Effective Strategies to Promote YouTube Videos in 2017

As a business owner, if you think you have done it all to promote your business, you are wrong! Reason(s)? Creativity never ends, and in fact, it’s creative and innovative thinking that helps you survive in today’s online competitive space, agree?

Brand promotion is not just about imitating what your competitors are doing. The entire game is all about creative and innovative thinking! Though in some digital marketing tactics like link building, imitation works but not in every case.

No doubt, technological advancement has made the competition fearless. Therefore, marketers worldwide continually strive to find innovative ways to grab people’s attention, and YouTube Videos are one of the most significant ways to seek attention.

A video lets you tell your brand story, communicate a value proposition, and strengthen the relationship with your existing customers and potential prospects. As the most recent statistics reveal: (Source: HubSpot)

• Around 48 percent of marketers worldwide are planning to add YouTube to their content strategy this year.
• 2/3^rd of YouTube users prefer to watch YouTube on the second screen while watching TV at home.
• YouTube has become a commonly used platform by larger businesses. For instance, 71 percent of firms with 100+ employees use YouTube as compared to 38 percent of the self-employed.
• YouTube has touched the magical figure of having over 1 billion users which are almost 1/3^rd of all people on the Internet.
• The time people give watching YouTube on their TV has more than doubled year over year.

Having highlighted some fascinating information about YouTube, you would have now realized the importance of the YouTube platform when it comes to brand promotion.

Therefore, don’t stick to the same old boring plain text. It’s time to go interactive and leverage YouTube videos for better brand promotion. Let’s get started to see how…

First And Foremost: The Content

Yes! It matters to decide what sort of content you want to show in your videos.

Today, the biggest challenge is how you will differentiate yourself from others. Reason?

Stiff competition! Consider yourself lucky if your competitors are not on YouTube which would be no less than a surprise because everyone knows what this platform can do. No surprise that numerous YouTube channels consistently publish high-quality, engaging content for their audience.

What will you do?

Don’t worry! Keep these things in your mind:

• Make your videos very instructive and engaging.
• Make sure the length of the videos is neither too short nor too long. Also, maintain the information balance.
• Your viewers should get something valuable in the end.
• Add humor to make them emotionally connected.
• Try to retain their curiosity level to make them come back for more.
• Motivate them to appreciate your good work.
• Add urgency to subscribe, like, and share your videos.
• Ask them to provide feedback.

A video is an interactive form of content, and interactive content is the future of content marketing. Delivering information in this form is easy to digest for online users.

Create Action-Packed Titles

On YouTube, you can find hundreds of videos on a similar topic that are very instructive and better than one another, but only a few of them succeeds at getting people’s attention. Reason?

Titles!

Your title decides whether an online user will watch your video or not. Therefore, give your video’s name which is search friendly. Try to keep the titles of your videos short, searchable, and unique. Do remember to include a call-to-action so that watchers get motivated to open and watch that video. If possible, try to include your target keyword to increase search relevancy. Your title must trigger the inner instinct of the online users to make them feel “Yes, this is what you were looking for, go ahead!”

Nail The Thumbnail

Apart from the title, the second most crucial thing is the thumbnail. A thumbnail is a snapshot that appears on your video and gives viewers a quick idea of what a video is all about. In other words, a thumbnail is a still picture that gives a little information about your video.

Therefore, it should be perfect and compelling!

Being an end user, you might have noticed you click on a thumbnail to watch a video, but find that video has no relevance with its thumbnail. Many marketers use this technique to increase the number of views which is not a right practice. You can count this strategy as a bad practice.

If your audience watches your video and sees no relation between the video and its thumbnail, they can unsubscribe from your YouTube channel considering you an unreliable source of information. So, don’t try to deceive your viewers just to increase the views of your videos because this way, you can’t go long!

Strive to provide a relevant thumbnail.

Wondering, how to create a better thumbnail? Check out what YouTube suggests. In a nutshell, you have to nail the thumbnail!

Video SEO

One of the most crucial strategies is to make your YouTube channel and videos discoverable and easy to recognize. YouTube is the second largest online platform, and SEO helps you get more viewers for your videos through searches.

According to a post published on Search Engine Watch, check out the list of factors the YouTube algorithm takes into account classifying videos in your search results including:

• Title tag information – Keep it accurate
• Audience retention
• Keywords in description tag – to improve relevancy in searches
• Tags – to categorize your videos
• Video length
• Number of subscribers after watching
• Comments
• Likes and Dislikes

Now, check out these crucial tips from the same post:

• Write long video descriptions to target your keywords. Also, do remember to link your main website to drive a good amount of traffic.
• Optimize around “video keywords.”
• Get more video views from online communities including Quora, LinkedIn, etc.
• Encourage subscribing and linking.
• Create Keyword-Rich Playlists to get more search traffic to your videos. A keyword-optimized playlist gives YouTube profound information about your Video’s topic.

Promote on Social Media

Promotion on social media is one of the best ways to boost your marketing and grow your YouTube channel. Over the years, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google Plus have improved their functionality a lot which makes them the ideal platform for brand promotion.

Leveraging social profiles will certainly help you gain exposure immediately for your videos. If you ask the reason why to go to social media, it’s very simple to understand. Potential prospects you are looking for are active on these social platforms.

Not only you can promote your videos on leading social platforms, but you can also check their performance. For instance, views, clicks, comments, and shares. Therefore, to get full advantage of your hard work, promote your videos on social media as well.

Use Them in Email for Re-Marketing

Just one email to your subscribers is enough to get thousands of video views, and this is the power of email marketing. Marketers across the world, leverage email marketing to promote their YouTube channels and videos. Therefore, use collected email addresses to notify your fans and watchers directly in their email Inboxes. For this, you can rely upon AWeber – An email automation tool. Create a newsletter to keep your audience informed about new updates and recent videos.

Without a doubt, videos are highly impactful in retargeting customers don’t whether you are a product-based or service-based company. With the help of email marketing, you can integrate your video into an email to remarket your product.

Don’t Overlook Analytics to Review & Rework

Never overlook analytics! Whether it is on YouTube, Facebook, Google, or any other social platform you have a profile on and promote your videos. Monitor how your videos are performing. Dig deeper to find:

• The days your viewers are most active
• Time your audience is most engaged
• What sort of content do they love to ingest

It will help you review and rework your strategy so that you could improve your promotion. In short, analytics lets you know your flaws and keep you focused on creating content your audience liked the most.

Over to You

No doubt YouTube is an amazingly powerful social network that marketers worldwide leverage for brand promotion. The points mentioned above clearly explain the way you can promote your YouTube videos to boost your business in 2017. Are you using YouTube for brand promotion? Share your views by giving your valuable comments below!