8 Ways to Maximise Your YouTube Marketing Results
Are you on YouTube? Are you getting the results you hoped for? In this post, we share 8 actionable tips to enhance your YouTube marketing.
Why YouTube?
Before you throw all your marketing dollars into YouTube, you might want to consider this statistic. More than 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute on YouTube. In other words, there’s a lot of competition for those eyeballs.
So, how do you maximise your YouTube marketing results? Here are 8 ways to achieve this.
1. Create compelling videos
Most of us will never create a “viral” video with millions of views. But thank God, this is not your competition. Instead, you should create content that addresses your audience’s needs. Your goal should be to create videos that are helpful, valuable and compelling to your prospects and clients.
If you can blog about it, you can create a video about it. Your video content may consist of how-to’s, answers to frequently asked questions, expert interviews, screen video captures, slideshows and more.
2. Make your video discoverable
Your videos should be discoverable both within and outside of YouTube. Videos often appear on the first page of search engines and are a proven method of leap frogging your competition to the top of the search results page. The fact that Google owns YouTube can’t be overlooked.
To make your video more discoverable, you’ll want to focus on these 3 key areas.
Title
Make sure your targetted keywords are in the first few words of your title. Another trick is to add a colon after your initial keywords and rephrase your title for maximum effect.
For example, your video on saving money for college might be called “College Savings Plans: The 529 Plan and Your Child”.
Description
Two things to keep in mind here:
1) Start your description with a full URL
2) Don’t be stingy with your description. Be as descriptive and keyword-rich as possible. This will help you get found more easily by people searching YouTube for your type of content.
You can also include more URLs throughout your content.
Tags
Be sure to include any and all-related keywords in the tags field.
These aren’t the only variables in getting found, but they’re the easiest to manage and control. Page views, subscribers, comments and likes can all affect your video’s visibility.
3. Brand your YouTube channel
Even without spending the big bucks for a brand channel or becoming a YouTube partner, you still have the opportunity to create a branded experience on YouTube.
Consider your YouTube channel your “home away from home”. In other words, you can turn your channel into a destination. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
- Create a custom background and choose your colours to match your branding. As with every social media platform, the more branded and “lived-in” your profile appears, the more credibility you appear to have – warranted or not. A generic or default design makes you appear fly-by-night.
- Choose “Player View” as your layout. Unlike the Grid View, the Player View features one big video that can be set to autoplay. Because total views can positively impact your visibility, you want to make sure your featured video is set to autoplay.
- Create playlists and feature your best content in the right column. Playlists are a way of organising videos on YouTube. Although you can create playlists of any video — whether you made it or not — for your channel, consider creating a playlist of your most popular videos, or ones that best represent your products and offerings.
For example, if you own a pet store, you might have a Care & Feeding playlist with such hits as “Taking Care of Your Iguana”, “Feeding Tips for Your Parakeet” and “What Will Your New Pet Snake Eat?”
Just as you have a homepage on your website and silos of information for your different products and services, you can replicate this on your channel through clever use of the Featured Video and Playlist.
4. Use annotations to build subscribers
You can add annotations to your YouTube videos that include clickable calls-to-action. These annotations appear on top of your videos for a specified length of time and can include links to other videos, playlists or channels, or include a subscribe option.
This is also helpful if you have created a video with out-of-date information. Rather than deleting the video, you can create a new video, then go back to the original video and embed a link that takes people to the updated, corrected version.
If you make Facebook how-to videos, you should expect to use this trick quite a bit.
5. Post a bulletin and alert your friends and subscribers
At the top of your channel is the Post Bulletin tab. You can create a bulletin and a link to a video that will appear on your subscribers’ and friends’ homepages. This is a great way to draw extra attention — and traffic — to your video.
6. Use YouTube ads
People go to YouTube and directly enter in search queries of what they’re looking for. So you can bid on those keywords, just as you would Google pay-per-click. But instead of a text ad coming up on the right-hand side, as it does on Google, you get a video and a thumbnail of a video.
Also upon submitting your video as a Promoted Video, it then has the opportunity to run what are called “CTA” ads. CTA stands for “cal-to-action”. They’re clickable and they allow you to click right over from a video to a website.
7. Leverage other social media platforms
YouTube is a social media platform, not an island. Here are some ways to extend the reach of your video and make it more shareable.
Blog it
Every time you post a new video, you should create a blog post around it. Use a keyword-rich title and fill your post with appropriate, complementary content. This will deliver your video to your blog subscribers and increase its chances of being found in a search.
Plus, you can add your own sharing buttons on your blog, making it easier for other people to share your content.
Post it to Facebook
Whether on your profile page or on your business page, you can reach a much wider audience on Facebook. Plus, video is a great way of increasing your Edge Rank.
Tweet it
Good content goes further on X (former Twitter).
8: Review YouTube insights for more insights
YouTube has some powerful analytics that give you insight into who’s watching your videos and how they discovered them. You can gather information on an individual video or on all the videos you’ve uploaded.
Reviewing your most-watched videos or the videos with the most community feedback (comments, likes, etc.) can point to what type of content resonates most with your target audience.
Conclusion
By creating content that resonates with your audience, building up a branded channel and using bulletins and ads, you can greatly increase the return on your investment in creating online videos.
However, this is just the start of increasing your online visibility through YouTube marketing.
SOURCE: Social Media Examiner
