In the last seven years, YouTube has become the most compelling social site for video sharing. According to Katrina Radic with Branding Magazine:
"YouTube claimed 60 hours of uploads per minute and 4 billion views per day. That's up 25 percent in the past eight months and the equivalent of more than half the world's population watching a video every day."
YouTube created a funny little site called onehourpersecond.com to visually illustrate the effects of these statistics (Be sure to check it out - it's a lot of fun to watch!)
When done right video and healthcare content marketing work together perfectly. Hospitals come across as being sincere and helpful, wanting to help people solve their most personal heath problems, when they use video to tell compelling stories.
Another reason why YouTube is a great platform for healthcare marketers is because they can easily minimize their engagement risk and focus on offering content that has value to the end user.
Case Study: Johnson & Johnson
Johnson and Johnson - a company whose products are familiar to all American households - has developed a very successful content marketing strategy using YouTube. The goal of their channel (JNJ Health) is to provide "videos that promote a better understanding of health".
Here's an example of their most popular video to date. It talks about teenage obesity and weight loss treatments and has been viewed over 634,000 times with over 1,300 comments.
This video was posted in 2008 and is still raking in fresh views and comments (view it on YouTube.com). The content itself touches on an ongoing crisis in America and allows a forum for discussion. The young ladies in the video tell a heart-felt story that many people can relate with.
Notice too that there is no mention of 'Johnson and Johnson' and apart from the profile name indicating that the channel belongs to 'JNJ Health' there are no branding elements surrounding this video.
J&J's YouTube Successes:
- Providing educational or informational content that helps people who might be facing similar problems.
- No self-promotion or mention of their brand or their products.
- Introducing a "human" angle to the story (The ability to reach people emotionally means that you have to appeal to them on many levels. Give them something to think about and something to comment about).
- Providing relevant material for viewers.
- Very brief content means that people are willing to invest the time (a minute and a half) to view it and to leave a comment.
Advice from YouTube
Andy Stack is the Product Manager at You Tube. In an interview with Larry Kless with ReelSEO.com, Stack advised "that it's important for retailers to develop a content strategy and not necessarily an advertising strategy, and sponsor content that matters to your community and spend money to promote content that's tested and works."
Key Take Away
From a consumer's perspective the content that a brand provides is more important than the brand itself. If you're thinking about using YouTube for content marketing, make sure that the content you provide is relevant and based on topics that interest your audience and can spark interesting discussions around it.
Over to You: Have you experimented with YouTube? What are some of the successes you have had with your content marketing strategy. Please share in the comment box below.