Video Marketing Part 5: How to Use YouTube as a Marketing Tool for Your Business
Did you know every minute there are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube? Because of all the “clutter,” videos advertising products and services often have an uphill battle to cut through the noise. With a few additional steps, you can match your videos to the audience you’re targeting.
Think of YouTube like a second Google
YouTube is a search engine. In fact, it’s the second largest search engine – second only to Google itself. Viewers search the site for solutions, information, and entertainment. Similar to Google, YouTube searches through an index of all of the information it has on each video to generate a list of the best videos to answer users' queries ranked in the order it think will be most relevant to the search.
Provide Context to YouTube
As a small business owner using video marketing, it's your job to make sure YouTube knows your video has the answers. While you may think a single picture is worth a thousand words, YouTube thinks it’s worth 0 words without any context. Unfortunately, technology isn't fully at the point of being able to fully analyze audio and graphics for relevance, so you have to give YouTube textual information.
Adding short and long-tail keywords in your title and description. The more information YouTube has about your video, the better.
- Having a lengthy description with keywords your target market is likely to type in a search helps YouTube correlate your video to their search query.
- However, YouTube is wary of keyword stuffing and will analyze your description to make sure it sounds like a natural voice instead of just a list of words. Thus, it’s important the description read normal and not just be keywords.
- While you don't have to make your descriptions the same hard-hitting, high-quality content as your blog posts, you do have to make them understandable and give a clear picture of what the viewer will learn from the video.
Adding transcriptions. One of the best ways to help YouTube's bots is to have a transcription of the audio/voiceover content.
- This makes your channel look more reputable and gives YouTube more certainty about the content of your video.
- Google reads your transcription for the context of the video. Though it may be tempting, don’t try stuffing extra keywords in that aren’t actually present in the video. The transcription should line up exactly to what is said in the video content.
- It's also a great move for helping your audience enjoy your video if they are viewing the video with closed captions enabled.
Adding Tags. YouTube has a great tagging feature that allows you to add a limited number of tags that describe the videos content. Use this wisely to highlight keywords and topics covered in your video.
It's not enough to have great marketing videos. You have to be able to put those videos right in front of your target market, and that means pushing your way in front of all the other videos. Over the past several weeks, we have featured an entire series regarding effective video marketing strategies. If you haven’t already read those blogs, we encourage you to check them out in the links below. If you still have more questions or want help implementing video marketing, contact us today!
