into a YouTube strategy will be a waste of time for a business, the reality is, if you do it right there’s a good payoff.

The point of creating video content is not so you become the next YouTube sensation, or to get a billion views. No the reasons your business need a channel are much less fun, but are especially important to reaching certain demographics. (i.e. those cursed millennials)

Reason #1: You Need New Content

If you’re looking to reach new audiences than you’ve had in the past, finding different content types might be your key. If you’ve been relying on e-books, blogs, and other written content to engage with your customers, remember this: According to Google,  millennials are 2.7 times more likely to prefer watching a YouTube video as compared to reading a book.

While written content is still important for SEO, and there is a large portion of the population that will gladly read content to learn, most people aged 21-36 would prefer to watch video.

Reason #2 You Need to Educate

In sticking with the theme of how to reach millennials, 70% of those asked in Google’s study said they used a YouTube video to learn something new. This generation is just as much a fan of DIY as many of their predecessors. They’re learning new things, and they’re teaching themselves how to do them through watching large amounts of content on YouTube.

No matter what your business is, there’s a way that you can educate them on processes, tools, etc. But beware of making it about self promotion or sales. If you’re going to educate to gain new traction, do that. Videos that come across as sales pitches may be a turn off to many viewers.

Reason #3 You Need New Buyers

Notice the top end of the age bracket of millennials. We’re pushing 40! (ugh) Which means many of us have families, we’ve been in the workforce for 10-12 years. Therefore our buying power is going up. If your brand is struggling to sell to younger buyers, the answer may be that you’re not connecting with us on the level we seek.

That doesn’t mean running out making a generic video that pretends to identify with that target demographic. (see below) No, through learning about how and why you do what you do, we can find that connection. It doesn’t matter if you’re a financial adviser or a carpenter, educating your audience with new content will help establish yourself as a go-to reference and place to buy.

Just Do The Thing

You don’t need to invest in thousands of dollars in audio/video equipment to have success on YouTube. You also don’t need to have the looks for television either. Being real is more important than having high production value. (although some level of production would be helpful)

The best advice I can give is to watch other how-to YouTubers. The ones that are successful, even the ones who run businesses, take time to dive deep in to information. If you don’t know who to look for, that’s ok, the beauty of YouTube is that it’s like any search engine. You can ask it a question based on your interests and then it will give you an answer. The ones that rank well tend to be those that create good content. So let them be your guide on what to do next.

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