Given the huge number of companies 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 national companies and major advertisers often use YouTube to enhance the awareness of their brands.

Instead of focusing on individual products or services, Chapter 1 How YouTube Can Help You Market Your Business 11 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 Millward Brown study found 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.

A good example is the series of videos produced by Old Spice, like the one shown in Figure 1.5, capitalizing on the popularity of its 2010 “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials. I love these videos; they’re clever, intelligent, and entertaining as hell. They’re also extremely popular, garnering millions of views apiece on the YouTube site. Very successful brand building, indeed