The usual Internet sales funnel starts with the initial contact between the prospect and the company, and then it goes on, hopefully, until it ends at a payment gateway such as PayPal or Google CheckOut. Between these two, there might be many interactions, and also quite a lot of time might go by. This time and these interactions may be broken down roughly into three stages: (1) when they’re still shopping around, (2) when they’ve stepped in your storefront, and (3) the sales counter. Shopping around is the stage where customers have already decided to spend some money, but they’re not exactly sure of the details. The storefront is when they’re actively engaged with your brand, asking about products and alternatives, considering prices and making real buying decisions. The sales counter is when they’re at your website, credit card in hand, going through the process of checkout. After that comes the delivery part, but that’s up to you.
Now let’s focus on the storefront stage, and why YouTube is perfect for it.
First off, Google shows relevant YouTube videos intermingled with their search results, and competition is much less fierce in terms of backlinks and PageRank. Add to that the fact that YouTube itself is the second largest search engine on the Internet, ahead of all of Google’s competitors. On a second line of reasoning, YouTube has the huge advantage of having video as the medium, rather than text and pictures. This means your prospect gets to see your face and get a feel for how you speak and go about your business. On top of some face time, you can add simple graphics, you can give explanations of product functionality and you can answer customers’ frequently asked questions. Think of your YouTube channel as a cheap and direct infomercial broadcaster with social media as the cherry on top.
YouTube might sound scary as a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) platform for the beginner, but there are several reasons why this need not be a holdup. One problem might be the video production. Maybe you don’t own a high definition camera, maybe you don’t have any background on cinematography. Although it pays off to learn these skills, there are plenty of hands waiting to be hired out there. Try outsourcing script writing and video production, and have your outsourcer add product pictures from the Internet. Tell him to finish the video with a link to your website, and your phone number. When uploading the video – which can also be outsourced – take your time to set the metadata correctly. In other words, use time and location data to let search engines know that your video is relevant. Your most potent weapon here are tags. Also, use the social media features of YouTube to let the most watched videos percolate through other social websites like Twitter and Facebook.
An Internet phenomenon of late is a tremendous example and proof of concept for the sheer power of reach that YouTube videos have. Base solely out of YouTube, many celebrities have arisen over the course of the last few years. A few of my personal favorites are simply vloggers with a bit of professional production on top such as Tobuscus, RayWilliamJohnson and sxephil. These were the early adopters of YouTube, not only as a platform for watching silly videos, but also as a place to publish their creations. As Google figured out ways to monetize content on YouTube, it was to be expected that their next move was to invest heavily on content production. Currently, some YouTube content creation partners include big names like Madonna and Jay-Z.
From a business perspective, however, what would be the best way to penetrate this new wave of technology that is Internet TV?
Here’s an imaginary sales funnel that leverages YouTube, according to the model mentioned in the first paragraph:
1. User sees outbound marketing campaign that uses text, image and video ads on the Google Search and/or Display Networks.
2. User starts interacting with you via social media and becomes an eager consumer of the content you put out. This has been done via email newsletters, articles in a website, but now it can also be done via YouTube. YouTube is, in many aspects, very much like a social network like Twitter or Facebook. Comments make for quick interaction. New videos can be recorded, edited and uploaded in a couple of hours, and good videos quickly bubble up to the top of search results, both because of social engagements and from how these engagements are accounted for in Google’s algorithms.
3. Prospects convert into clients.
What this does, in a very real way, is it relies on psychological triggers that brick-and-mortar stores have been built around. One of these is the consistency trigger. This means that people need time to process the fact that they’re going to spend money, and it is easier for them to go through with the purchase if they can related to the brand with some consistency. Clients expected that your brand be accountable and available to certain extents, much like a regular store would.
Also, they expect to see incremental changes in your brand, websites and sales videos. They expect you to slowly get better and better at providing your service. YouTube also has the advantage that all content ever produced by your company could be online forever. It will continue to bring clients dripping through the oldest videos, up to the new ones. Plus, they will only see your new, high engagement counts, which creates a phenomenon where you’re always getting more engagements, because you already got many engagements.
The more engagements you have, the larger your audience will be. The larger your audience is, the more people will drip down your sales funnel and grow your business. That’s the beauty of social media: engagements always scale up and percolate through the social network. This doesn’t immediately translate into sales, because the processes are different for each of these. One the one hand, social engagement is free, and more is always better. On the other hand, sales and conversion involves a process of selection. For the engagement part, the more the merrier, but not for the sales part. Firstly, because not all people will benefit from your product. Secondly, because not all engagements will lead to win-win relationships where sales make sense.
Whereas the engagement stage is all about scaling up, the sales funnel is all about scaling down. YouTube is such a great tool because it allows you to make the transition from one to the other.
Author Bio: Nicolas D’Alleva is a fan of all things YouTube including cheesy videos, bad editing, and anything that a user takes time to create. Mr. D’Alleva owns an Internet marketing company called Spotted Frog and an inbound call center provider called Specialty TAS.
