Summing It Up

9 Top Tips for YouTube and Video Marketing

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

I was in a LinkedIn conversation today with Timothy Lorang, a video producer/writer at Image Media Partners. Tim focuses on integrating YouTube and video marketing into a social media strategy, and gave some tips about using video for inbound marketing.

He said there are three main purposes for inbound marketing videos:

• Educational or how-to videos showcase your company's knowledge and help establish you as the go-to information spot for your industry or field.
• Image or awareness videos make people aware of and favorable towards your brand.
• The third kind is meant to drive traffic back to your website. A well-crafted video of the first or second kind can accomplish this task as well as its primary purpose, as long as you are clear about what you want the viewer to do.

So what things do you need to do in a successful inbound marketing video?

1. Put it on a public platform where it can be found by your target audience. You Tube comes to mind.
   
   
2. Keep it short. Even with a fabulous attention grabber at the beginning, lots of people won't watch till the end, and the longer it is, the fewer that watch the whole thing.
   
   
3. Make your brand or call to action clear and place it where people will see it, like very near the beginning of the video. In the old days a TV ad might place it at the end of the commercial, so people would remember it, because you couldn't skip the ads (before remote control mute or TiVo) unless you took a comfort break or went into the kitchen to fix a snack.

4. Just as you do on your website, optimize the keywords, descriptions and title of the video to let people know what you're about. It not only helps your video get found, but also attracts the people who are predisposed to be interested in your topic.
   
   
5. The first line of the description should contain a link to your landing page for the video and should also include the http:// to make the link hot. This is the ONLY place you can put a live link that will go back to your website.
   
   
6. Brand the video in the first few frames, like a title that tells what they're about to see: "mywebsite.com shows you how to [title of the video]."
   
   
7. Have the host or narrator give a brief intro to your business at the beginning of the video - "Hi, I'm So-and-So from mywebsite.com and we specialize in [whatever it is you do]. For more information visit our website at mywebsite.com."
   
   
8. Promote your video just like you would a blog post - run a social media campaign for it, put it up as a video response to a related video on You Tube, write a blog post and use it in the post.
   
   
9. Use the space at the bottom of the screen to put your contact information - phone number, email address and/or URL. Remember, it's not a live link, so leave it up long enough for the viewer to write down the information.
   
   
10. [BONUS TIP!] At the end of the video have the narrator announce that contact information is coming in a moment and thank your viewer for watching. Add contact info using graphics, so you can change it later if necessary. NEVER fade to black before you show the contact info - that means the video is over and most people will stop watching before they see the contact info.

You might object to having all this information in your video. It's not art. It's marketing. There are plenty of places for art videos.

And speaking of places, you should consider posting your video to three video publishing sites, such as YouTub, DailyMotion, and MetaCafe. It's not unusual for a well-optimized video to rank higher than a website, and for more than one version of the video to rank. So you could grab two or more spots on the first page of Google. This not only strengthens your creditbility and authority, it pushes one or two competitors off the first page.