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How to Carry out Effective Video Marketing on YouTube

Editor’s Note: We wanted to revisit this blog for those looking to start utilising YouTube and video into 2020. The original content is still as relevant as it was when it was first published, so you can find the original blog below. We hope after reading through this post you will have a better understanding of how to achieve success with your video marketing efforts on YouTube and stand out from your competitors.

2018 was a big year for the Google owned online video sharing company, YouTube, when it was reported that the social platform was growing at a rate almost twice as fast as Facebook.

With around 1.8 billion users logging in on a monthly basis, this video-sharing community is now the second largest social media site in the world. Not only does it offer some amazing opportunities to reach new audiences but an effective strategy of video marketing on YouTube can also increase social signals on other platforms, improve search rankings and engage your existing customer base.

So, what are the ingredients for effective video marketing on YouTube?

What to Configure on YouTube?

As with any strategy, the key stages of successful video marketing on YouTube are self-evident and apply to any digital marketing campaign, irrespective of the platform, namely:

• Set your goals
• Research your audience
• Research your subject
• Create exciting and shareable content
• Cross promote your material
• Include Calls-to-Action
• Measure success

Set Your Goals

Firstly, you need to know what you trying to achieve before you can ever hope to achieve it. Sounds like useless advice along the lines of not teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, right? Well, you’d be surprised at how many people jump into web video creation projects without a clear idea of what it is they want.

Decide up front whether your aims are about increasing traffic to your website, improving your conversion rates or driving brand awareness. Set down your current position and make sure you have a measurable benchmark against which you can compare the success of your video marketing campaign.

Research Your Audience

Before you create any digital content, whether this is a blog, news article or simple message on social media, it is imperative that you understand your audience. Knowing what it is that they want to learn about or what entertains them will inform the kind of video marketing on YouTube that you should be creating.

You can use some tools to help you achieve this and YouTube competitor analysis is included in a lot of the main social media monitoring applications. Social Insider is one but others include:

• VeeScore
• True Social Metrics
• Vid IQ

Vaizle also offers a basic tool for free which can help you compare your own YouTube channel with that of your competition.

Research Your Subject

Once you know what kind of content you are creating and the angle you want to take now is the time to do some keyword research. All videos uploaded to YouTube need to have relevant keywords to help users find the video. Some clever keyword selection can help you maximise on any trending topics whilst accurately describing the video’s content.

Create Exciting And Shareable Content

Now comes the exciting part, creating your video.

The style and format of your video will largely be defined by your brand image and a consistent approach to this is recommended.

However, the five key ingredients to any successful video on YouTube are the same (irrespective of the message), which means that your content should be:

• Useful
• Entertaining
• Engaging
• Valuable
• Relevant

‘How-To’ videos are particularly successful on YouTube and addressing common questions that your customers may have but in a creative way might provide you with highly shareable content.

Don’t forget to make sure that you choose a high-quality image as your thumbnail. All audiences judge a clip by its preview graphic so it should be clear, enticing and relevant to the content.

Cross Promote Your Material

It goes without saying that promoting your video is key to the success and can make the difference between a video that reaches a smaller audience and one that ‘goes viral’.

Yes, anyone who produces a web video strives to achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of exponential shareability but this can only ever be achieved if you actively cross promote your content on other social media platforms.

You can do this on your own pages but don’t forget the importance of other YouTubers who can do this for you, and sometimes far more effectively. Just like blogger outreach can help your written content perform better, by networking  (or collaborating) with influential YouTubers you could help guarantee your content to achieve more mileage.

Include Calls-To-Action

YouTube allows you to include annotations and cards which are clickable links that can be inserted (or overlaid) into your video. Coupled with the traditional method of finishing off your video with a Call-To-Action and ensuring the notes beneath the video have all of your contact information, you will be able to drive your audience to your website or social media accounts for more information.

Likewise, if you are simply looking to grow your channel then don’t forget to ask people to subscribe to your account. Quite simply, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Measure Success

Lastly, it is important that you monitor the performance of your campaign by using analytics. Depending on the goals that you initially set at the beginning of the project, you can measure this success via YouTube’s own analytics or via Google Analytics.

Remember that video marketing on YouTube is not a ‘set-and-forget’ method and the beauty of digital media marketing is that you can tweak as you go. By regular monitoring you can adapt aspects of your video to see what is working well and what isn’t.

Editor’s Note: Update below as of November 2019

—– Our 2019 and into 2020 Update on YouTube video marketing —

In 2019 and heading into 2020, it’s not enough anymore to just fit the basic criteria and follow a bullet-pointed list of ‘things to include’ in marketing material, particularly when it comes to video.

