Instagram vs. Youtube: How the marketing strategies of brands differ?

In this blog post, we are going to analyze how brands’ strategies are changing according to the platform.

In the past, brands had a general marketing strategy where their components changed from time to time. Today’s world is a very dynamic environment, so not to miss the changes in consumer preferences, brands are working on different marketing strategies at the same time. To maximize getting benefit from each platform, multiple marketing strategies are a must. To illustrate it more, we are going to compare different features of Instagram and YouTube and how brands are using these different features to create a competitive advantage for themselves.

First of all, each digital marketing strategy has its target such as creating awareness for the brand, generating more leads, or just getting more traffic for the website. Using the right platform to achieve these goals can be cost-effective rather than using all of the platforms at the same time. Generally, YouTube is a content intense platform that’s why it needs more concentration and creativity but it promises more fun and loyal audience. However, as creating and planning content takes time, Youtube is not the right platform to answer your rivals’ marketing campaigns. Also, it is not the right platform to generate lifestyle content as the Youtube audience is mostly concentrated on learning or having fun.

On Youtube, you have more time to get attention. It can be said that you have 10 minutes to explain what you are doing and how your brand can be beneficial to potential clients or how your product is working. So you have lots of time to give full information about the things you wanted to share.

When you look at Instagram, it can be said that Instagram reflects the ideal life of an individual. Because of its nature, it is more consumer-centric. People tend to share what they are doing in their daily lives and where or how they spend their money. For this reason, more lifestyle contents exist on the platform.

Moreover, as Instagram is faster than Youtube there is less time to attract users’ attention for the marketing campaigns. You have only a few seconds to show the catchiest features of your product or your brand. That’s why you need to be fast and easily understandable. Also, we can say that as Instagram is very fast, content doesn’t have a long lifetime in Instagram.

On the other hand, Instagram is very successful when a brand decides to make a call-to-action campaign. You can easily create and share links and can organize affiliate marketing campaigns with influencers as getting the attention of followers and directing them to your brand’s website.

Also when we look at the costs, YouTube has one advantage. To charge, your ad should be watched for at least 30 seconds. Instagram has no feature like this. With this advantage of Youtube, it has a lower cost per click (CPC) than Instagram.

However, Instagram is 22% cheaper than YouTube when you want to show your ad to more people.

In conclusion, Youtube and Instagram are two different platforms where there are differently strong and weak points. For this reason, brands have different strategies among those platforms to exploit their benefits and these different strategies complete each other.