I recently read Denise’s blog post about branding for small companies with tight budgets. She briefly touches on some relatively low-cost methods for marketing a small company on a limited budget. In her post, she mentions YouTube videos as a way of advertising.

Every company’s ultimate goal is to create a positive brand image in consumers’ minds. To do this, a company must promote itself through effective advertising. Effective advertising is about selecting the medium that best suits your company’s budget and needs. As with any type of advertising there are pros and cons. A YouTube video can be powerful method of advertising because it can contain specific content catered to the product or service your company and is highly flexible and interactive in that you can constantly make new videos and update the content in the videos. Furthermore, it is interactive because people can leave comments and tell you what their thoughts are on your advertising medium. From those comments a company can figure out what they are doing well and what you can improve on. And the most obvious advantage is that it’s free!

However, there are cons of making YouTube videos as well. The primary issue with choosing the Internet as a medium of advertising is that the Internet is becoming cluttered. A link to your YouTube video is no longer just a link to your video. Rather, there is a multitude of other advertisements from other third parties. For example, sometimes when you click on a video, there is usually another 15-30 advertisement that plays before your video. Also, sometimes there are pop-up ads during the video. This can get distracting for the audience that you want to target because they may get annoyed and/or frustrated and may not interpret the message that you want to convey in your ad as well as you had hoped.