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While YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon in that it’s the place where we watch hilarious videos of cats smoking cigarettes, it is also a channel where creative marketers can reach a huge audience for a relatively low cost. If you have a great idea, a sense of humor and are not afraid to get in front of the camera, read on for 4 simple tips.

1. Be on message. Last year I launched a new job search engine in Australia and shortly after launched a video titled  “Australia’s Worst Boss”. The website’s competitive advantage is that job seekers can read reviews about employers and avoid a nasty surprise that their new company or manager wasn’t quite as expected, so our strategy was to provide a cautionary tale aligned to our point of differentiation. To avoid your video being in the ‘great video, can’t remember who made it’ category the message needs to be associated in some way with your business value proposition, however tenuous.
2. Hire a Production Crew. We’ve probably all seen extremely amateurish ‘corporate’ videos on YouTube and elsewhere and this can certainly have an impact, all negative. Just as owning a car doesn’t make you Dale Jnr., having an Iphone doesn’t make you a great a cameraman. A professional production crew might only be two people, a cameraman and a sound technician, and if they have the skills to actually produce the final version while providing some directing guidance along the way then that should suffice. Our video cost $5,000 to produce and reportedly the famous Dollar Shave one cost less than $3,000 so this is short money well spent.
3. Direct Promotion. Unfortunately even the greatest video doesn’t either find or watch it itself, so having made the investment in preparing something you’re proud of, it’s essential to use every means necessary to promote it. Send a mass email to friends, family, customers and nicely request that if they enjoy it they should feel free to share with others and (ideally) ‘like’ it or comment on YouTube. You should also attach it to your Facebook page and use the new ‘promoted post’ feature that allows you to very affordably reach friends of friends of friends. Remembers also that anyone who ‘likes’ your video post on Facebook automatically drops it into their update stream so be careful not to spam your own friends or their pals.
4. Seeding. Having already directly promoted your video, it’s time to bring in a specialist agency to ‘seed’ your video across various social media and other video sharing sites. These folks are worth their weight in celluloid gold because they have the smarts and tactics to reach the audience beyond your 3 degrees of separation very affordably. You can expect to start seeing your video on sites like Stumbleupon, Tumblr etc in all the right places and giving your video excellent reach into a very web savvy crowd.

Today’s internet users are becoming accustomed to a highly engaged experience online and this definitely includes video. Get started, have some fun and watch the clicks roll in.