It’s such an over-saturated and competitive area that your content needs to really stand out and be unique while still being informative if you want your video marketing campaign to be a success. If you’re looking to create something successful and even potentially viral, then you need to really think outside the box to stand out from those that think within it.

If we look at the video marketing successes of recent years, we see that many stand out by being quirky and unconventional in their approach. I’ve written previously about how Blendtec started blending the latest smartphones to show how durable and strong their product was. This channel has been popular for over a decade by continuing to stick to their own formula/brand of marketing and being sure to use other ‘trending’ products to feature alongside their own in order to capture a secondary audience.

We’ve seen other slightly different examples such as the Hydraulic Press Channel where a viral video was created first via a wacky idea and later developed into a full brand branching out into other areas like a video games and merchandise.

Brainstorming video ideas

There are many ways that you can start to brainstorm some ideas following a similar route from the previously mentioned viral videos. There are many ways you could go with this but If, for example, you make protective cases for smartphones, think of how to put them through an extreme test that the average user would never encounter. Dropping the cases from an extreme height or attempting to smash them to pieces using unconventional methods – as long as you have confidence in your product and it’s of a high quality it’s definitely recommended to experiment with quirky unique ways to show your audience just how good your product is. Many business owners might think this undermines the product or gives an unprofessional image but it’s simply not the case – marketing has evolved and so have audiences that will be buying your products or services.

Video can be a great way to generally engage with your audience and customers. We’re starting to see a lot of businesses utilising other social networks and then concluding with video per campaign. For example, many businesses would encourage user questions to be submitted via Twitter (even with the inclusion of Twitter polls) and then create a video when the results are in. The video would be used to answer questions in a ‘live’ type of setting and if questions were asked about a product, demonstrating / carrying out a task that the users enquired about. It’s a more effective way of engaging with your customers via visual content that is user-submitted.

Creating Micro-Video Variants

Additionally, once you have a solid idea to base your campaign around, you can make a micro variant of the content either by taking a snippet from your main video or alternatively making an entirely separate video with the idea of making it suitable for tiktok and Instagram.

This really isn’t as time consuming as you might think as you can simply export a condensed version of the video whilst editing your main YouTube video. It’s an easy way to cover additional bases as some of your audience will prefer shorter duration video content that can be viewed on 3G/4G with minimal data usage – most people won’t want to load a full YouTube video on their mobile phones if connected to a cellular network too.

Although we have seen many variations and attempts at creating micro video hosting platforms, micro video is here to stay and is worth your time. Through Vine (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and more recently TikTok we are seeing short sub 10 second videos generating millions of views in a very short amount of time if utilised correctly and are becoming more widespread the last few years.

When it comes to separate ideas for micro video, there are tons of ways you could utilise the network to really showcase your product or services. For example, if you are a cosmetics and make-up company, you could create time-lapsed sped up videos of the before and after shots of your make-up. Not everybody is going to want to watch a video like that in real-time so this is where micro video and time-lapsed content can really shine for you. That is just the first example that came to me while writing but I’m sure you can see the potential here to really trim the fat from your content and get straight to the point increasing the chances of keeping your audience engaged.

In addition to being a great addition to your current marketing efforts, video and micro video can be utilised to compliment your other content such as articles, blogs and general social media announcements. It has been said that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text, so it makes sense to cover all bases in addition to enhancing your content via the use of video and visual content.

Live videos and streaming

We have also seen a huge increase in the amount of people utilising Facebook video and Facebook Live Video. This opens the possibility of live-streaming your presentations or events for those that can’t make it to see you in person – ideal for businesses with an international customer base. There are of course many other usage scenarios for Facebook videos and you are only limited by your creativity and ideas so get some ideas down, even throw a brief draft together and share it with your team the next time you have a marketing meeting – combining ideas from multiple angles will nearly always enhance the appeal and success of your videos.

Editor’s Note:  Our original post is listed above. We hope you find the tips and information provided to be useful when it comes to creating engaging video for your business, product or service. If you found the article interesting, be sure not to miss out our recent blog post on the uncertain future of YouTube,

Opace & Video Marketing on YouTube

Opace is a forward-thinking digital design agency that offers a range of services designed to help clients achieve the maximum online visibility. As well as web video creation, we also provide a diverse selection of marketing methods including social media management which includes YouTube.

To find out more about video marketing on YouTube for your business, call to speak to one of our team today.

 

Image credits: kreatikar/Pixabay, kaufdex/Pixabay, geralt/Pixabay and typographyimages/Pixabay.

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