10 Reasons to open a YouTube Channel in 2020

There are at least 10 reasons why you should consider YouTube as your main strategy to grow your brand in 2020 and beyond.

1 – The Obvious

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, owned by the first largest engine, which is Google, so you cannot really afford, as a brand, to not be there.

2 – Visibility and Exposure

Whatever you publish on YouTube, it can be listed and found on Google. 

3 – Your Authoritative Status

If you are consistent with the content that you publish on YouTube (quality and frequency), you earn an “authoritative” status for your audience (and potential clients). You become an authority on whatever is the subject matter on the industry that you are in.

4 – Content Never Dies

So whatever content you publish is going to be there forever, and it creates new followers even years after it has been published (if relevant). If your content is used as an input point for a digital sales funnel, that will make money for you while you sleep. It just keeps on growing and growing.

Sometimes some content that has been published on YouTube gets a lot of momentum even two years after it’s been created. 

5 – Source of Traffic

YouTube can be an excellent source of traffic and not just views to grow your channel, but traffic to bring people somewhere else. For example, a sales funnel or your website or a landing page where you want to bring users to create a mailing list.

6 – Mailing Lists

Speaking of Mailing Lists… With the traffic generate with point number 5, above, you can build Mailing Lists, which are an essential tool in marketing and digital marketing.

When you get your subscribers on YouTube, those subscribers that they are owned by YouTube, they belong to you, but you don’t have access to their emails. Capture the email addresses of these people and grow databases of individuals that you can market to.

8 Branding is Now Personal

Tesla has got 4.2 million followers on Twitter. Elon Musk has got 28+ million.

People engage with a person at leads 5 times more than a corporate brand. So if you want to promote your company, create a “persona” and support him/her in social media. So if you are a large organization and you have many products, you should have one “persona” per product. That’s why opening this article, I mentioned that it could be strategic for you to create more than one YouTube channel. 

9 Source of Revenue

The monetization of your YouTube video is not something that can make you very rich, very quickly. However, it can still be a source of revenue. And there are also other side revenues you can rely on:

• Affiliate marketing

• Promoting your own digital products

• Sponsorships

• Merchandising

• Product sales

• Live events

• Brand deals

YouTube is a marathon, not a sprint.

10 Beat the competition

That’s right! As you start a YouTube channel and begin publishing valuable content for your audience, you create a library that keeps on growing.

It can be daunting at the beginning when the growth seems really slow, but it will snowball eventually. Once you have your sizeable audience, it will be challenging for your competitors to catch up. The sooner you start, the better.

In the challenges section below, I’ll demonstrate why it’s not too late to start a YouTube channel.

The 3 Challenges

There are mainly three challenges when starting a YouTube channel.

1. How do I do it, technically? Am I able to speak in the camera? Do I need a specific camera, audio, a particular studio, and all of that? 

2. Is it too late? There are so many YouTubers, am I the last one coming into this race, and am I going to be able to compete with everybody else?

3. How do I find the time and the resources to get the content to create the various episodes?

Challenge 1 – The gear and the technique

The technique comes with time; watch YouTube videos about how to make videos, and you’re all set. There’s a wealth of information available online. The gear is really not that important. Any decent smartphone nowadays produces more than acceptable footage.

Where you should invest in is “audio quality”. Audio is more important than video on YouTube.

You just need an inexpensive microphone and to treat the room where you record to avoid reverb and echo. This can be easily achieved with carpets or blankets on the floor and covering flat walls.

The most crucial factor for a good video is that you provide true value to your audience and possibly deliver it with a story. Using a simple storytelling technique when delivering a message is very powerful and engaging. Like any movie or book, you just need 3 blocks in a story:

1. A beginning (set up your story)

2. A middle (tension, challenge)

3. An end (resolution)

Challenge 2 – Am I too late to get into YouTube?

I’ll answer to this point with data. According to Omnicare, 95% of the global internet population watches YouTube. This is already an encouraging statistic, but what’s more interesting is how many active users (creators) there are on each platform.

If you start a YouTube channel (or any social media account) and you publish content, you become a “creator”. Your competition will be other creators in the sale platforms. Let’s see how many creators there are on each social media platform, compared to YouTube.

Number of Creators on Social Media Platform

LinkedIn has got 660 million users, more or less. Only 303 million are active. So 45% of these people are engaged.

Instagram has more or less 1 billion active users, and 700 million of them publish content at least once a month (estimate).

Facebook, with over 2 billion users, can count on “only” in 840 million creators. 42% that provide content write posts and publish pictures on the platform. 

On Twitter, 56% of the users actually write tweets. Everybody else just read.

Here comes the exciting part: YouTube, with 2 billion active users per month, has only 50 million creators. 

So your competitors, my competitors, people that really create the content on YouTube are 50 million. This is 2.5% of the YouTube users!

YouTube is not only the second-largest search engine in the world and the second-largest social media platform, but it’s also the one with less competition when it comes to creators, by far!

Why is that? Because the entry barrier is very high. You need to have the skills to create videos, you need to have the creativity to come up with real content. It’s a lot of effort, but right because it’s more effort, you can get more benefits out of it.  

Challenge 3 – Where do I find Time and Resources?

Creating content for social media is demanding, it can be a full-time job. YouTube mainly, is the platform that requires more time and resources. SO where are you going to make time for this?

There are two distinct categories here. The first category is a single individual, the second one is a business.

 If you’re a one-man-gang (one-woman-gang), you decide your own content, your priorities, your schedule. You need to have the willpower, the termination, and planning just to do it and get stuff done.

If you are a creator within an organization (where I have quite a bit of experience), it’s an entirely different ball game. 

To create content inside a business on different topics, you need to source material from people that don’t even understand the process of creating valuable content.

They are experts in a specific subject matter, and you need to get their time to source the material, but they typically are swamped. You need to get their time to extract their valuable information and transform it into content that you can then publish.

And this is a challenge: it’s going to be extremely difficult and frustrating. In my experience, your best bet is to ask an executive directive (an internal communication). It must be clear that Digital Marketing and Social Media are key growth factors in your company, and everybody is expected to collaborate with the marketing team.

If it can help, ask them to read this article or watch this video 😉

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below or contact me.