Explainer videos are one of the best marketing tools used by businesses to increase conversion rate and seek their customers’ attention by creating awareness about their product. Start-up companies desperately look for customer acquisition as they are new to the market and YouTube serves as the world’s leading platform to market your explainer videos.
YouTube is a great video-hosting site owned by Google. It gets a prominent listing on Google if you carefully optimize your content. Moreover, you can track various statistics on YouTube like the number of views, rating, number of likes and dislikes, audience demographics, viewer drop-off while watching video, source of traffic and a lot more.
Traffic source is extremely helpful for you to discover the resource used to view your video. You can use these insights to optimize your metadata, tags and keywords to appeal more to the respective target audience.
Following are the 10 tips for start-up companies to promote their video on YouTube:
People often forget to change the raw file name in their computer while uploading video on YouTube. This sharply affects their ranking on search engines. YouTube gives a lot of importance to the raw file name used in your video while uploading. Though a rich title has its own role in ranking; a keyword rich raw file name will give more visibility to your video. For instance, it is better to have to file name as YouTube-Marketing-Tips.mov rather than a default file name like vid-20-06-2014.mov
Videos have the quality of being highly sharable. All YouTube videos can be easily posted on leading social media networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. Moreover, the name YouTube itself adds a lot of credibility to your video. When people read the link associated with your video and find it linked to YouTube, they assume that the content would be authentic. People love to share new, informative and quality video content with their friends. Post your video on all your social media profiles so that your target audience can engage with it on the platform of their choice. Furthermore, social media is an avenue for people where they can express freely and interact with you. They add value to your video by leaving critical feedback.
It is fairly easy to download a YouTube video. Many marketers with dubious intentions use your video for their benefit. To avoid being in such a situation, it is highly advisable that you brand your video with the logo and name of your company. Preferably use a watermark that claims your ownership over the video. Additionally, it enhances your brand image. People love to associate with the brand when they like the video and it helps in improving your brand recall value. While creating a brand on YouTube, you must focus on the content. It should relate to your brand. The style and look of your videos should be consistent across the channel.
You must decide what action you want your target audience to take after they finish watching your video. One thing for sure they can do is to like and share your video on YouTube but that does not give you direct benefit. You can rather ask them for subscription to your videos, newsletter, link to visit your website, blog and social media profile for further information. It is a great way to generate powerful leads as people who subscribe to your videos, sign up for newsletters and like your social media page are genuinely interested in your product. Else you can direct them to your e-store for purchase.
Small gestures matter the most. People love to see themselves on YouTube. It is an exciting way to win their trust and build brand loyalty. Request your existing customers to send videos to you showing their experience with your product and how they use your product. This way, they’ll get popularity through your video channel and they will feel glad and take pride to be a part of your company. And most importantly, it will inspire others to become your customer. You can post these fan videos to your blog, website and other marketing channels.
Story-telling is an art and people love to hear interesting stories on a video channel like YouTube. A gripping story will garner a large number of views and your product will get popular than ever. You can follow a PAS approach (problem-agitate-solve) wherein you show a problem generally faced by your target audience. Show how this problem is creating hurdles for their business. Introduce your product and show how it is an answer to their problem. But you must remember, people are not interested to hear about your product features. They rather want to know how your product adds value to their work.
A case study is a real life story of your customers and their experience while using your product. Interview your existing customers and ask them how they feel about your product. Good or bad, every opinion counts as it looks real and valid. As a start-up company, you need genuine support from your customers to testify your claims. And there is no better place than YouTube to market your brand. Moreover, case studies help you to understand your customers better and resolve their issues in future.
Thumbnail is a cover image of your video that reflects what your video is about. It is very important to have an attractive thumbnail as it can persuade or dissuade viewers to click on it. Thumbnails are visible in search results so make sure they match with the title of the videos. By default, YouTube gives you three choices for selecting your video thumbnail. Select the thumbnail that best represents your video. If you use Windows Movie Maker to upload the video then you can create a thumbnail image of your choice.
Let the YouTube crawlers discover you through your quality content. Add an appropriate title to your video including the most popular keyword. Add trigger keywords to your title to make it more enticing. YouTube gives you a limit of 5000 character to describe your video but you don’t have to use the entire space to explain the contents of the video. Keep it short by adding 2 or 3 crisp sentences.
Do not forget to ad relevant keywords in the description. You can also add experience-enhancing links such as subscribe, related videos and playlist option to engage your viewers. Tags are descriptive keywords that help in further increasing your visibility. Use common tags and description when you upload multiple videos to your YouTube channel. It makes it easier for your audience to discover you.
Besides that, use annotations over your videos. These are text overlays that allow you to provide additional information to the viewers. Annotations can include navigation to next or previous video, subscription to YouTube channel, link to other YouTube videos, etc.
Number of viewers who use their mobile phones to visit YouTube is rapidly increasing. Your content should be legible for small screen. Do not fill up the screen with too much textual content. Apart from that, shoot horizontally, take closer shots, use lower resolution (720 p is the best for mobile and computers alike), keep your videos short and a have clear audio. Try to use prominent animation so that the mobile audience is not put off by poor quality of the content. They should generate equal pleasure as they do while watching on their computers.
Conclusion
Your business can gain a lot by posting explainer video on YouTube. It exposes your business to the customers across the world and they can easily understand what your business is all about. Appropriately use the marketing tips to get a higher ranking not only on the YouTube search results but also on Google. Not to forget, YouTube is also a social network to engage with the communities. If you serve them interesting content on a regular basis, they will turn back to you for further information. This is how you gain loyalty at YouTube.
Have you uploaded any video on YouTube before? What response did you get? Please share your views below.
If you still haven’t created any explainer video for your business, contact Oomphbox.
