Take a look around and you’ll see many great companies, businesses and startups who have already established their appearance worldwide. Now, look closer and you’ll see that they don’t have a YouTube channel which they are running on regular basis. Why you should not either? Or should you?

YouTube is a huge community with over 1.5 billion of people. It’s a video-hosting website that is highly increasing in its popularity, quality and quantity of videos.

Number of YouTube users worldwide from 2016 to 2021 (in billions)

The statistic shows the number of YouTube viewers worldwide from 2016 to 2021. According to the forecast, the number of online video platform viewers will amount to 1.86 billion in 2021, up from 1.47 billion in 2017.

Indeed, hardly can you find a person in this world who hasn’t seen a single video on YouTube. But have you seen a person who would buy something through YouTube? Does it really help you to increase your conversion rate? What value does it provide for your business in terms of digital marketing? Is it a good customer acquisition channel?

Why will YouTube hurt your business?

According to ThinkwithGoogle, people usually come to YouTube in order to relax and entertain themselves.

How many times did you want to watch a video on YouTube for exactly same purposes? Or maybe your intentions were different? Maybe you wanted to watch something educational, useful, meaningful, etc.

It doesn’t matter what purpose you’ve come to YouTube with, you would end up watching some meaningless videos or some music videos, etc.

How many times have you clicked on those suggested videos and would go on an N-hours journey, surfing and consuming endless amounts of trash? We’ve all been there.

1# Issue

Now, let’s imagine, you’ve launched your own channel. You’ve put a lot of effort, time and money to start expanding your business on YouTube. If your purpose is to increase the conversion rate and generate more sales, then, most likely, it’s a NO. This is a dead end. Simply because you can’t sell directly with YouTube. It’s a waste of precious resources which you could have used for improving your internal processes and developing other customer acquisition channels.

Why? If you haven’t build a chain of connected videos which will pop-up in the suggested videos section then your potential clients are going to fall into a trap of clicking on every fancy thumbnail and, eventually, will get lost in the vast ocean of other videos that have nothing to do with your product.

However, you can attract and direct the traffic to your website, product page or pricings page which will, indeed, bring you more sales.

The idea that you can use to create videos, if you want to run your own channel anyway, is to shoot a video that will present your product. A video can describe the features of the product and a step-by-step guide of how to use it. This is what Rokenbok Toys did to establish a better user experience relationships.

According to Animoto, 80 percent of millennials consider video content when researching a purchase decision, so you don’t want to lose this opportunity.

#2 Issue

If you are running a local business, you should take into account countries restrictions, where YouTube is banned for a variety of reasons. See the list of countries where the Censorship of Youtube is implemented and is not going to be taken down, at least, in the nearest future.

If your clients are from these countries and you’d like to improve your performance and build closer relationships with them by setting up a YouTube channel, this is not going to work out. However, you can use other resources such as Vimeo. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo is only banned in Indonesia.

#3 Issue

Youtube requires not only money, but also overall consistency in posting videos. When you’re not posting, you’re losing your potential clients and opportunities to make money through ads. Spreading your resources on creating this acquisition channel may not be a good idea, if you’re not going to be consistent with the postings frequency.

However, you may repurpose your blog, if you have one, and make a summary of every article or maybe present them in a new light. Speaking about digital marketing, this is what Neil Patel does on his channel. This is what sometimes guys from BBC do in terms of delivering news, instead of writing an article, they post a video.

Also, videos can help you to have a better response from your customers when you launch an email campaign. As Animoto says, 50% of millennials are going to read your email if it contains a video, which your email campaign can benefit from.

#4 Issue

According to YouTube statistics, more than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices. Are you sure you have a mobile version of your website and you know how to optimize for it? Maybe you don’t even need your website to be optimized for mobile platforms, why wasting money on it then?

People still use desktops and laptops to surf through the web, however, most of your audience is going to come from mobile devices. Let’s say you’ve successfully launched YouTube channel, you have people coming to your channel, which even generates leads… but zero coverts. Nobody buys your products simply because your website isn’t mobile-friendly.

YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18–34 and 18–49-year-olds than any cable network in the US. Take a look at this age range, does it fit to your customer persona? Is your audience using mobile devices? Will a YouTube channel make a significant influence on a potential boost in sales?

#5 Issue

YouTube is just another customer acquisition channel just like a blog, Facebook page, Twitter, etc. Except for a blog and website content which still remain the main parts of SEO, YouTube provides very little value in terms of search optimization.

It might, however, work if we speak about digital marketing strategies and tries to build better customer relationships since we, people, think with our eyes.

If you’re trying to catch your clients’ attention in order to convert them by placing a video on a landing page – forget about it. A video on a landing page is going to do more harm than good. The landing page has to be quite narrow in its purpose, which is in not only to drawing attention, but also encouraging to take action and, eventually, buying a product. A YouTube video is only going to distract your clients. How? Remember those suggested videos? They are going to take your clients into a long, long “free” journey and you’ll never see them again.

Things to consider before you start a YouTube business (Checklist)

• Your business model is not B2B;
• Your audience is 18-34, 18-49-years-olds;
• Potential customers are not from banned-on-YouTube countries;
• You have time, money and other resources to give it a try;
• You’ll be consistent with postings frequency;
• You have content to share and products to shoot a video about;
• You have already built other more effective customer acquisition channels and YouTube is the only one left.

Conclusions

It’s all about trying. If you have enough resources, your business is running stably and you’re thinking about finding other ways to attract clients – give YouTube a try. However, if you’re a small company that has not yet strongly established itself, then do not prioritize YouTube to be the main channel which you hope to bring your customers with. It’s much better to concentrate on your website content, where you can still make some videos to build better relationships with your clients.