Beginners Series: How to Use YouTube as a Marketing Medium?
Understand and Utilize YouTube as an Effective Medium
Well, if you are not on YouTube or already have a considerable following on the medium, stop reading, this article is not for you. This article is for people or brands, who want to put their YouTube channel on steroids, and well need it to work.
This article is for people who are not very familiar with YouTube optimization.
300 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube every minute. How will you get people to watch your videos? If you are able to get some people to watch, how will you convert them?
Here are a few pointers to go back and optimize your current videos as well as make sure that your future uploads are optimized from the beginning. So here are a few pointers on YouTube Optimization:
Title & Description
Title of the video should be less than to about 60 Characters, make it keyword rich but with exact match to queries that your target users would search. For example if you are selling coffee for cold brew, your video should be about, and have the title, “How to brew cold brew coffee?”.
For description of the video:
- Youtube Displays only 100 Characters
- Front Loading the Descriptions with CTA, Links, and Summary
- Total limit is 1000 Characters
So make sure that the first 100 characters of the video have the right terms to attract attention of people. How many people click on the thumbnail of your video in searches will depend on the first 100 characters. The video landing on search results will be dependent on how you title it and your description.
Tags & Categories
A big part of YouTube experience is auto-play and search results, which depends on the tags and category that you will associate your video with. Make a small list of important keyword mix (small & long tail keywords), and add them to all of your videos. Add more relevant keywords first and make sure that you don’t add any irrelevant keywords. Keep common tags for channel videos.
Very important to select the right category, we should analyze:
- Other videos in the category
- Product value of other videos in the category
- Relevancy of other videos in the category
Thumbnail has to be 1280x720 Pixels, 2mb or smaller. Make it stand out, clear and without tiny typographical nuances.
Cards
You can use the YouTube Cards feature for one of the following:
- Channel cards that direct viewers to another channel.
- Donation cards to encourage fundraising on behalf of U.S. nonprofit organizations.
- Fan funding to ask your viewers to help support the creation of your video content.
- Link cards, which direct viewers to an external site, approved crowdfunding platform, or an approved merchandise selling platform.
- Poll cards, which pose a question to viewers and allow them to vote for a response.
- Video or playlist cards, which link to other YouTube content of this kind.
Use the most relevant form of cards. If you are looking to increase the viewership and subscribers, the #6 version should be the choice.
Call to Action within the videos
Keep a consistent, clear and crisp call to action at the end of all your videos. Linger post the call out so that the user is not automatically taken to another video before he/she can take action on the call to action. Here are a few good examples:
Call today for a consultation.
Email us for a quote now.
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Targeting the Viewers
YouTube combined with Google Ads gives you a lot of options to target your users. You can build custom audiences, viewer audience, etc. Here are a few examples to bucket them into different segments:
- Users who shared your videos
- Users who liked your videos
- Users who subscribed
- Users who commented on your videos
- Users who watched one exact video
- Users who watched one exact video as an ad
Show each segment relevant ad, and remind them about your brand. Chances of them engaging with your ad increases by this simple targeting.
Need More Ideas on Videos?
Well here is an infographic that HubSpot has published, it has a list of different categories of videos. It will help you create videos for users with different intent levels. You should start right at the top when creating your channel, and move downwards.
How to Spread the Word?
If you are creating videos which are going to be informative, helpful and engaging, you just need to follow the hygiene points mentioned above, you should be done. People will find your videos, like them and share them.
If you still need some push, you can use the following list to evangelize your channel. But don’t break the cardinal rule, NEVER SPAM!
If you are still feeling under-confident, take the scripts of your videos and show them to a group of people consisting your target audience. Take feedback, and modify. Repeat. After a couple of cycles, you will be able to create good content, and then using the information in this article, reach to other people like them through YouTube.
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