If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth millions. The thing about content marketing is that it’s not just about informing and educating, but creating an experience that your audience can feel. Whether you’re a consumer or business customer, decisions are not made solely on logic, but emotion. As content marketers, we have an opportunity to tie into the experiential state of information influence by leveraging media like video.
eMarketer reports a lot of support for the growth in video investment: Online video is expected to grow 55% this year and is the top format for content marketing. Stats about YouTube are pretty compelling.
Did you know?
- Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
- Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
- YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth
- 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
- 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week
YouTube and video marketing isn’t only for consumer products of course, B2B marketers are getting in the video game in a big way. Sometimes to learn what’s possible with a particular channel, it makes sense to look at big companies with big budgets and see what they’re doing. We can learn from their investment (right and wrong) to bring insight to our own internet marketing efforts. Here are 11 (yeah, 11 because “10” is boring) of the top B2B brands and their YouTube channels.
HP: http://www.youtube.com/user/hp
10,386 subscribers
4,152,345 video views
Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/user/microsoft
43,187 subscribers
13,547,934 video views
UPS: http://www.youtube.com/user/ups
1,236 subscribers
2,348,974 video views
Cisco: http://www.youtube.com/user/Cisco
17,663 subscribers
2,856,045 video views
Oracle: http://www.youtube.com/user/oracle
4,979 subscribers
2,177,212 video views
Accenture: http://www.youtube.com/user/accenture
1,729 subscribers
231,156 video views
Intel: http://www.youtube.com/user/channelintel
33,606 subscribers
37,697,035 video views
SAP: http://www.youtube.com/user/SAP
2,850 subscribers
391,368 video views
Fedex: http://www.youtube.com/user/fedex
2,253 subscribers
2,709,332 video views
IBM: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibm
10,767 subscribers
4,453,956 video views
GE: http://www.youtube.com/user/GEreports
2,755 subscribers
6,442,730 video views
I think there are a lot of good ideas to take from the user experience, creative, content and YouTube Channel implementations from each of these B2B Company YouTube channels. There are also some examples that perpetuate the “boring B2B” moniker. Obviously the production costs for a lot of the content is out of reach for many companies, but that’s where the smarts and creativity of your marketing team (or agency) will come in to play. Creative smarts wins the day against budget in many, many ways.
This post focuses on large, heck the largest, B2B companies but I am curious what your favorites are? What B2B video channels or individual videos on YouTube, regardless of company size, have you liked the most?
