Many small and medium businesses try to engage their customers through Facebook and twitter. Another venue you might want to look into is YouTube.
Here are some examples of small and medium businesses who took advantage of YouTube and the results that effort generated.
Case Study # 1:
A hair care product company, operated by the owner a woman from Los Angeles, decided to increase her visibility by going on YouTube. While pocking around in the site, she notices a few questions posted by users of products in her niche. She offered support, advice and suggested trying her products. She urged the users to tell her if it worked for them.
The result? 2 years later there are over 5,000 videos showing people using her product. The attention has helped raise her sales by 40% and pushed her 7 year old company into profitability. The products are now sold in Whole Foods and Target as well.
And she didn’t post one video of her own. She waited for the video bloggers (vloggers) to do that: “When dozens of different vloggers with their own unique hair types actually video themselves applying the product in the shower in one continuous take, it’s hard to dispute how it ends up looking” She says.
Recently she hired some of the vloggers to help her in her YouTube campaign.
The push shouldn’t be a hard sale. Forum posters can smell those a mile away, she says. Companies have to establish themselves as being helpful so their recommendation will be taken seriously.
Case Study # 2:
A knife company used the same tactic. They didn’t start a conversation about their knives, but they reacted to questions and offered suggestions. They interacted with the posters by sometime offering them to try a knife for free or for a limited time.
Today, there are almost 4,000 video blogs about their company. They make sure to stay on top what is being said. To provide good customer support, the company employees (all 5 of them) are alerted every time a comment comes in and they answer, sometimes from home and in the middle of the night.
Being accessible promotes loyalty to the brand, says their marketing director. Forums reflect that.
Case Study # 3:
Makers of a new, very small, digital camera learned the hard way how important it is not to hard sell. Their efforts to brand the camera on bike riding forums backfired. People were annoyed with them and pointed out foreseeable problems even without seeing the camera up close.
The company listened to the complaints and laid back. The result? 7,500 videos about their camera, done with their camera are currently posted on YouTube. More than 15% of their business comes from YouTube.
Listening to Vloggers helped the company to further develop their equipment into niches they have not thought of. When people talked about mounting their small camera on remote control cars and planes, they manufactured a kit for that purpose. It is one of their best sellers.
You can use YouTube for more than just posting videos. Using their channel system is a good way to find out what people are talking about, what they want and what they suggest. Then you can assess how it pertains to your business.
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