By Matthew Yeoman
YouTube offers both an incredible marketing opportunity, as well as an online customer service channel. Once your channel is established, you can start working on content that not only brings in new customers, but builds brand loyalty, helps customers understand your products and services, and answers questions before they’re asked -- all in the name of customer service.
Your goal with almost all of your video marketing on YouTube should be to create closer bonds with your customers; YouTube allows for the kind of direct interaction you’ll never get with a TV commercial. Having videos ready for sharing, via their URLs, can also make for great content on your social media websites, or in a customer service setting.
How-to Videos
How-to videos on YouTube are the go-to move for most brands looking to use YouTube in a customer support setting. We all grew up with how-to videos on our TVs -- I still watch This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop from time to time -- so they’re a familiar style of video.
Just like on TV, these videos are meant for people with specific goals in mind. These goals can, of course, relate directly to your business. Do you sell bathroom tile and want to help your customers install them? Here you go:
Home Depot created and shared that to the tune of 1.5 million views. That's 1.5 million highly-targeted viewers who either are interested in something Home Depot sells, or have purchased from them and are viewing this video in a brand-loyalty growing capacity.
If you’re really looking to push sales as you push these customer service videos, include a link in the description of your YouTube video to your products. These links are rel="nofollow" so they have no SEO value; however, they may convert better than any other content you create online.
Demonstrating How Your Products Work
We’ve all seen a million bad product demonstration videos, and yet the Home Shopping Network lives on. While these videos may not be the darling of your social shares and drive lots of people to your YouTube channel, they can be excellent opportunities to help people learn about your products.
Here’s a terrible example, pre-YouTube, of a brand trying to do a product demonstration:
Notice how terribly awful Windows 95 failed in this legendary bad video. What’s wrong? They don’t get to the showing of the product! I even chose a video with the first five minutes of fluff cut out and they still couldn’t just show us how Windows 95 worked beyond ‘‘push a button.’’
The team over at Nest have a daunting task ahead of them in a tech setting as well: teaching users how to use their new tech. Nest has a much better handle on product demonstrations with their simple to follow guides from actual experts:
You can go a step further and do broader demonstrations that are more like online product tutorials. These will cover much wider aspects of what a product can do, rather than focusing on specific features. Jimmy Ray Purser, a former technical marketing engineer at Cisco, has a unique approach to this:
- He addresses specific customers who have wanted to learn about this aspect of the products sold by Cisco.
- He acts more like a goofy college professor than a boring high school history teacher.
- He uses a variety of techniques to show the content.
Here’s Jimmy doing his thing and explaining a rather complex issue that relates directly to what Cisco does:
With these types of videos you get very close to people who are clearly interested in your products. Be proactive and use a few tips that help you gain YouTube subscribers so that you can capture these users over the long term. Why not bring them back to your channel again and again for product demonstrations in the future?
Creating Answers to Frequent Questions
Many people go online looking for answers relating to specific products. The easiest teaching tool has a mix of show and tell; video does this in a way that text just doesn’t. Having videos on YouTube that answer common questions can be your chance to provide videos for people who don’t come to you directly, but find your videos via search. You’ll also have these videos ready to share in a customer service setting for when people do ask.
As an example, Best Buy has created a bunch of ‘‘Things to Know Before You Buy’’ videos. These videos come up frequently in searches related to their products. A question such as ‘‘What is the difference between LED and LCD?’’ will bring up this video:
When an online customer service rep is asked a question via email, Twitter, Facebook, this is an easy share that explains what a product is, and what the buying options are. Successful videos provide generic product information first, and then talk about specific products later.
These types of videos are easy to create as well. The Best Buy video above was likely shot in a morning and edited in an afternoon. A bit of music under Creative Commons license fills it up and makes the video feel a bit more lively.
You also have the opportunity to use YouTube annotations o create pop-up links to products being shown, or to category pages. Best Buy could have included pop-up links to their OLED, LCD, etc. pages when each one came on screen.
YouTube as Proactive Online Customer Service
Creating a section of your YouTube marketing channel specifically for your customer service goals can do wonders for your video marketing’s overall usefulness. You’ll be creating video that can be found in search engines, while also creating content that can be shared in a customer service setting.
Not all of your social media managers will be experts on every facet of your business. Having a video for them to share when they don’t know the answer to a question can make them look smart, and your business look prepared.
