When it comes to launching advertising for your new brand, there are dozens of options. Many of these are tailored specifically to your industry. Depending on what product or service you’re offering, you need to target certain advertising channels—and one of those is likely to be via social media.
YouTube is technically categorized as a social media platform because it includes the ability to comment, interact, and follow others. Technically speaking, it’s the world’s second-largest platform—second only to Facebook. For the purposes of marketing, setting up a YouTube channel offers all the benefits of a social media platform with even more features tacked on
If you’ve been wondering whether it’s worth the time and effort to set up a YouTube channel for your business or brand, think again. Compared to similar platforms, your company will get a lot more out of a video channel. Let’s explore the core reasons behind this, along with a few tips that will help you set up your YouTube channel with the right outlook. First, let’s focus on content.
#1: Content Freedom
Setting up a YouTube channel puts the power of video marketing straight into your hands. In fact, these videos can serve as a north star for your brand, allowing you to communicate with followers, try out new content, and gauge interest in new projects.
Let’s cover an example. PokerStars is the world’s leading poker platform that caters to millions of players worldwide. To increase its reach, the brand has introduced riveting YouTube series, including the recent PokerStars Mystery Cash Challenge for professionals. YouTube is the perfect place to launch these new challenges, as it allows existing subscribers to dive into the action while also providing unique content to help bring newcomers on board.
#2: Optimization From Google
YouTube is the second-largest social media platform in the world. But thanks to the fact that it’s owned by Google, it’s also the world’s second-largest search engine—behind only its parent company. YouTube’s partnership with Google offers major benefits in terms of SEO that marketing teams should be focusing on.
Recently, Google’s SERP began prioritizing YouTube videos. That’s because the information presented in them is just as valuable as traditional text. This fact is something your marketing team should be looking to tap into, as the vast majority of searchers will click on one of the first ten organic results generated.
#3: Building Brand Authority
Above, we outlined why YouTube is fantastic for new series like the PokerStars Mystery Cash Challenge. Aside from experimenting with new content, YouTube also allows brands to repurpose old content. Whether they’re moving blog posts to YouTube or vice versa, having two places to upload content boosts your brand authority.
Let’s take a look at another example. Milk Makeup is a global beauty brand that offers world-class makeup and is targeted at Gen Z. To keep its branding fresh, the marketing team utilizes separate approaches for YouTube and its other social media channels. This effectively offers Milk multiple campaigns at the same time—even if each post is based on the same drop. This also helps boost SEO standing for your brand, even without spending too much time creating separate posts.
#4: Generate Niche Leads In A Global Audience
YouTube also serves as a way to reach new consumers. Just like any other social media platform, it’s interactive and allows companies to pick up new subscribers easily. However, the sheer size of YouTube is what makes it stand out from others. Compared to Facebook, which is larger, users are generally younger and more engaged.
Similarly, many head to YouTube in order to explore new brands. This isn’t often the case for platforms like Instagram, X, and TikTok. Because they’re focused on short-form videos and photo sharing, there’s less context for marketing. In fact, many ads run on these platforms direct users back to YouTube—where they can delve deeper and learn more about a product or service with a video post.
#5: Follow The Traffic
In the example above, we outlined why YouTube is better for marketing than other social media platforms. But let’s dig a bit deeper here because, when looking at the numbers, YouTube’s traffic stats are simply mind-boggling.
On an average day, YouTube welcomes around 30 million visitors. Each minute of that day, users upload around 300 hours of video. And, according to Google, around 68% of the platform’s visitors use videos to explore new products and services that will inform their purchasing decisions. When viewed by the numbers, the core benefits of advertising on YouTube simply fall back to its massive traffic.
#6: Advertise Directly To Consumers
If 68% of YouTube visitors rely on videos to help them decide about purchases, then that should bring one fact into clearer focus: YouTube’s demographics aren’t just exploring the platform but looking to learn something. This means that brands can tailor their marketing campaigns so that they’re advertising directly to consumers.
In other words, YouTube offers a higher conversion rate than similar social media platforms. That’s because YouTube videos aren’t hamstrung into a shortened format. Like the Milk Makeup example from above, marketing teams are able to easily extend, shorten, or otherwise alter videos in order to capitalize on conversions. But these types of campaigns only work when advertising to an active and interested consumer base—which YouTube has in spades.
#7: It’s Free
Lastly, let’s cover one of the most obvious reasons that setting up a YouTube channel should be a priority for your brand. It’s totally free to set up an account and start uploading videos. Let’s be clear: it does cost money to launch ad campaigns on YouTube—but that’s not what the focus of this list is about. Instead, we’ve been exploring the reasons that YouTube is important from a variety of perspectives.
One of the most important lenses to view brand authority and advertising is through cost. Ad campaigns can cost an arm and a leg, along with hiring a marketing team. But when brands set up shop on YouTube, they’re able to quickly start creating content and engaging with consumers—even if they aren’t quite able to buck up and pay for a large ad campaign yet. In other words, YouTube lets users passively build a following for free.
