One question we often get is “why do I need anything besides You Tube for my video?”  With the phenomenal success of You Tube, this is a natural reaction.  As with most marketing questions, however, the right answer really depends on your specific goals.

Digital marketers generally have three high-level goals  – create awareness, engage prospects and convert visitors to leads.  The good news is that video can dramatically increase your results in all three areas.

You Tube is a great channel for achieving the first goal – it’s built for generating awareness.  Millions of people go to You Tube to look for relevant videos. Posting your videos to You Tube is an easy, inexpensive way to be discovered.

But engaging and converting prospects requires a more considered approach. Digital marketers typically spend a great deal of time and money to attract visitors to their websites, as well as optimizing that experience for conversion. To maximize your investment, you want your video content to be a vital part of that overall experience and conversion process.  Keeping prospects engaged on your site gives you more time and opportunity to convert them.

If, on the other hand, you send those hard-earned prospects off to You Tube, you may risk degrading their experience and lose everything you’ve already gained.  Yes, they see your video, but they’re no longer on your site, and you have lost control of their experience.  The prospect is now open to presentation of irrelevant content or, even worse, to content from competitors.

Once a prospect reaches your site, your goal should be to give them an experience that is tuned to their needs and enables them to easily take action that converts them from a suspect to a lead.   At a basic level, this requires interactivity and integrated calls to action.

Finally, whenever you do engage prospects on your site, you want to measure those interactions so you can constantly tune your efforts and programs to maximize conversion. Leading marketers are now successfully integrating their overall tracking and individual user actions within marketing automation (e.g., Eloqua, Unica, HubSpot, Marketo) and sales automation (Salesforce.com) systems. This ensures that the process of creating awareness, engaging prospects and converting visitors is properly executed and measured from start to finish.