Editor’s note: Kathryn Korostoff is the president of Research Rockstar Training & Staffing, and the host of the YouTube video podcast series, Conversations for Research Rockstars. The series launched in 2017. She can be reached at KKorostoff@ResearchRockstar.com
I have a video on YouTube with over 15,000 views that says, “yes!”
To be candid, I am a bit biased toward YouTube. I've been using YouTube semiregularly since 2017 and have released over 100 videos. Of these, 15 have more than 1,000 views, which I consider very successful given that market research is a pretty narrow topic - in the context of all YouTube as a whole.
From my experience with the video podcast series, Conversations for Research Rockstars, [YouTube] has absolutely helped me to reach both new people and it has been a great brand-building mechanism with people I already had relationships with. For me, both audiences are important. However, there are two important caveats.
It can be tricky to assess the precise business impact in financial terms. Unless you are using YouTube videos to make money selling ads on YouTube, sales tracking is indirect. For example, someone searches for a term that leads to your market research-related video. They watch the video and maybe decide to visit your website as a result. Maybe they end up signing up for a meeting or demonstration, after which they become a client…perhaps a year or more after they saw the video. Would you know that B2B sale originated with YouTube? Probably not.
In contrast, people who do consumer marketing on YouTube are more likely to have more precise sales tracking, since they likely have the mechanisms in place that allow Google Analytics to track end-to-end sales conversions. B2B is messier.
You can get a lot of other useful statistics from the Channel Analytics section of the dashboard. For example, I can see that about 50% of my views come from YouTu...