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Every few years I have a head-smacking moment where I realize I’ve been missing a trick. A while back I admitted I was wrong to be a content marketing naysayer. Just this year I realized how I’d been missing the boat on YouTube.
I’ve known about YouTube, of course. It saved my life teaching me how to fix my Samsung freezer’s ice maker (154,289 views!). My kids don’t really watch television anymore. Just about everything they view is on YouTube. But I never took it seriously as a tool for B2B marketing.
Why the bias? My feeling was that in B2B marketing YouTube, much like Facebook, didn’t have a place in the buying process my customers go through. Here’s why I was wrong: YouTube is where people go to learn. And learning is a key part of the buying process.
What I came to understand was how many of my buyers and users were turning to YouTube videos to educate themselves. My previous content marketing awakening came when I realized marketers today need to create content related to problems their customers are trying to solve, and not just their products. I bought in when it came to blogs and SEO. My personal bias led me to overlook the fact that YouTube can serve the same purpose.
I have two of our sales engineers to thank for setting me straight. Both of them had been a security analyst – our target user – before joining Exabeam, and they both told me how little time they had for training. Many analysts, I learned, are self-taught, and YouTube is their first port of call.
We had a YouTube page, but it was a pretty lonely place. We’d double-post our customer videos there, as well as some of our old webinar recordings. But that was it. Like our Facebook page, really just a box to check rather than a concerted marketing effort.
Once I’d been clued-in to the power of video, though, I went down the YouTube rabbit hole. I drove my wife crazy with my nightly ‘Did you know?’ learnings. Conversations with my team were like that ‘What Dogs Hear’ Far Side comic: “Blah, blah, blah YouTube. Blah, blah, blah YouTube.” It began to seem that YouTube was the answer to everything. Some of my staff started thinking I had gone off the deep end.
Though we are just at the beginning of our journey, we’re already making progress. Our goal is to create content to answer questions and teach skills related to cybersecurity. Eventually, we’ll introduce offers into our videos that move people into the top of the sales funnel. Here are five things I’ve learned so far:
- Keep an Open Mind – while I was down the rabbit hole, I was often agog at the volume of views and high subscriber counts that belonged to people and companies I’ve never heard of before. YouTube is a whole different world. Just because you are not a big public company, a famous blogger or pundit, or huge on Twitter, doesn’t mean you can’t be big on YouTube. The flip side is also true – your reputation in other media won’t automatically make you big on YouTube. You have to put in the work.
- Let Your Hair Down – the vibe is very different on YouTube. It’s more personal. Slick corporate videos may actually turn people off. B2B marketers may need to go from chic to shabby chic to fit in.
- Optimize, Optimize, Optimize – boy, there’s a lot to optimize on YouTube. Descriptions. Meta tags. Thumbnails. Also, SEO is totally different than on Google. Conceptually, it’s the same, but the algorithm is different. You need to do SEO optimization for YouTube specifically. And, just to keep things interesting, Google search now includes what’s called the Google video carousel. YouTube videos often appear on Google search engine results pages. Which means you need to optimize for both YouTube search and Google search.
- Minutes and Hours – in all my years of marketing, I’ve never used minutes or hours as a metric. But ‘watch time’ is the name of the game on YouTube. You want people to watch your content, and YouTube does, too. Details of the YouTube algorithm are secret, but it is well known that watch time is an important factor in how your videos rank. As of the writing of this blog, our channel has 200 hours of watch time per month, which I find pretty astonishing.
- Seek Expertise – Sure, anyone can start a channel. But only 40% of channels have more than 1000 subscribers. If you want to grow, I recommend seeking expertise. Use YouTube as your first step. There is a ton of fundamental information on channel optimization, video production, growth strategies, and more. We also hired an agency with specific YouTube expertise (funny enough, our SEO agency knows very little about YouTube search optimization). My hope is that, much like Google SEO and conversion rate optimization, we’ll build basic YouTube competency on my team and can use the agency for more advanced strategies.
How far will we go on YouTube? I’m not quite sure yet. But I’ll never dismiss its importance again, and I only hope I’m faster to recognize the next big thing, whatever that is.
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