YouTube as a marketing tool has reached a 99% adoption rate and a 73% year-on-year increase, according to The Top 100 Global Brands: Key Lessons for Success on YouTube report from marketing and advertising company Pixability.
The report reveals that brands achieving the best results are shifting their focus from television-style brand awareness to more longer-form, socially-engaged, content-rich channels. Uploads on YouTube by top 100 global brands have surged from just a few dozen in 2005 to over 10,000 a month in 2012. These 100 brands make up over 9.5 billion YouTube combined views and more than 2,200 channels with 258,000 videos.
Pixability predicts that by 2015, top brands will spend part of their budgets on the production, marketing and distribution of over one million new videos on YouTube. Yet marketers need to work hard as the report reveals that over 50% of brands’ videos receive less than 1,000 views.
Marketers and brands understand how YouTube works and treat it in a different manner to achieve the best results, said Rob Ciampa, the study co-author and EVP Marketing at Pixability. And marketers who don’t will “end up in the legacy marketing world, wondering why their customers are at a competitor’s channel,” Ciampa added.
The study reveals that the best-performing brands have 50% more videos per channel compared to the least successful brands. Furthermore, the most successful brands publish high volumes of content regularly, or around 78 videos a month, while leading media brands produce even more: nearly 500 videos a month.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine and it follows different SEO rules to the traditional approach. The most successful 25% of the top 100 companies are taking more care in optimising their YouTube channels, the report showed.