Introduction

Making a YouTube channel is the easy part, it’s really about what gets the audience talking about the YouTube channel and wanting to subscribe to watch more videos. This is mainly due to investing time, skills and resources to ensure that videos are being generated consistently to satisfy the audience (Thomson, 2017). This blog will focus on what makes a good YouTube video for a large online fashion organisation and how making a great YouTube video can gain a larger target audience.

Ways to make a great YouTube video.

Large online businesses use social media as a marketing platform to raise brand awareness. This can be seen in major online fashion organisations such as Pretty Little Thing, Missguided, I.AM.GIA etc. These organisations were all founded on Instagram and now have millions of followers due to sell-out products (Stevens, 2018). Starting on Instagram is a great way to gain a large target audience however, with YouTube being ranked the second social networking site in the world (Stout, 2018), large businesses can grab this opportunity to gain new customers.

An important factor to consider is the length of the YouTube video. Having a short thirty second video to promote a brand is a great way of starting a YouTube channel as people struggle to commit to a longer video (Zarella, 2010). This may result to the audience having better engagement throughout the first video which could lead to an increase about of subscribers.

Another factor to consider when being a large online brand is the use of celebrity endorsement/ social media influencers. Parasocial relationship is the intimate relationship between consumer and celebrity (Horton et al., 1956). It is known that using celebrities in marketing perceives positive attitudes to shop and therefore, leads to brand loyalty and increased purchasing habits (Labrecque, 2014). Here are 5 reasons why celebrity endorsement work: https://medium.com/strategic-content-marketing/5-reasons-why-celebrity-endorsements-work-47de8515b072.

How will this be achieved

Being a large business means more money to spend on marketing to boost sales and there are plenty of ways to spend this. One way to create the perfect YouTube video is of course paying someone else to do the job for you. Online there are numerous video editors that can create a YouTube video that caters for your desires needs. Just from searching video editor’s online, the top 10 video editor’s around the world came as a result where it has been made very easy to contact the editors: https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/?q=video%20editing%20youtube.

Making sure that the thumbnail is eye-catching as it is what the audience first sees when browsing through YouTube. YouTube offers three options to decide from, which means that picking the most interesting section of the YouTube video is highly beneficial (Zarrella, 2010). For example, in regarding online fashion, the thumbnail could be celebrities in the organisations garments to draw in watchers.

Once the perfect YouTube video has been created, make sure to promote this on all other active social media sites e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. This is to of course attract the audience to watch your business’s YouTube video and to achieve a place in the ‘Honors’ section which analyses data through algorithms to measure activity over time. The honors sections are broken into categories such as most viewed, commented, favourites, rates and responded to the video (Zarrelle, 2010). The use of hashtags will also help spread the video across to a wider target market.

Risks

Of course, with every positive, there are drawbacks so identifying these before producing a YouTube video is very important. One risk may be that it turns into a complete waste of money due to barely any views. This may be caused by poor promoting e.g. not sharing the YouTube video on other social media sites, no use of hashtags meaning. Another risk may be a waste of time as long hours may have been put in to produce the perfect YouTube channel for it to not go anywhere.

References

Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. 1956. Mass communication and para‐social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19: 215 – 229. DOI: 10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049

Labrecque, L 2014, ‘Fostering consumer- Brand Relationships in Social Media Environments: The Role of Parasocial Interaction’, Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 28, no. 2, pp 134-148.

Media, M (2016) ‘5 Reasons why Celebrity Endorsements work!’, Medium, 31 October. Available at: https://medium.com/strategic-content-marketing/5-reasons-why-celebrity-endorsements-work-47de8515b072 (Accessed on 19 February 2019)

Stevens, Ben. (2018) ‘Big Interview: Umar Kamani, Founder & CEO, PrettyLittleThing’ Retail Gazette, 26 February. Available at: https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2018/02/big-interview-umar-kamani-prettylittlething-ceo-founder-retail-gazette-exclusive/ (Accessed 19 January 2019)

Stout, D, W. (2018) ‘Social Media Statistics 2019: Top Networks by the Numbers’ Dustn.tv, (N.D.). Available at: https://dustn.tv/social-media-statistics/ (Accessed 20 January 2019)

Thomson, L 2017 ‘” In my humble opinion…”: Serious Youtubers’ self-presentations, roles, and authority’, Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, vol. 54, issue 1, pp. 811-813.

Zarrella, D. 2010. The social media marketing book. Beijing: O’Reily.

Initial Findings

I.AM.GIA is mainly using social media to advertise their clothing. The main platform that they are using is Instagram where they have models wearing their items and using #iamgia in their caption.

One thing that they are doing well is that they are capturing iconic and eye catching photos to promote their products. They are doing this by using different types of backgrounds. For example, one of I.AM.GIA’s shoots where in a scrap yard (as seen below) which makes the picture look trendy and edgy. The pictures that they are capturing stand out from other clothing sites as its not just the model they consider, its the background, accesories and pose which all makes an iconic picture.

I.AM.GIA uses celebrities and a list models to promote their clothing. They do this by capturing celebrities in their clothing and posting them on their Instagram with the caption #iamgia. This encourages customers to purchase their items as it is trending worldwide. For example Ariana Grande is seen in one of their bikini’s in her new music video (as shown below). 

This email was sent two weeks ago from River Island. This email explains that there are up to 30% off on certain items which range from womenswear, menswear and even kidswear. The options of these categories are easy to access, as this email sends the customer directly to the sale of the selected category. It also expresses that there is free UK standard delivery on orders over £65.

This is below this email which advertise River Island’s social media accounts and encourages peopl to follow them. It is seen that there is a River Island app that can be downloaded to customers on a direct App Store or Google Play link. The email also makes it easy for customers to find store details by options such as ‘shop online’, ‘store locator’, ‘contact us’. This is a clever way of bringing customers in to the local stores.

I would not open this email, I would most likely delete this email straight away. This is because I recieve many emails from retailers that advertise offers. Thes offers ranch from certain percentages off items, free next day delivery on items over a certain price and notifications of the retailers sales. This makes any future emails from retailers advertising promotions very off putting and it sadly does generally mix into the heaps of promotions I receieve daily which ends up being deleted straight away.

In this email there is no personalisation, it just explains that there arae up to 30% off selected lines.