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38 P a r t I Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube

Why Informative Videos Work

Informative videos are the YouTube equivalents of old school infomercials. The best
of the bunch provide useful information for viewers, something they want or need
to know, while subtly selling your product or brand beneath the surface.

With informative videos, it’s the information you provide that’s key. It has to be
something that viewers are looking for, something that will help them perform
some sort of task or make some sort of decision. It has to be both relevant and use-
ful to what they’re doing—and relevant to what you’re offering, as well.

It goes without saying that random information placed on the YouTube site won’t
attract many viewers. The information you present has to be something that your
current or potential customers are looking for, or else they’ll never seek out, let
alone view, your video.

Equally important, the information you impart has to be complete, accurate, and
unique. Complete, in that you can’t expect to attract customers by only giving them
half the story; you have to provide all the answers, all the data, all the facts, in order
to be fully useful. Accurate, because if you’re not, viewers will abandon you without
question and savage you without mercy. And unique, in that viewers can’t find it
elsewhere; you can’t hand out the same old same old and except anyone to care. (It’s
a truism that if consumers can find the same information elsewhere, they will; why
should they get it from you?)

Whatever it is you present, then, you have to present it in the best way possible. You
have the opportunity to position yourself or your company as the authority on a
given topic, but that status is not conferred lightly. To be perceived as an authority,
your videos have to actually be authoritative. You have to present information that
no one else has presented—at all, as well, or in the same fashion.

When you present information that helps viewers do something useful, they’ll want
to watch it—and they’ll remember you afterward. After all, people do remember
those that help them when they need help. When you provide answers to people’s
questions, they’ll seek you out and recommend you to their friends. That’s how you
gain viewers—and future customers.

The key, then, is to determine what types of information your current and potential
customers are seeking, and then provide them with that information, in video for-
mat. This gets down to being able to think like the customer, either innately or via
customer research. What is it that your customers want or need to know—and why?

There’s no universal answer to this question, of course; different customers need to
know different things about different products and companies. For most businesses,
there’s a wide range of information you could provide.