Since 2006 YouTube is in our lives in one way or another. Mostly as an entertainment, learning platform as a user. It certainly gained huge popularity as an advertising platform, but how about YouTube being a branding and conversion platform? Does it impact the customer acquisition cost and increases sales? Or is it mainly brand awareness?

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March was Women’s History month and at Innovate UK Edge we celebrated both International Women’s Day and Transgender Day of Visibility. This leads us to reflect about how innovation and technology can make our societies more inclusive. At the 3i- Inclusive International Innovation we had the opportunity to discuss with Paola Marinone, one of the innovative women entrepreneurs supported by Innovate UK Edge and CEO & Founder of Buzz My Videos, about how platforms as YouTube are inclusive by nature and how they can accelerate this process.

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In Paola’s words “The beauty of YouTube is that it is everything and anything. It's the sum of extremely small niches of audiences. There’s an audience for everything. This is brilliant for brands that want to reach new audiences organically, as well as for impacting the sales funnel and the bottom line. “

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YouTube is, first of all, a Search engine and being on YouTube means being indexed in both YouTube and Google in one go. Product discovery and decision making is often done by viewing YouTube videos. A research says that over 70% of YouTube viewers bought a product after watching a YouTube videos.

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If you think B2C this is incredible already. But what about B2B? 50.9% of B2B decision makers do product research on YouTube. This is a real untapped opportunity for most brands of any size that can reach new customers, engaging with them, share how to and case studies and then sell your product.

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Is a YouTube strategy extremely costly? Not really. Users prefer an imperfect message, as far as authentic and meaningful to them. This means that polished videos are useful, but not necessary. Content strategy, frequency of uploads, SEO Optimizations, community & engagement are way more important than a perfect commercial video.

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Last but not least, your brand most probably already has an archive of videos on YouTube. That is your new gold. You can leverage them to drive traffic to new releases. They are a great asset; you're sitting on a golden pot and you did not know!

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Wondering where to start now?

Check how to assess your performance on YouTube HERE and register to our next Women In Innovation workshop about strategic change in your business HERE.

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Data source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/youtube-stats-marketers/