Business videos published on YouTube is skyrocketing

The Top 100 Global Brands: key lessons for success on YouTube.

 

YouTube is currently the second largest search engine in the world. Within Google search, video content has been measured as 53X more likely to achieve organic, first-page ranking than traditional web pages. Therefore, optimizing your videos to perform well in search is absolutely critical to maintaining a successful YouTube presence, says YouTube-certified marketing and advertising software company Pixability in their debut research “The Top 100 Global Brands: Key Lessons for Success on YouTube.”

 

Revealing a 99 percent YouTube adoption rate and 73 percent year-over-year growth, the brands driving the best results are moving beyond television-style brand awareness to much more socially-engaged, longer-form, content-rich channels.

Luxury, Apparel, Alcohol and Automotive brands received the most positive user ratings (as measured by sentiment repsonses on YouTube videos). Financial services is the least popular industry.

Examining how the top 100 global brands, as ranked by Interbrand in its Best Global Brands report, have made YouTube a critical part of their marketing and business strategy, the report analyzes the videos produced by these brands.

 

Over the past five years, the top brands have gone from just a few dozen YouTube uploads in 2005 to more than 10,000 cumulative video uploads in a single month last year. These 100 brands alone now account for 9.5 billion collective YouTube views and more than 2,200 channels containing 258,000+ videos. The authors of the research anticipate that by 2015, they will likely invest in the production, marketing, and distribution of over one million new YouTube videos. But brand marketers have work to do: the study uncovers that over 50% of their videos get fewer than 1000 views.

The industry video strategy analysis shows identifiable industry clusters of similar companies pursuing very similar content strategies and achieving comparable results. B2C technology companies on average produce the most content and reach very high view numbers. On the other hand, luxury good brands tend to produce significantly fewer videos with fewer viewers by a factor of 100-1000.

The Top 100 Global Brands are realizing that YouTube is not merely a video platform; it’s also a major social media platform. That’s why customer and audience enagement is necessary for sustained YouTube performance.

Engagement and response to comments and shares is important for sustained audience response. The better brands do not turn off comments and sentiment. They embrace them and engage their audience.

 

Successful Practices for YouTube Marketing Success:

1. Be a well-oiled, consistent, video content machine.

The most successful brands have 50% more videos per channel compared to theleast successful ones.
The best-performing brands publish high volumes of content on a regular schedule.
Top aggregate brands publish approximately 78 videos per month. Leading mediabrands produce even more: close to 500 videos per month.

2. Take video optimization and YouTube channel architecture seriously.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so discoverability is key.
YouTube SEO follows very different rules than traditional SEO.Within traditional SEO—Google prioritizes web pages with YouTube video embeds.
The best performing 25% of Top 100 Global Brands took more care in optimizingtheir videos and channels, maintaining twice the number of playlists and video tags than the bottom 25%.

3. Don’t get caught in the overproduction trap; lesser quality video works well, too.
The best YouTube marketers produce a broader range of video content. Videos do not need to be prime-time quality because those with lower production value can be just as effective.

 

4. Apply an “Always On” strategy to video marketing.
The most successful brand marketers on YouTube integrate their online video strategies with their traditional, offline marketing strategies. Successful video marketers don’t hesitate to produce video series for very limited, buthighly engaged audiences, such as event participants.

17 of the Top 100 Global Brands use less than 50% of their channels. Continued advertising results in sustainable channel growth and subscribers.
5. Apply branding consistently, intelligently and methodically.
The top performers consistently brand their videos in both the video content itself aswell as in metadata, which includes titles, tags, and descriptions.
An appropriate level of branding within videos is essential because successful YouTube videos are often used outside of the context of a branded YouTube channel, such as website embedding.
Over-branding may limit sharing within independent communities of interest
6. Adding more content is more important than adding more channels.
37% of all channels have not been updated with fresh content for over 120 days. Successful marketers have YouTube channels that clearly focus on specific target audiences.


7. Engage your community with social media
Facebook and Twitter are among the most important sources of traffic on YouTube within the Top 100 Global Brands.
Users frequently share videos on social networks, and video content is attractive for sharing.
The top 25% of brands had significantly higher social sharing of video than the bottom 25%.
Viewer sentiment is starting to show distinct trends by industry. Home and luxury segments have the highest sentiment, while financial services and consumer goods have the lowest.