How You Can Use YouTube to Market Your Business in Kenya? Given the huge number of companies in Kenya that embrace YouTube videos, it should come as no surprise that there are a lot of different ways to use the site.
Every company has its own unique goals for their YouTube marketing.
Some companies use YouTube to generate brand awareness. Some use YouTube to promote a particular product or drive sales to their retail store or website. Others incorporate YouTube as part of their product or customer support mix, use videos for product training, or even use YouTube for recruiting and employee communications.
Anything you can say in person or to a group of people, you can say in a
video and distribute via YouTube.
YouTube for Brand Awareness
Large Kenyan companies and major advertisers often use YouTube to enhance the awareness of their brands. Instead of focusing on individual products or services, these videos push the company’s brand, often in the same fashion used in traditional television advertising.
In fact, online videos are better at imparting brand awareness than are traditional TV ads. A recent study by Millward Brown found out that online viewing led to 82% brand awareness and 77% product recall, compared to just 54% brand awareness and 18% product recall for similar television ads.
Experts believe this is because online viewers are more engaged than television viewers; the Web is a more interactive medium than the passive viewing inherent with television.
Brand awareness videos are typically entertaining, using a soft-sell approach to ingrain the brand’s name and image in the minds of viewers.
YouTube for Product Advertising
If you can use YouTube to push an overall brand, you can use it to push individual products, too. This requires a more direct approach, although it’s still important to make the video informative, educational, or entertaining.
To promote a product, you want to show the product in your advertising, as Nike (www.youtube.com/user/nikefootball) does with its Bootcamp Drill. You can show the product in action or used as part of a demonstration or tutorial. Just make sure you include lots of close-up product shots and link back to your own website—where more product information is available.
YouTube for Retail Promotion
You can also use YouTube to promote a company’s retail stores. These videos can be general in nature (which gives the videos a long shelf life), or more specifically targeted to shorter-term promotions (“check out this weekend’s specials!”).
But a video that is nothing more than a store advertisement probably won’t attract a lot of viewers. A better approach is to find a way to showcase the store without resorting to claims of 20% off and “this weekend only” specials. For example, you might want to record a short store tour or highlight individual departments or services within the store.
You can even produce educational videos that demonstrate the products or services your store offers. Make the video informative, and you stand a better chance of grabbing eyeballs.
YouTube for Direct Sales
YouTube is a terrific channel for generating direct sales for products and services. All you have to do is show the product in action or provide a clip of the service in question, and then ask for the sale by directing the viewer to your own website.
The key to converting eyeballs to shillings is to generously highlight your company’s website address within the body of the video. Put the contact information at the front of the video, at the end of the video, and overlaid at the bottom of the screen during the body of the clip.
Make it easy for interested viewers to find more information or place an order. (And, to that end, there’s nothing wrong with mentioning the product’s price somewhere in the video.)
YouTube for Product Support
Not many companies in Kenya use YouTube to generate new business; some companies do so to support existing customers. Consider some of the most common customer problems and questions, and produce one or more videos addressing those issues. If you can help your customers help themselves, you provide them with a useful service and reduce your company’s support costs—all with a free YouTube video.
For example, AutoDesk Inventor is a high-end computer program for 3D mechanical design from AutoDesk. Knowing that their customers need a lot of post-sales support, the company put together a series of YouTube videos showing how to install, configure, and use the program. It’s extremely useful—and helps to cut down on traditional tech support costs, as well.
Note
You can also embed your YouTube support video into your own website. It doesn’t matter where customers view the video, YouTube or your site; what matters is that they get their problems solved at little or no expense to you.
The same goes if you have specific product support or technical support issues.
If you’re a computer manufacturer, you might create a video showing users how to install more memory or connect an external hard drive. If you’re a car manufacturer, you might create a video showing drivers how to change a brake light or check their car’s oil level. You get the idea—use YouTube to turn a problem area into a public relations victory.
YouTube for Internal Training
Your company can also use YouTube for internal purposes. Take, for example, the issue of sales or product training. You have a new product to introduce and a sales force to train.
How best to reach them? In the old days, you’d fly salespeople from around the country to a central office and put on a day’s worth of hands-on training.
Doing so, however, is both time-consuming and expensive. Instead, consider using YouTube for your product training. Create a series of short training videos.
All you have to do is upload the videos to YouTube and provide access to all your company’s salespeople. (They don’t have to be public videos.) Sales force personnel can watch the videos at their leisure, without losing valuable sales time trekking back to the office for training.
You save money, your salespeople save time, and you create an archive of product information that anyone can access at any time.
YouTube for Employee Communications
You can use YouTube for all manner of company communications. Instead of holding a big company meeting just so that the big boss can give his yearly state of the company address, have him record the address and post it on a private channel on YouTube.
Employees can watch the CEO say his thing from the comfort of their own desks, while they’re on the road, or even at home.
In fact, many companies find that YouTube is a fast and effective way to disseminate all kinds of employee information. Done right, it gets information out there in near–real-time, with all the benefit of face-to-face communication, which is a lot better than sending impersonal memos via email.
YouTube for Recruiting
Finally, don’t underestimate YouTube as a recruitment tool for new employees. If you have a company welcome video, post it on YouTube and make it public. Think of this as a PR exercise to attract new talent to your company, which means doing it up right—it’s as much a marketing project as it is something from the HR department.
You can link to the video from all your recruiting materials, even from any traditional ads you place. Don’t limit yourself to a single long puff video:
Produce separate videos for individual departments, as well as to illustrate company values, employee benefits, facilities, and the like.
Tip
Your current employees are your best recruitment tools. Include plenty of
employee interviews in your recruitment videos to help personalize your
company and to put a friendly face on the corporation.
Additional Useful Resource
In this book you’ll learn how to promote your videos on the YouTube site, insert pop-up notes and annotations, add clickable overlays to your videos, and create a customized brand channel.
It even addresses how to use YouTube for B2B marketing, which is always a hot topic. Know that the information included in this book is both strategic and technical.
That means you’ll find general marketing advice alongside specific technical instructions; you’ll learn how to use YouTube as a marketing tool as well as how to create, post, and manage YouTube-friendly videos.
If you do it right, YouTube can become an important part of your marketing mix and drive a lot of traffic (and sales) to your existing website.