Determining How To Use YouTube Videos In New Ways

As the United States was coming out of regional shutdowns in 2022, we met at the 900lbs offices in Far North Dallas (near the Galleria shopping / office / hotel complex).  This was to get everyone together and determine how to use the company's pre-existing videos, mainly on YouTube, in smarter ways to grow the business.  

This required a "triangle" method of thinking for marketing: 1) Being found through the more compelling videos, 2) Using the videos for advertising and other "outbound" (interruption or disruption) methods, and 3) Getting people to share the video content without any incentive by the company.  Instead of a universal formula to weight each category, we determined that each major industry required its own weighting due to the differences between previous clients' industries. These range from museums to professional sports teams to defense / aerospace to non-profits to universities. 

However, one thing we determined in the meeting was to create assets with the existing videos which could serve two purposes, instead of just one.  These included playlists optimized for the search engines (Inbound) but also which could be their own landing pages for lower-cost online ads (Outbound). From there, we then figured out these ways to use the videos better heading into the more competitive environment once businesses started to rebound after the travel restrictions started to be lifted:

• Sharing the videos on mini-posts within the company's Maps listing
• Embedding the videos on existing websites in order to get more signals to YouTube which would make the video become a "suggested" video after a competitor's content was watched
• Including YouTube videos on case study website pages instead of (or in addition to) Vimeo videos. This was done for ease of playback on some mobile devices and/or for increased odds of helping the video appear higher in the YouTube rankings
• We had only an inkling of how AI tools like ChatGPT and other such platforms would trust YouTube versus other video-sharing platforms. At the time, AI platform exposure was a low priority - but it is significantly increased today
• Adding YouTube videos in press releases around major case studies. This was done to give the press releases more credibility and not force any release readers to have to click off the press release's page to watch the associated content
• Several other methods

Leaving that meeting was a productive day and gave us some much-needed reassurance that the company would be successful in the post-2020 business environment, especially with the changes in demands for new technology by larger companies & organizations prior to 2020. 

In an upcoming meeting there will be new priorities and new methods to leverage existing YouTube content. The goal is to have as much applicability to reach all 3 types of marketing, letting the "wow" factor (if any) generate the word of mouth/sharing aspect -- and focusing on the primary two methods (inbound & outbound) as we have more control over those aspects.