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It is the process of strategically placing your content on this free, user-driven media site and doing so for the purpose of increasing and promoting your own sales. In a competitive market, YouTube has emerged has a new tool in viral marketing, but if you don't know how to use it properly - the process may backfire, or simply slide your campaign into oblivion. It's an emerging trend, and something that many companies are now looking to take advantage of.

So, what is the appeal of marketing with YouTube? There are several things happening in this realm that are worth taking note of:

Product Advertising That's Consumer Driven

Similarly to television's product placement, YouTube allows for user generated videos to include products, services, anything at all that will be seen by hundreds of thousands of users, whether it's done intentionally or not. If a popular user video makes use of a certain brand of webcam or keyboard, and it's seen in the video being used or having its features demonstrated even almost accidentally, that product has still been exposed to hundreds of thousands of eyes - essentially, it's free advertising. Recently, companies such as Nokia have seen this trend and have partnered up with influential bloggers in order to promote their own products.

Entertaining Advertising Content That's Brand Driven

As fewer young people watch television and move toward the internet for their entertainment options, advertisers have the option of creating entertaining media spots to market their product - a kind of 'unintentional-intentional' advertising. For example, Nike created a "home video" of a famous soccer star practicing his moves while wearing new Nike gold shoes. Although the spot didn't look like a commercial, the clip was downloaded 3.5 million times off YouTube. That means an incredible number of Nike's target market for those shoes saw the clip, providing Nike with nearly free exposure. More brands will likely develop these entertainment-driven advertisements as the marketing trend continues.

Advertising Campaigns That Are Word-of-Mouth Driven

If a company does something that's really unique online, and it involves video in any way, it's going to end up on YouTube. And what will the viewers of these videos do? They'll tell their friends or email the video to them. Say they send it to 6 people in one day, and those 6 people send it to 6 more people the next day. The day after that, 36 people are sending the video to 6 more people each. That's 216 hits in three days, originating from one person. Imagine how many visitors you'd have with 100 users viewing the video on the first day, or 500. As the number of visitors increase, that's going to result in several hundred thousand people seeing your ad online in just a few short days. Chevrolet is one success story with this kind of YouTube marketing, having achieved around 4 million hits on its regular website after creating a campaign based around allowing users to create their own spoof ad and placing it on YouTube.

Although the viral marketing trend is in its relatively early stages, the drive forward on YouTube marketing only seems to be increasing. It should only be a matter of time before advertisers realize the high impact this kind of marketing now has on many of their target demographics.

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