Failing on YouTube? It’s Time to Revisit Your Online Video Marketing Fundamentals
By Jake Oates, Vidify
YouTube isn’t the only video hosting site on the web, but it’s undoubtedly the most popular. After Google, YouTube is also the second most popular search engine which makes it a very important site if you want to bring more visitors to your website.
If you’re looking to improve your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) as well as your marketing efforts, then now is the time to revisit the fundamentals of optimising your videos. These can often be overlooked when marketers find themselves on the front lines of any given marketing campaign:
Revisit Your Meta Data
The same as website SEO, optimising a YouTube video relies heavily on placing relevant keywords in your titles and meta descriptions.
So if you’re uploading the video in question to your own personal site in addition to YouTube, it’s a wise idea to try to vary the keywords included in the title and description. This allows your video or videos to rank in search results for a larger selection of keywords. Also, the description field can be used to promote your own personal website, as well as describing what your video is like.
Remember That Sharing is Caring
If you add an embed code in your video or videos, it will enable others to share it on their websites or blogs. You can find this embed code under the video by clicking the “share” button and then selecting the “embed” option. If you want to encourage people to watch your videos, you can add links to your YouTube clips on your own website. This is basic cross-promotion and it ensures that any existing customers can see your latest message, too.
Not Getting Pageviews?
If you were hoping for a lot of traffic and you didn’t get it, there are a number of different ways to increase the amount of views:
- Promoted Videos – Similar to Google pay-per-click advertising, YouTube only charges a user when somebody clicks on your promoted video. The rates are very reasonable and there is no risk at all of you having to pay for something you don’t need.
- Video Responses – A little sneaky, but efficient. If you find a video that gets a lot of views, you can consider posting your own video as a “video response” (see below). If your video is relevant and engaging, people will click and watch.
- Get Social! – Technically a social network, YouTube needs interaction—so you should add other users as friends, comment on other people’s or brands’ videos and videos and generally try to become a part of the community. By interacting with other people’s content, you’re likely to attract more interest in your own. This is a part of YouTube marketing that many brands overlook.
Learn From Your Mistakes
There are monitoring tools on YouTube which are wonderful. So if you’re after results, you can use trial and error to help you. If you analyse the stats for your videos with an eye toward what is getting you views, then you can apply what you discover to future videos. Keep creating what works until it doesn’t anymore and your numbers start to decrease. Also, take a close look at competitors’ videos that pulled in thousands of viewers. Learn from them and try something similar.
There is also some paid YouTube monitoring software available, like Raven Tools. This tracks video views, channel views as well as channel subscribers over a period of time. They have an advanced monitoring option too which offers more data; things like unique views, comments and favourites.
Long Videos – Nobody Watches Them
If you have a ten-minute video; split it into five two minute videos. It is highly likely that people will be more drawn to watching a series of shorter videos and they also have another benefit; you can optimise each video for specific keywords and aim for a larger number of keywords.
One example might be, “How to look after your cat.” Why not break that into a number of smaller videos titles such as, “What to feed your cat,” and “How to brush your cat” and so on?
Make it Professional
Not everybody can be the next Steven Spielberg. And not every video, especially for corporate clients, should have that “viral” DIY look. That’s what outside help is for, especially when it comes to leveraging high definition video that is expertly scripted and finished up with a crisp voiceover. Another thing a professional company may be able to offer is custom animation and graphics, which can be added and the majority of agencies have the ability to add these elements for a polished, professional finish.
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By Jake Oates, Vidify, a video production company specialising in helping SMEs reach their targeted customer base with the help of online videos.
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I agree with most everything here, but I do still believe that longer videos, if well-produced and containing information that self-selected audiences are looking for, can be successful. We produce seminar videos for clients and people who want that content appreciate not having to load a new video every five minutes.
Bottom line is to make videos that are useful, authentic, and meaningful to the intended audience. Trying too hard to be funny, cute, or go viral is a total waste of time for business videos.
I agree with pretty much everything in this article. I also agree with Steve that videos should be useful to the viewer in some way.
One point you forgot to mention, was that having transcripts to accompany your videos is a really good way of connecting with a wider audience (hard of hearing for example) and is great for SEO.