5 ways to maximize your YouTube video marketing

Do you want a better return from your YouTube marketing? YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google but often lower priority for marketing. Over 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute, so the challenge is how do you make your boat videos visible to potential consumers amongst the funny cat videos and movie trailers.

Here are five tactics to help improve visibility on YouTube. Think of it like SEO for your website.

1. Educate and inform your audience

Boaters don’t generally go to YouTube to find products or services to buy. They go to watch something entertaining or informative. Instead of pitching your products or services, deliver information that makes your buyer more intelligent. Focusing on specific brand strengths will present you as a thought leader, how-to videos (e.g. common maintenance tasks on your boat) are often popular, and third-party boat or equipment reviews can build trust.

You may already have this content but not know about it. If you have a longer video, cut it into several short videos on a specific topic. Also collect other videos across YouTube and add them into your playlists, or ask your customers if they have any videos you can use.

2. Focus on your YouTube Channel

Your channel is like your home page on YouTube. Google (who owns YouTube) is recommending that you optimize your channel as they are trending toward ranking channel results as well as individual videos. Remove videos that are not getting views, as they will drag down the rest of the channel.

You should fully setup your channel. This includes:

  • Introductory video trailer
  • Channel banner with links to your website and social media
  • Channel description, tags and about us copy. Using key organic keywords for this content is a great way to go.
  • Configuring basic and advanced settings

One aspect that is often overlooked is integration between YouTube and Google+. If you don’t have a Google+ page you should create one, and then connect it with your YouTube channel. The primary reason to do this is to 1) be able to pick your channel name, 2) help increase Google page ranking.

Caption: boats.com’s optimized YouTube channel.
Boats.com’s optimized YouTube channel.

3. Optimize each video for search

This is the day-to-day maintenance for YouTube. When you add a video it is worth spending additional time to add complete descriptions and search tags. This content gets indexed for search. If you don’t have the search terms here people will not find your videos. You don’t need to overload these and it is more important to be complete rather than wordy.

You can also add a transcript file to your video, either by adding captions in YouTube or creating a separate text file and uploading it. This is more advanced and time consuming work but adds additional content for the search engines to use.

4. Add Call to Actions

Unlike search engine ranking, YouTube uses time watched as a key element in its algorithm. As well as getting people to your content, you need to keep them watching. Creating engaging content is top priority, but we also suggest adding a couple of annotations near the end of your videos to encourage users to take action such as subscribe to your channel, see related videos, add comments or click to visit your website. Adding URLs into your descriptions can also help in this regard.

Organizing your videos into series playlists is also important to link like content together and encourage additional video views. A special playlist called a “serial playlist” can also be used to display other suggested videos. Using these will keep people on your channel as opposed to clicking off to watch a competitor’s video.

Boat reviews are organized into a playlist and annotations provide clear call to action
Boat reviews are organized into a playlist and annotations provide clear call to action

You can use the YouTube analytics tools to see the view time on your content and whether people kept watching or dropped off.

5. Promote your content

Taking the steps above will greatly increase the organic traffic to your videos. But you should also promote your YouTube channel. Embedding video into Facebook, from your blogs, newsletters or putting links into forum posts.

Paying for views through YouTube advertising or Google paid search is a good way to drive traffic. This does not help with your search ranking but it can help your channel appear more authoritative and popular. Remember that users can skip some ads so it is important to have a high impact message.

Follow these steps and you will soon see an increase in your YouTube views. It might take a while, but using these techniques that build on top of each other and your views will compound over time. And if you are thinking how can you possibly fit this into your already hectic day, there are specialists who can help.

Tim Claxton is a digital marketing consultant in the marine industry, and periodically writes articles on boating and technology.

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One Comment

  1. Some really great advice here Tim. There are so many ways you can improve your presence on YouTube and get the most out of it – great marketing tool for the boating industry!

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