ShareVideo marketing is widely touted by digital marketers as being one of the most engaging forms of content out there. With the rise (and occasional fall) of social networks that support video such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine (RIP) and TikTok, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that video is here to stay.
However, despite this, many organisations struggle to even get off the ground when it comes to video marketing, or worse, get it badly wrong. So what should you be thinking about when considering a YouTube marketing strategy?
“A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a million pictures…”
While it’s true that online video is an incredibly engaging form of content, there is far more to creating video content than just filming something and uploading it to YouTube. Much like a blog post, your video should tell a story, or be of interest to your target audience. Remember: Every search performed on the web is a problem that someone wants to solve, even if that problem is just to find entertainment.
At a very simple level, you can use YouTube videos as a way to add engaging content to your website, whether that be as explainer videos or simply customer testimonials. The important thing is to make sure that your videos add value (or answer a concern) for your target audience.
Stop trying to “go viral”
One of the overriding themes that runs through most conversations about video content is a desire to “go viral”, reaching millions of potential customers with one incredible video.
Videos that go viral tend to have nothing to do with marketing a business, or have been meticulously planned to ensure that they occur just ahead of a rising trend. Trying to endlessly recycle popular content on your own platform can result in your business appearing to be out of date or “trying too hard”. Remember the trend for businesses organising flash mobs? The concept quickly became overused.
Killing the radio star
To make a true impact with YouTube content, you need to combine two things:
- Content that your target audience will want (or need) to seek out
- A whole load of data
YouTube videos, while easy to upload, need to be backed with supporting information to help the algorithm to understand them, such as:
- Video titles
- Video descriptions
- Tagged keywords
However, to truly get the most out of your content, you can use a little bit of SEO knowledge to optimise your videos and give them the opportunity to rank higher in YouTube search results.
The best place to start is often with keyword research, which can be achieved in a number of ways. You can either perform standard keyword research, using tools like Google Keyword Planner, or you can take a slightly more sneaky approach.
The tagged keywords for YouTube videos are stored as meta keywords, a feature that has been long dead within SEO, but that does create an opportunity within YouTube marketing. By using a piece of crawling software, such as Screaming Frog, you can scrape the tagged keywords from any video on YouTube. Meaning all you have to do is find successful videos against the search term you have in mind and then find out which tagged keywords they’re using. Suddenly, you’re well on your way to having video content that attracts your target audience!
It’s time for some standard SEO
Now that you have some keywords to work with, all you need to do is apply a little bit of SEO logic to the rest of the features of the video. If you want to appear in search results for a certain set of keywords, make sure that you’re using them in your video title, as well as in your video description.
Remember: As clever as the algorithm is, it can’t watch your video. This means that initial searches are based on the relevancy of your title and description against your chosen keywords. After that, the algorithm will start to gather user information such as watch time, likes, shares, subscriptions and comments to understand the quality of your content and to decide whether it will rank in future searches for the same term. If your content truly answers the search query, and is of high quality, then you should see your views and engagement levels start to climb even higher.
Good luck!
That’s really all you need to start understanding how to use YouTube as an effective marketing tool. However, we appreciate that sometimes it’s difficult to identify keywords or content themes that may be relevant to your target audience, let alone working out what the intent behind those searches might be.
If you would like to speak to one of our specialists about how you could use YouTube to support or enhance your customer journey or conversion path, get in touch with us on 0845 450 2086. Let’s get you started on the road to creating incredible video content!
