The Australian, Entrepreneur
MARKETING fads come and go but YouTube and the internet look as if they are here to stay. YouTube is about rich interesting content rather than rich video production companies that usually make expensive TV ads. And this makes it an ideal medium for the small to medium-sized business, according to Sydney-based Laurel Papworth, a social media consultant and evangelist.
“One of the things I like about small business is that they don’t do traditional marketing with high-end effects that are fluff,” she says. “They do an instructional video. I love that because you learn something while you are watching it and I think that’s an important move in advertising. We are looking for some depth of content to our advertising now.”
She says that, for instance, if she was making a hand cream she would blog about it and make instructional videos. “How you use the cream, how I made the cream — and the people who would be interested and passionate about them would be a very small market sector but it’s my social network, my business network and my industry network,” she says.
The most famous of all YouTube marketers comes from the US, Blendtec. Company founder and presenter Tom Dickson has appeared in 70 of his own short, cheaply shot spots where he has demonstrated exactly how robust his blender is, with everything from marbles to an iPhone and a Nintendo Wii remote. “His blender is now the No1 recalled blender,” Papworth says.
Australia is behind the US in using Web 2.0 applications. But small companies are warming to cheaply made YouTube clips, including Bokashi Composting Australia, which uses them to explain how its system works. Sydney-based chef Benjamin Christie uses YouTube and has helped his marketing of Australian indigenous ingredients to the US, in addition to his own brand as a consultant chef.
Scott Garnett, managing director of Sydney-based Barons Brewing, says video helped his entry to the US by training distributors about the business’s beer in an entertaining way. “The reaction in the US was absolutely phenomenal,” he says. “They are absolutely bored out of their minds with the things they have to watch. We get thunderous applause. It was gold.”
After a recent two-month sales trip to the US, he realised the video was causing a lot of interest. He simply uploaded it to YouTube.
“The amount of attention it’s got is staggering. Since we’ve put it on (YouTube) and linked it through the site, the amount of hits we have had is incredible. Some months we’ll get close to 1 million hits on our site and the lion’s share are related to that video.”
Scooteria, which sells scooters from branches in Stanmore and Kensington in Sydney, decided to use YouTube as a service to existing customers. Its YouTube video covers a scooter ride to Royal National Park south of Sydney.
Joint owner Wensley Carroll says that YouTube is one of the most cost-effective ways to host and distribute video on the internet. “We post that actual video on our site as well as on YouTube,” he says. “We’ve just done one at the moment. The aim is to put maybe one out there a quarter. You don’t want to be putting too much on their either because it gets too noisy. People are probably looking for something in particular when they end up on our YouTube page. They will have punched in Vespa or scooter rides in Sydney or something like that. There is a fine line in it being seen as advertising or a community post.”
There are limits to using YouTube. For instance, any single video uploaded has to be under 100MB which, depending on quality, limits length to five to 10 minutes. However, an uploader can raise that to 1GB of content.
As with other social media sites, it does allows users to connect. But for real effect the video user needs to use other social sites and email to help spread the message. Papworth says it should be spread through the communities where the business has social and business connections. These could include a traditional website, blog, Facebook, MySpace or forums. “You wouldn’t create a video and put it up on your Facebook page and just hope to be discovered,” she says. The Facebook viral tools such as Superwall help the user get the message out.