One of the things that we’re constantly looking for are emerging, effective, and inexpensive marketing tools online for our readers.  We try to dissect some technologies and provide the positives and negatives of them so people can decide whether they are right for their businesses.

One of my favorite new, online marketing technologies is YouTube.  Why?  Video marketing is one of the most effective forms of communicating with your potential clients.  Nothing stays in the long term memory better than both seeing and hearing.  Having something on paper (ie: this blog) is good and gets the message across and audio is even better and stronger than “writing”.  But the king is video.

There are several advantages to having a video presence:

1. Memory - Like I already stated, people will remember the content of your video much more than if they had just read a web page that you wrote.
2. Trustworthiness (not sure if it’s an actual word) - You establish much more credibility to your potential clients if they actually see you.  One of the biggest fears customers have in dealing with small businesses is that they’re not sure if the firm will deliver as promised.  By having a video of yourself, you establish a trust that customers value.
3. Cult Status - As weird as this sounds, there is something to it.  If someone sees your video online, they view you at a higher level - almost like a “star”.  You come from a position of power and increase your credibility in their eyes.

While those are all good reasons to have video online, they don’t go in to why YouTube is so important and valuable.  Some of the reasons YouTube is so effective for online marketing is some of the reasons it has grown as an almost overnight success (sold for $1.65 billion to Google in less than 2 years of being in business).

1. It’s Free - There is no cost in putting your video online with YouTube.  With a lot of other video hosting solutions, you need to pay a monthly fee to host your videos online.  And with those, you get only so much space and bandwidth per month until you start getting hit with expensive overage charges.
2. Easily Integrated - One of the primary advantages of YouTube is that you can integrate it into any web page very easily.  There is no special software that end users have to download, which is often a hinderance with other solutions.
3. Lead Generator - People can search for topics that you talk about on YouTube and become a lead for your business.  While this is a little less likely, it’s still a possibility.  I have used YouTube in the past to research some topics that people created specifically for YouTube.

The reason I think you need to start with YouTube now is that you will gain a distinct advantage over your competitors if you start creating a video “series”.  If you just record one 3 minute video every month, you’ll quickly have a nice source of informational videos for potential customers.  Don’t you think that you will stick out in their mind if each of your competitors has just a digital brochure web site and you have a set of informative videos?

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