7 Reasons Why Brands Should Focus On YouTube Shorts Seriously
What are the most viewed apps on your smartphone? I can say with certainty that social media and video streaming apps like Instagram and Youtube are most likely to be present in the top 5.
With a shift in the generation and the increasingly digitised lifestyle that the public has grown accustomed to, the overall attention span of humans has taken a drastic hit. In this fast paced world enabled by 5G, any piece of information is available within seconds, and accessible to everyone with an internet connection.
This decreased attention span has led to the rise of short form content. The Millenials and GenZ, while being pickier with the content they consume, have developed an appetite for short-form content that is quick to digest while being equally entertaining.
Resultantly apps like TikTok, and Instagram reels have seen a meteoric rise in their audiences as well as content contributors. The pandemic was also quite a major external factor that accelerated the boom of these apps amongst people and younger audiences while everyone across the globe was on lockdown or quarantined with their smart devices being their only connection to the rest of the world.
This presented an excellent opportunity for marketers to evolve their marketing strategy and connect with GenZ.
Being the biggest video streaming platform globally, YouTube ofcourse couldn’t lose out this golden opportunity to target a bigger section of audiences that were flocking to these short content platforms.
When it was obvious that short form video content was here to stay, YouTube launched YouTube Shorts in India in 2020 and released it worldwide in 2021.
With the kind of traffic and sales that these short form video content platforms were pulling, it was only logical that businesses and brands make a move to incorporate them into their content marketing strategies.
Here are top 7 reasons why brands should focus on YouTube Shorts seriously as an effective marketing tool.
1. Insane Popularity = Massive Audience
With the feature of YouTube Shorts becoming extremely popular very quickly, it has gained a lot of traction. Unlike Tiktok or Instagram, YouTube has the benefit of being popular amongst the public irrespective of their demographic. This helps marketers reach out to a wider section of their target audience than that on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
Not only does promoting on YouTube shorts help you reach a wider audience, it also helps you reach a more relevant audience. Content that is viewed by the public today gets heavily filtered through AI algorithms to match the right audience with the right content. This just means higher conversion rates for your brand and sales.
2. Repurpose Your Content
Creating YouTube Shorts is quite simple and creators can take advantage of the fact that YouTube allows creators to use clips from their old videos and make several shorts lasting 30 seconds or less.
Repurposing old content with the best bits and information from older videos or marketing campaigns strikes 2 goals with one stone. Brands can remind the audiences of their presence and engage with them while giving the marketing team buffer time to brainstorm ideas about new content to be shot and released.
Brands often spend quite a hefty amount on good marketing campaigns, repurposing old content in short form video is just another way of getting a good ROI.
3. Engage With Your Audience Creatively
Many brands contract influencers and micro-influencers to promote their various products on different social media platforms. Creating YouTube shorts to demonstrate the functionality of your product is another way to get the audience’s attention is a quick way without seeming super-imposing.
Influencers on video streaming sites are famous for their creative way of executing product promotions and that creativity reaps great benefits for the brand in focus when the followers feel intrigued with the product.
4. Low Production Costs
While the platform offers some great benefits and exposure, low production costs are one of the most decisive factors in why more brands should use YouTube shorts. You can simply make do with your mobile phone and a video editing app to create and upload exciting new content for your audiences.
People today anyways prefer quantity over quality especially in short form content, therefore compromising in production costs while focusing on releasing more content for higher visibility is not that big of a deal. It's an added benefit that smaller brands can take advantage of.
5. On-The-Go Brand Promotion
Since YouTube shorts are 60 seconds long max, brands can scale through on the go promotional tactics. People are getting busier and busier day by day, their patience for advertisements amidst video streaming is also rapidly declining as they prefer to skip long ads.
But shorts can provide the opportunity for brands to employ a short on-the-go kind of promotional video that people can watch without skipping. Delivering impactful messages in the shortest time possible so people can watch it on the go without needing to skip or getting annoyed due to lengthy ads that they find irrelevant.
6. Established Platform Advantages
Youtube is an established platform that as mentioned earlier is used by men and women of all ages and ethnicities across the globe. Due to its strict security and privacy policies, it is also accessible to a greater number of people as compared to other video streaming services.
This brings the content creators and brands who utilize YouTube to post their content a certain advantage over platforms like tiktok, which is banned in a lot of nations and currently faces ban threats over security and data privacy policies in others. Therefore along with reaching a more diverse audience, by investing your time and resources in YouTube Shorts, you are also reaching out to a more reliable audience with certain security about the future of your brand marketing plans.
7. Monetization
By promoting your brand on YouTube through shorts and becoming a part of the youtube business community, you can monetize your content. There are certain rules and guidelines that brands and businesses need to follow before their content can be monetized but it is a great way to add another income vertical for your brand.
You can simply hire digital marketing experts to gain more tips on how you can improve your content and gain higher following to increase brand exposure and earn more through higher view counts and higher sales.
To Summarize
Brands today need to realize that short form content is here to stay and gaining more popularity everyday as people get busier with their lives. Content relevancy has gone up like anything else, therefore brands today cannot afford to skip any means necessary to gain the attention of their audiences and get in their goodbooks.
Marketing your business on YouTube Shorts is just another vertical that needs to be conquered to firmly acquire your presence in the minds of a younger, more fast-forward audience.