Today is a momentous day. No, I’m not talking about the Seattle Seahawks’ recent Super Bowl victory. That was more of a blowout than a major event. After five months of data gathering and analysis using Pixability’s big data video software, today our marketing team launched our study “Beauty on YouTube: How YouTube is Radically Transforming the Beauty Industry and What That Means for Brands.”
This report, the latest in a series of Pixability-authored studies around major verticals on YouTube, clearly reveals that major beauty brands are falling short on YouTube compared to beauty vloggers, haul girls, and other YouTube beauty personalities. Beauty brands currently have fewer subscribers, less channel activity, fewer views, and less overall ROI on YouTube than teenage girls producing makeup and beauty content from their bedrooms.
For all their creative and advertising investments, major brands have only garnered 3% of YouTube’s 14.9 billion beauty-related video views. Just a handful of beauty brands are effectively incorporating YouTube into their web and commerce initiatives, and only a few are successfully working with YouTube’s independent beauty personalities. That’s really a shame; brands are missing tremendous opportunities to engage their target audience on the platform viewers are turning to for all things beauty.
Yes, significant room for improvement remains for brands, but our study defines five key ways brands can make better use of YouTube’s marketing potential right away. Brands can change their video production strategy to be geared specifically towards YouTube in addition to optimizing their channels and videos for SEO. Creating more videos, in a wider variety of lengths and covering disparate subject matter, will help attract and grow an engaged YouTube subscriber base. Combining hyper-targeted advertising campaigns with strategic YouTube community outreach will efficiently build brand footprints on YouTube, rather than paying for every view as many brands currently do.
Rob Ciampa, our Chief Marketing Officer, will be presenting additional details from Pixability’s beauty study at WWD Digital Forum: Beauty Edition on February 11, 2014 in New York City. Rob and I will also be hosting a free live webinar on both the study and the beauty industry on YouTube on February 26, 2014. Registration details can be found at https://www.pixability.com.
You can download the complete “Beauty on YouTube” report here.