The Advantages and Disadvantages of YouTube as a Marketing Tool

·YouTube has over 2 billion monthly users which makes it an obvious choice for advertising, especially should a company which to advertise rich media for their products, YouTube is a website where any user can upload any length of video they like, therefore companies can give a full demonstration of their products on the site.

·YouTube is an excellent place should a company wish to gauge feedback on their product or service, YouTube has a comment section where the community can leave an unlimited character long post detailing their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a product. YouTube also features a like and dislike button which gives companies an easy idea of how their audience is feeling at face value.

·Should a company have the money for push marketing, YouTube is a great place for the pay per click model, a company can pay YouTube’s parent company Google, to have their products and services advertised at the start of any video they should feel will have their target audience viewing. The average cost to advertise on YouTube is around 10 to 30 cents per view.

·YouTube advertising will get a company results, YouTube is designed in such a way that the viewer has to wait at least 5 seconds before skipping an ad, this is to the advertisers benefit as 5 seconds can be enough to grab your target audience should you have content worth their while.

.YouTube does however have its disadvantages, the 5 seconds bypass option does put pressure on the advertiser to make sure their content can grab the consumer, therefore a company will have to hire an advertising team to make sure their rich media is of a high standard.

·Should a company set up their own YouTube channel to promote their brand, there is no guarantee that it will generate traffic, YouTube is an incredibly saturated site for competition and thus, a brand selling the same product as another might get completely overshadowed by them in views, thus generating no revenue for the company.

·Companies must be very open to negative feedback on YouTube, the platform is notorious for what is referred as ‘dislike bombing’, which is when a community of users will come together to dislike videos and leave very negative feedback which in turn can scare off any future potential customers should they be interested in your product.

·While generating likes is a good sign, many users can simply like a value while disregarding its value proposition, this means that a consumer can simply lie a video on a product, expressing interest in it, but may not translate to a sale, this leaves companies wondering whether they need to push the product more.