YouTube Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for whether and how a business should use YouTube in 2011, covering cost, format and realistic audience expectations.
YouTube had crossed firmly into mainstream territory by 2011, no longer a novelty for viral clips but a genuine second search engine that customers used to research products, learn how to do things and decide who to trust. For a business owner deciding whether video deserves real investment, here’s the framework worth working through.
Ask whether your product or service benefits from being seen in motion. Anything that’s hard to explain in text alone, a physical product in use, a process, a space like a restaurant or a gym, tends to gain the most from video. A business selling something that’s explained just as well by a paragraph of text has less obvious upside here.
Weigh the real cost, which is time more than equipment. By 2011, decent video could be shot on consumer cameras or even higher-end phones without a large equipment budget. The actual cost is the time to plan, shoot and edit consistently, and businesses that underestimate that time commitment tend to post once, get inconsistent results and quit.
Consider “how-to” and educational content before promotional content. Viewers on YouTube in 2011 were increasingly using it to learn how to do something, and a business that answers those questions earns trust and search visibility that a straightforward advertisement doesn’t. Save the direct promotional pitch for a smaller share of what you publish.
Factor in YouTube’s role as a search engine, not just a social platform. Videos with clear, keyword-relevant titles and descriptions were increasingly showing up in Google’s own search results, giving a well-optimized video a second discovery channel beyond YouTube’s own search bar. This makes video worth more to businesses in searchable, how-to-heavy industries than to those in categories people don’t typically search “how to” queries for.
Decide on a sustainable cadence before you publish your first video. A monthly, well-made video sustained for a year builds more of an audience than a burst of ten videos in one month followed by silence. Treat this the same way you would any other content commitment: pick a pace you can keep.
Think about where else the video will live, not just YouTube itself. By 2011, embedding YouTube videos on a website or sharing them through email and other channels was standard practice, and often drove more views than YouTube’s own discovery did for a smaller channel. Plan for that distribution from the start rather than treating YouTube as the only home for the content.
Be realistic about who needs this now versus later. A local service business with a visually demonstrable skill (a contractor, a personal trainer, a chef) has an immediate, obvious use case. A business selling something abstract or purely business-to-business might get more initial return from written content and revisit video once that foundation is in place.
The bar for 2011 isn’t “every business needs a YouTube channel.” It’s that any business whose product, service or expertise benefits from being seen and explained in motion should be seriously testing it, because the audience watching and searching there had grown too large to keep ignoring.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2011 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
