As the second largest search engine, YouTube is a force to be reckoned with. And with 65% of executives visiting a vendor’s website after watching a video, it’s clear that leveraging video into your content marketing strategy is an ideal tactic for us B2B marketers.
There are many ways B2B’s can leverage video marketing in their content strategy, from educational webinars to short, quick snippets from live events. However, no matter how much you leverage video marketing and fill up your YouTube channel, if your videos aren’t properly optimized, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities. Follow these 5 steps to optimizing your YouTube videos for increased visibility, credibility and awareness.
Title
Your video title is as important as the titles you use for your blog posts and web pages. So they need to not only grab user’s attention, but they need to be properly optimized for search engines. Additionally, in order for your entire title to show up in search results, your titles need to be clear and concise. While YouTube allows for 100-characters, best practices recommend keeping titles around 60-characters.
Descriptions
A video’s description field is valuable real estate, helping audiences and YouTube’s discovery systems understand what your content is about. When searching for a video, the first few sentences of the description will display in the results so you want to make sure you start with a compelling few sentences. Just like the title, don’t forget to use relevant keywords where possible. Your video description is also a great place to include a call-to-action, encouraging users to interact with other videos on your YouTube channel or drive traffic to your website.
Tags
In the YouTube world, tags are keywords that help users find your videos. Similar to adding targeted keywords to a blog post or web page, you want to ensure the tags to choose are relevant to more than just your content, but your brand also. Putting yourself in the shoes of your viewer can help you decipher what terms they would use when searching for content and increase the chances of them landing on your channel.
Thumbnail
Thumbnails act as miniature marketing posters for your videos – they attract viewers to your content and compel them to click through to watch. We recommend creating a high-quality custom image that represents the content. YouTube recommends using an image (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.) with a resolution of 1280×720 that is under 2MB.
Annotations
Annotations are clickable text overlays on YouTube videos that are used to boost engagement, give more information, and aid in navigation. Using annotations you can ask users to like or share your video, have users to subscribe to your channel, direct users to relevant pages on your website and much more. Annotations are completely customizable giving you the ability to decide when they pop up, how long they stay for, what they say, where they link to, what they look like, and where they are placed. You can really be creative with the use of these, but be careful not to go overboard so it doesn’t take away from the quality of content in your video.
What’s next?
Like any great piece of content, you want to share it with the world! Sharing your videos across your social channels, including it on your website and email marketing efforts will ensure your videos are being seen. You put the effort into making this video, now get it out there.
