A lesson in youtube's recent moves

Erika Morphy of Forbes recently asked our opinion on YouTube’s redesign. In answering her questions, it occurred to me that there’s always been confusion around how a retailer can best use YouTube, and how that overlaps with their other video marketing efforts. 


So below are some thoughts on how YouTube fits into a broader video marketing strategy for a retailer or major brand.

• YouTube’s goals are probably not in harmony with your goals. This is the number one thing to keep in mind. 
• YouTube is designed – and now redesigned – to get viewers on YouTube and keep them there, discovering and consuming content. That’s great for assembling an audience for advertising purposes, but when they go from watching your video to a recommended cat video (or, worse, another retailer’s video), you lose. 
• Because your goal is to move consumers from consideration to purchase. That means keeping them focused on your content, not that cat video, and ultimately moving them to a location (such as your site) where they can buy.
  

Does that mean you should avoid YouTube? No. There are plenty of tools YouTube provides to keep your audience engaged in a way that makes sense for retailers.

• A customized channel is always the start. Annotations can drive traffic between your videos – you’re not taking the visitors off YouTube to purchase, but helping them learn more about the products you offer by navigating between them. Those are valid uses that help you build engagement while staying in sync with YouTube’s goals, even if they’re not the same as yours. In short…
  

You’d be foolish to leave YouTube out of your video strategy. You’d be equally foolish to place it at the center. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. It is a destination where consumers come to watch video, and it does a great job of making video social. YouTube’s place in a video strategy is as a high-traffic outpost to facilitate discovery, moving consumers into the consideration phase and helping them decide to purchase.

A YouTube player embedded on your site is free…so is a puppy. Remember YouTube’s get-them-on-YouTube-and-keep-them-there goal? 

• That’s why it’s so easy, when you embed a YouTube player on your site, for it to siphon off traffic. All a user has to do is to click the YouTube logo in the lower right and bam, they’re on YouTube. 
• Let’s say you can develop around this and design so that YouTube’s branding enhances, rather than detracts from, your site goals. Both can be done but are not easy, meaning that YouTube is about as free as a free puppy. There’s lots of care and feeding involved.
  

Free puppies grow up. The little puppy shown above is now 120 pounds and small children try to ride him like a horse. Your video program will scale up too. If you’re a retailer you may have thousands or tens of thousands of products and corresponding product pages…with video to manage. 

• YouTube remains a great outpost to get that video content seen by more consumers. It’s probably not engineered as the best console to manage that content on your site, a critical location, at that scale.

So just as before, a wise retailer uses YouTube purposefully as a part of a video strategy to gain additional video views and consideration. 


YouTube wasn’t a substitute for a video strategy before, and these new changes don’t alter that at all. Are you using YouTube successfully? If so, what’s working for you? Let me know in the comments.