Videos can be a great communication tool and more businesses utilize YouTube and videosharing sites to share their message. But like any other marketing tool, there are precautions to be taken for your video to yield any positive outcomes. But if not done correctly, your investment in online videos could be wasted!
One of the first things you will have to do while uploading your video on YouTube is by entering all your essential Metadata’s, which includes title, tag, and description. YouTube is a search engine and your data and keywords can make or break you when it comes to your position in search results.
So here are few tips for optimizing your YouTube videos:
1. Titles:
When coming up with a title, see that your title is compelling, and that you have used all the essential keywords, for the position in the search engine. Many people choose to go by the name of the some famous business analyst, or popular celebrity or brand name; what happens most of the time is the people searching for the videos will skip the video if familiar with names of the person or brand that has been mentioned in the title. Therefore you should always side with essential, relevant keywords than the brand names.
Like all the other marketing tools, content is very essential; a relevant and interesting content should be backed by an interesting, catchy title. Your video should have an equally interesting title as your content to grab eyeballs.
2. Tags:
When it comes to tags, it is always good to keep it as a mix of common and specific keywords. When you post a video showing the pros and cons of B2B marketing, then your tag should have the essential keywords like B2B marketing, pros and cons, merits and demerits, etc.
It is also important to use variations of keywords, such as common misspellings. You should use up all the space you can when adding keywords, but make sure you are adding tags that are relevant to your video. For example, if you use ‘B2B Marketing’ as your tag just because it is a popular marketing term, but actually has nothing to do with your video, the YouTube algorithm will be able to tell if your video has got nothing to do with the marketing term used and this will hurt you in the long run.
3. Description:
Good titles and descriptions provide information scent and contribute to a much better end-user experience. When writing your description, keep in mind that only the first two lines of your video’s description are going to come in the search results. Therefore, it is effective if you try and include all the essential and relevant keywords in the body of the video description.
4. Include a Call to Action in the Video:
A call to action can be featured at the conclusion of the video or throughout the video with peripheral text. The call to action is frequently to try to get someone to buy something or visit a website for more information. I suggest using a vanity URL (mysite.com/videos or mysite.com/promo), again, to be able to segment and measure the effectiveness of the video.
5. Thumbnails:
Your video thumbnail is your “mini marketing poster”. Hence, your thumbnail should be very compelling as to catch the attention of the surfers and to increase their curiosity as to what the entire video contains.
Currently, only YouTube Partners have the option to personalize your thumbnails, but if you aren’t a partner you will still have a choice of three. Choose the one that is the most attractive and interesting.
6. Annotations:
Annotations are another way to do linking. You can use the annotations feature to link to other YouTube videos. When the viewer has discovered your video through search or other resources, you can connect them to your other videos with the help of annotations.
Annotations can be used to direct viewers to other similar videos, subscribe or even comment on your video. You can add static subscribe and recent videos made by you or your company, this will help you to boost your company’s popularity.
7. Keep Your Videos Short and Simple:
Usability report show that even while watching a video that is less than one minute, viewer’s eyes wander to other related videos. People’s attention span on the internet is short, so keep videos as short as possible, if you can keep your online video less than a minute, do so. Most videos you’ll definitely want to keep up to three minutes that should be your maximum.
Businesses use YouTube to host video in the hope they'll turn up in search results, expand their audience, and generate leads. It doesn't matter how great your video is; if people don't know it exists, it doesn't have much business value. If your intended audience is to find your video, you need to optimize it for maximum visibility in Google and other search engines. Hence these few tips hopefully will help you to get your video the right viewership.
