According to statistics, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. It plays over a billion video hours each day and receives more than 1.5 billion users each month. Both users and brands upload 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute. With all that, demand for video content is increasing, as 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product/service. Plus, 95% of viewers are more likely to remember a call to action after watching a video, compared to 10% when reading it in texts.
Long story short:
If you don’t have a YouTube channel and don’t create videos to engage users and generate leads, it’s time to start. And if you want to succeed here, think of YouTube content strategy optimization for higher rankings and more positive results.
Here go your five actionable steps to consider:
1. Build a Video Content Plan
Yes, YouTube is a video channel, but it’s still about content that covers all stages of the sales funnel: it should attract users, engage them, nurture, and finally convert into subscribers or customers. With that in mind, your YouTube channel needs to generate a kick-ass content!
In other words, you need a content strategy and a content plan. Both will depend on your marketing goals, so make sure you understand them. Why do you need a YouTube channel?
a. Brand awareness and popularization?
b. Selling products or services by creating video ads?
c. Entering new markets?
d. Content monetization?
e. Entertaining or educating your followers?
For a great content plan, you need to know your target audience inside out. Their interests, preferences, and reactions to your videos will help to understand what to post. Google itself recommends to “create a content plan to ensure that your content both meets your brand’s goals and engages your intended audience.” So, think like a critical essay writer:
a. Come up with the right message
b. Choose the best video types for your marketing goals (ads, brand videos, testimonials, vlogs, etc.)
c. Think of a video maker and editorial planner
d. Set the time you’ll need to video making, finalize a publication schedule, and fill the calendar accordingly
Consider the Analytics tab for your channel to get the data on demographics and quantitative insights. Therefore, you’ll see what content to use and how to improve it for better results.
2. Organize and Optimize Videos for Better SEO
As well as Google, YouTube is a search engine. So, to get the most out of its algorithms, make sure to optimize videos so they would hit the target:
First and foremost, optimize titles with keywords. Whether you create content about healthcare, weddings, real estate, or anything else, correct keywords will help YouTube algorithms to understand what your content is about and rank it accordingly. Also, remember about closed captions and subtitles: they can help you boost videos too.
Then, add relevant keywords to your video descriptions. Think of up to 15 hashtags to mention there, and tag videos with your keyword variations so more people could find it. Don’t forget to choose a YouTube category for your video and define the best time for its publishing. (Check when your target audience is most active, and remember: videos get the max views in the first 48 hours after publishing.)
You might also want your videos to rank in Google’s featured snippets. For that, organize it accordingly:
a. Edit video content into clear sections for Google to understand it and use different clips from it in a snippet. And remember that every video needs intro and outro to perform better.
b. Optimize your videos into specific keywords that are relevant to your content but still are more likely to appear in snippets.
Also, make videos more engaging for users. Optimize them with custom thumbnails for your content to stand out. Free tools like Fotor, Crello, and others can assist in designing branded thumbnails for your videos.
Optimizing your video assets for mobiles will also help to improve your YouTube content strategy: more than 70% of watch time comes from mobile devices, so don’t lose a chance to engage such a vast audience.
3. Use Different Channels to Publish Your Videos
For better results, don’t limit your video content strategy by YouTube publishing. Combine this channel with other platforms and content types so more people could click, watch, and share your videos.
Many brands practice this trick. For example, you can embed YouTube videos into your website home page:
Or, add them to your landings for better engagement, dwell time, and conversion:
Most marketing specialists combine their text content with video testimonials to embrace a wider audience. Brian Dean, Neil Patel, and others had predicted a video content’s potential capacity long before it became routine practice. So, embed your videos into blog posts, guest articles, case studies, or reviews to hook the audience who prefer watching to reading.
And don’t forget about social media. Publish videos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other network where your target audience “live.”
4. Consider Alternative Ways of YouTube Content Promotion
Engaging content and a story behind your videos are all well and good, but you need to work hard on their promotion. YouTube starts ranking videos after they’ve got a thousand views. To get them, you might want to try the following practices:
a. Cross-promotion with other YouTubers: find the relevant channels by keywords and subscribers, and offer your content for them to mention.
b. Or, propose them to create videos for their channels but with backlinks to your page in descriptions. Use the best and secure video editor like InVideo for that.
c. If your marketing budget allows it, consider YouTube advertising.
d. Promote your videos to email subscribers. Send newsletters with embedded YouTube videos: even if they watch a video in an email, it will still count as a view.
e. Share on social media, backlinking to the original video on YouTube so that the followers could view it there.
f. Practice smart email outreach of influencers in your niche: explain why they need to watch your video and ask to share it with their audience.
5. Remember to Measure Results
Numbers speak volumes: 87% of marketers use video as a powerful tool for engagement and conversion; more than that, 88% of those marketers are satisfied with the ROI of their video marketing efforts. To join their ranks, don’t forget to monitor your video results regularly so you could analyze the situation and decide what to do to improve it.
Check your channel’s performance with YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics. There you can see what to adapt in the content strategy and YouTube SEO for better results: video length, time of publishing, content type, etc.
And don’t ignore user comments under your videos: it’s the best way to learn what they think, what topics they want you to cover next, and what you can do to improve your YouTube channel.
And now, over to you:
Do you build a content strategy for YouTube? Are there any actionable tips or optimization techniques about video making you could share with readers? Let’s discuss in the comments!
