People are watching videos more than ever before, but there’s more than one platform available for businesses who want to monetize content.
YouTube is almost synonymous with video. When we think of watching a video online, there’s a good chance that the mind goes straight to the platform. According to YouTube, “almost one-third of the internet”—more than a billion users—uses the video streaming service. While YouTube is a great place to start with video marketing, there are many other platforms out there for publishing video to help your business monetize content.
If you’ve invested time and resources into making a video for YouTube, you might as well spend a bit more time and effort and make the video play for multiple platforms as well.
Because of YouTube’s dominance, people have found a way to use the giant platform to monetize beyond display ads. Here are just a few examples of how people monetize content on YouTube:
- Using video as a funnel to encourage people to buy a product.
- Creating video ads for their own products.
- Posting reviews and testimonials for affiliate products.
- “Pixeling” watchers for retargeting and creating a leads list for ad purposes.
The Problem With Only Using One Platform to Monetize Content
YouTube has been an excellent platform to build a list or monetize content, but there are a few issues when relying on only YouTube for content promotion.
1. Diversification
It’s a general rule of thumb with marketing to never put all of your eggs in one basket. You just never know the motivations of a company, and relying solely on one service as your de facto video content hub could be a risky business decision.
Google (which owns YouTube) has pulled products, services and features that didn’t suit the bottom line of the company in the past. A recent example of this would be YouTube announcing they are removing premium channel subscriptions for creators.
2. Missing out on other platform traffic
If you’re only uploading your videos to YouTube, you’re missing out on a lot of potential eyeballs to your products and services.
3. Monetization
YouTube currently only has one way to directly monetize content from videos on their platform: Google ads. You can’t easily offer paid subscriptions, for example.
The Benefits of Video Platform Diversification
It’s time to start thinking more broadly about video for your marketing purposes. YouTube is a great place to start because the name is synonymous with video, but it only makes up a piece of the video marketing pie.
If you’re willing to branch out a bit further, you’ll soon find that you can repurpose or repackage much of your existing video content. Here are some of the best reasons to start looking at other platforms for your marketing videos.
Wider reach
While YouTube has a sizable reach, it’s not the only company with a large user base.
According to Facebook’s company stats, the social media network had 1.45 billion daily active users in March of 2018. Instagram’s about us page says it’s a “community of more than 800 million.” Both of these platforms have a video component with very large user bases.
Repackaging, repurposing and remixing
The secret sauce to squeezing the last drop out of your video marketing efforts is to take a video and reuse it multiple times. For example, you could take a video you’d originally published on YouTube and show clips on shorter-form video services like Snapchat and Instagram.
The original video could be a teaser for a longer series of premium, gated content hosted on Vimeo. You might make an ad with pieces of the original video and make a video ad meant for Facebook, sending traffic to your gated content, and setting up a Facebook pixel that can later be used for retargeting.
If you’ve invested time and resources into making a video for YouTube, you might as well spend a bit more time and effort and make the video play for multiple platforms as well.
Other Available Video Platforms
Here’s a short list of some video platforms and social networks that you can use in tandem with YouTube to monetize content.
Vimeo
Vimeo is very similar to YouTube in functionality, but it does provide one thing that YouTube doesn’t: premium content. You can use Vimeo to make premium content, gated content or just as an alternative to YouTube.
Many people think of Instagram as merely a photo sharing service, but digging deeper we see that it’s a great video marketing tool. You can upload videos and do live stories (which allow video) on Instagram Live and create longer videos on Instagram TV. That’s three different video features within the app.
Consider using Instagram videos to tease other products or content and build remarketing lists of people to advertise to.
Facebook Video
Facebook video currently comes in two flavors: live and uploadable video. You can upload longform video like you would at YouTube, or you could create video ads to drive customers to product pages.
Live video could be used as an alternative to a webinar, which you could use to make a pitch for a product or service.
Snapchat
Snapchat is another social network with a big video component. You could create a Snapchat story with a video, or just a regular snap that links to content on your website.
The idea behind all of these video platforms is to get used to repackaging and repurposing videos you’d normally upload to YouTube for other social networks to help monetize content.
–
This article first appeared in www.americanexpress.com
Seeking to build and grow your brand using the force of consumer insight, strategic foresight, creative disruption and technology prowess? Talk to us at +9714 3867728 or mail: info@groupisd.com or visit www.groupisd.com
