YouTube Video Marketing Strategies that Work

If you’re looking for a way to promote your YouTube videos, or to get more out of your YouTube Channel, you’re probably going to have to find some new YouTube video marketing strategies that will work for your business or brand. One thing’s for certain: you don’t want to avoid marketing on the second most visited website on the internet! Actively engaging more than 2 billion users, YouTube is full of opportunity for brands, especially since consumers spend an average of 100 minutes or more watching video content online – daily!

You’re probably not surprised that more brands than ever before are turning to YouTube to promote their content. There’s certainly a lot to love about this internet giant. But if you’re new to marketing on YouTube, you might be wondering what you can do to maximize your gain or otherwise benefit from the traffic that can be found here.

These YouTube video marketing strategies will get you going in the right direction.

1. Start with an Amazing Channel & Organized YouTube Content

User experience is everything these days, and this is true for your YouTube channel, too! You can’t just willy nilly start posting your content on YouTube and expect users to flood your videos. It just doesn’t work out this way – at least, not so much anymore. 

You need to think carefully about your channel layout and the organization of your YouTube content before you post. Or, if you’ve already posted a bunch of videos haphazardly, you’ll need to take some steps to organize your channel so that it’s easy for people to understand, navigate, and find what they’re most interested in.

Follow these tips:

• Create a value proposition that draws audience interest to your page.
• Include a call-to-action that encourages frequent audience return.
• Incorporate the branding and colors that represent your business to your page.
• Organize your content into sections that make navigating your page easy on the user.

It’s also important create YouTube content frequently and consistently, as well as to write great YouTube video Titles that are SEO optimized and catchy.  The most compelling titles include keywords that relate to your channel and your video content.  They’re also short, descriptive, and they tell the reader what the content is about.

Use these resources for producing great YouTube titles:

• Use SEMRush to find keywords that you can use in your titles.
• Find trending keywords on YouTube.
• Analyze your titles with the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.

2. Create Amazing Thumbnails

The thumbnail is your video’s key image and is essentially the great factor in influencing a click by the user. Done right, this tiny rectangular image has a whole lot of power to influence your audience! Choosing an impactful thumbnail image is probably just as important as the title of your video, if not more!

When creating a YouTube video thumbnail image, keep the following in mind:

• Consider including a face in your thumbnail as often as you can! Almost every one of the top producing YouTube videos will include a thumbnail image that has a face.
• Try including a red arrow, pointing to a particular part of the image, to draw the audience’s eyes and encourage a click. It doesn’t always work, but it can!
• Use your personal branding including colors, logo or other elements to boost brand awareness of your thumbnails.
• Stay consistent with your thumbnails. If you tend to include a face, do it will all of your thumbnails. If you include a logo, again do it with all of your thumnails.

It’s also important to follow best practices in using only standard video sizes when creating your thumbnails. This means you want to be sure to use 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080 to avoid blurry images.

Use these resources for producing great YouTube thumbnail images:

• Try Canva.com to customize your thumbnail designs.
• Consider A/B testing different thumbnails with Adwords.

3. Create Videos that are Optimal Length for Your Channel

While you might not think that video length has anything to do with your YouTube video marketing strategy, the reality is this is a very important area of concern. The average YouTube consumer will watch about 5 minutes of video at most. Very rarely will people watch a video that’s over 5 minutes long, even if they are an avid subscriber to your channel and love your content it’s really hard to get someone to stick around after 5 minutes.

With that in mind, you should carefully consider whether or not it makes sense to create videos that are longer than 5 minutes for your YouTube channel? Keep in mind that creating a longer video that merely repeats what you’ve already said is NOT going to help your marketing reach and it certainly won’t help to encourage people to stick around longer. 

When creating your videos, keep the following in mind:

• High quality content is important for YouTube videos.
• Videos should be planned so that they run about 5 minutes or less. While longer videos are accepted on YouTube, viewers rarely stick around that long.
• Make your content engaging and informative so that your audience will stick around.
• Consider including a CTA earlier in your video, for those who might not stick around to the very end.
• Incentivize sticking around so that those who do stay until the end of your video get something in return!

When it comes to producing YouTube videos that are optimal length, there’s generally a little trial and error involved. Use YouTube Analytics to help you find out what works best for your channel. You can then tailor your YouTube video marketing strategies, along with the other strategies discussed in this post, to your community!