YouTube or Instagram Marketing – Confused?

First, let us know what digital marketing is,

Digital marketing can be stated as the most complicated, yet significant powerful aspect on which every business invests and rely on. It is the progressive process of marketing your products and services through electronic devices. Digital marketing is a wide area under which I shall now discuss only YouTube and Instagram marketing. To be more specific, this article is more into differentiating these both.

YouTube marketing

This is a platform where you can make a demo of your product or service and gain the attention of viewers. It is very obvious that videos and images can grasp the viewer’s attention very soon than what words could actually do.

                         “The more creative you are, the more reach you get”

Marketing on YouTube makes sense and is very beneficial because of the enormous and diverse audience. The first and foremost benefit is YouTube is the second most used search engine that ranks next to Google. This adds a huge benefit to us.

Instagram marketing

This platform is an amazing platform to carry your marketing activities. You can connect with your fans and narrate your brand stories visually.  Creativity, frequency, familiarity and incredible engagement are the keys to Instagram marketing. This global platform also allows your brand to showcase your products and inspire viewers.

So, what could be the differences between these marketing activities on Instagram and YouTube? How can you judge which platform will best suit your business?

A brief comparison

Industry

Choosing the best platform among these two mainly depends on the kind of industry you are into. If your industry supports an easy way of visual storytelling and short attractive videos to attract viewers then without a doubt your platform is Instagram.

For instance – Apparel industry

But if your product requires long explanatory videos and long demo sessions then YouTube is there to welcome your product.

For instance – teaching tutorials, consumer durables

Time Horizon

Instagram – Content Shelf life is less (i.e) your content would live in people’s hearts for almost 24 to 48 hours. (no notifications)

YouTube – Content has a long shelf life (i.e) people’s intention is high and they actively keep on looking at your information. (presence of notifications pulls people into YouTube)

Optimization efforts

YouTube will need more optimization efforts than Instagram but fewer optimization efforts than that would require for a website.

Audience

Instagram – Younger audience ( Gen Z)

80% of the audience are young adults (18 – 29) and 12%  fall under 30 – 49 age groups.

YouTube – Millennials ( Gen Y)

Only 11% of YouTube audiences fall under 18 – 24 while 49% of YouTube viewers fall under 25 – 44 age groups.

So this shows that choosing the right platform depends on your target audience.

Hashtags

Hash tags provide brand discoverability through posts. This is very effective on Instagram but less effective on YouTube.

Though Instagram has daily active users (600 million) which is higher than YouTube ( 149 million) YouTube beats Instagram by 3.9 billion video and story views. But the visit duration is pretty good for Instagram than YouTube. Even it is good to play a pretty role in both the platforms, it is advisable to play a consistent role in any one of these platforms based on the factors discusses above.