I read an article last week from a well-known marketing expert that stated the Internet is no more powerful than any other marketing medium. Or in other words, the Internet, direct mail, television and magazine advertising are all equal…and should all be used together…instead of focusing on just one.
And I agree…at least on this day of this year. I may not agree next year. And I definitely won’t agree several years from now.
Why?
Because of Generation YouTube. Kids and teenagers these days are growing up in a totally different environment than us “adults” did. They communicate online or via text messaging almost exclusively. They rarely speak on the phone, they don’t write letters, they don’t read magazines, they watch TV shows from their computers and they have no interest in anything that arrives in the mail (at least as far as I can tell).
And web video is playing a big part of this. After all, why read through pages of text when you can click a button and watch what you want to know in seconds.
Watch any kid surf the Internet and what you see will surprise you; they use YouTube as a search engine. It doesn’t matter what they’re looking for…help with math, a video game or a person; they want to find the answer in a video. And on the occasion when they do use Google for something…they still type in “YouTube” in their search phrase so they can get a video-based result.
I’m not making this up. In fact, YouTube has already become the world’s second largest search engine behind Google. Yes, YouTube. And many pundits are predicting that it will overtake Google over the next several years.
I have no doubt it will. Eventually. So am I suggesting you give up on all traditional, text-based forms of marketing and start going with web video exclusively? No.
What I’m suggesting is you start adding web video to the mix now…in increasingly heavy doses. Whatever business you’re in…whatever market you’re in…eventually your audience will be today’s teenagers…all grown up. And as any of us with kids know, it happens a lot faster than you could ever imagine.
Being a mother of an 18 year old son, I have seen this happen. The first thing he does when he gets back from school is to turn on his laptop, log in to Facebook, keep it open at all times to communicate with he friends, and search YouTube videos on different topics. Then he comes to me to show them and talk about them. There is so much information available today, but the most important thing to remember is to to scan through the available information and only keep what is worth keeping. There is a lot of garbage around too.