Staying up to date with trends is important in marketing. YouTube is a great tool for showing what your business can do.
Promoting with a YouTube Account
By 2017, video will account for 69 per cent of all consumer Internet traffic. That’s quite the opportunity for making an impression. With video marketing growing in popularity, video is becoming an essential part of your marketing strategy.
Seeing Is Better
With our ever-dwindling attention spans, it’s more challenging than ever to get someone interested and keep them interested. If you had three minutes to read an article or watch a video on the same topic, which would you choose? In terms of getting a message across, the nature of video makes it the easiest form of communication to ingest. So, if you don’t already, now is the time to get active with your YouTube account. That being said, it’s not enough to just have an account. If you want to promote your business, you need to have a YouTube Channel so that you can upload videos, leave comments and have something that your customers can subscribe to. Just remember that less is more: the shorter your video, the higher the chance of people watching it to the end.
Content Is Key
If you were guaranteed someone’s attention for a minute or two, what would you say to them? This is a question you should continually ask yourself because it will help you decide what to upload. Also consider whether you want to inform people on the types of services you offer, show a how-to video or give a glimpse of what it’s like behind the scenes of your business. Using your YouTube Channel to promote your business doesn’t restrict you to using just corporate video content. If planned correctly, you can develop a series of topic specific episodes that entice your viewers to continue watching. Remember that YouTube is a social media network. It’s a chance to keep the conversation going by replying to comments and benefiting from the direct feedback. This also means that you should keep your content relevant and interesting. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and show them something they’d want to see.
How To Get Noticed
Although these tactics are behind-the-scenes, they are just as important as your content.
Naming
The title of your video is the first thing people see. It needs to be specific and straightforward. Ideally you should include relevant keywords (these are the words people type in when searching for you) in the title, because it will help you become more searchable. The title should tell the viewer exactly what they are about to see. Getting creative and abstract with titles is the last thing you want to do. For example, if you’re a drycleaner and you have a video showing how you remove stains from suits, call it, How to dry-clean nuts out of a suit.
Tagging
Tags are your keywords, essentially. They’re words related to your video. Tags can be input while uploading a video, or edited after at any time. It can easily be found in the Settings section.
Tagging is a great way to optimize search. If someone is searching for a topic that you use as one of your tags, the video will appear in their search results. Including keywords in your tags that are brand, location, and topic specific will ensure better consumer reach. It will also group your videos with others under ‘related content’ (which could be more of your YouTube Channel’s videos). Think of tags as a way of telling the search engines what your videos are about. As smart as technology is getting, it can’t figure that out for itself yet. Continuing with the previous example, you could include tags like: drycleaner, dry-cleaning, stains, removing stains, suits, dry-cleaning suits, Kelowna.
Annotations
These are the little boxes that pop up usually after a video is over (although they can pop up during a video as well). They are links to related videos, a button to subscribe to the channel, or the next video in the series (if applicable). Including annotations is a good way to control the flow of your videos and give your viewers more options. These suggestions can help retain interest and prompt people to watch more.
Keeping your company’s YouTube account up-to-date and interesting is a simple way of boosting your marketing efforts. By giving people what they want to see, you become a channel they want to subscribe to. With the growth of video—especially online video advertising—now is the time to get on board.