YouTube is the most powerful search engine just second to Google. The platform hosts billions of videos watched and praised by a massive user base daily. This is why YouTube is now being considered as an effective marketing and promotion tool for products and services.
Following are a few numbers associated with YouTube that proves the significance of the platform for your marketing needs.
- Users upload 500 hours of video on the platform every minute.
- YouTube boasts of 2 billion monthly users. This is one-third of the population that uses the internet.
- As compared to other online platforms, users explore YouTube 4x more to discover information about a brand, product, or service.
Your business promotion journey on YouTube starts with a video. You create a great video, optimize it and publish it on YouTube. But creating a video isn’t a simple task. Several video elements need immediate attention before you hit the publish button.
Key Components Of Successful YouTube Videos
To ensure a successful YouTube marketing strategy, these components should be placed rightly. I am discussing some of those elements in this blog post.
Branding Intro footage
In any marketing initiative, branding is essential. It helps to build loyalty and enhance value. While creating a video you should include branded intro footage so that your audience can immediately recognize you. It will be an innovative way to engage your target audience for longer.
Branding intro is also important as it ensures that your intended audience remembers the video even if they forget the actual content and the name of the video.
An Appealing Introduction
Unless a video has an attractive or striking introduction, it won’t get noticed much. An engaging video introduction can quickly earn your audience's attention.
Thus, once you’re done with branded intro footage, work on creating a solid introduction that resonates with your audience. The introduction should be impressive enough to convince viewers to watch the video. It should also clearly explain what the video is all about and how it will benefit them.
Short Openings and Title Credits
People tend to enjoy the video from the first frame itself. Long Title credits or openings can cut short the interest of your users. Moreover, long openers become the spoilsport especially when viewers go for binge-watching.
No one will be ever interested to consume lengthy video credits and boring video openers. Keep them short to stay viewers engaged with actual video.
Background Music
YouTube videos may provide outstanding or relevant information to the users. However, sometimes videos appear dull in absence of the element of engagement. Adding background music to the video benefits creators in multiple ways. One, it helps to grab user attention immediately attention and two, it establishes an emotional connection and drives the pace of the video.
Audio Clarity
A captivating video title or a soothing background score can’t help much to lift your video if it isn’t audible. Effective and audible audio helps your audience to understand the information or the subject matter you’re putting across.
If your video is offering an oral presentation of what you’re offering, make sure the audio of the video is crystal clear and heard above any other background music.
Call-to-Action
Call–to–action in YouTube videos is as important as the title and opening introduction. You have to be very careful about where to include the CTA button since you hardly know at what point a user leaves the video.
As video develops over time, engagement significantly drops off. It generally happens between two and three minutes. It shouldn’t be at the end of the video as it’s difficult to keep your audience engaged till the last second.
Instead, you can consider using clickable annotations in the first few seconds of the video.
End Screens
End screen offers video publishers an opportunity to promote a website URL, YouTube channel, or a video playlist. You can also utilize end screens to prompt a viewer to subscribe to your channel. While creating a video leave some space at the end to attach your end screen.
Video Thumbnails
The video thumbnail is another essential element of YouTube videos. The success of a video very much depends upon how impressive its thumbnail is. Thumbnails drive maximum traffic to your channel when your videos are shown in the related videos section.
YouTube analyzes video thumbnails to determine if a video is worth adding in the related video section.
Guest Slot
Haven’t heard of this before? A guest slot means offering other influencers space in your videos. A hosted Interview on one of your YT videos is the best example of a guest slot.
Using this opportunity, you can collaborate with other influencers or video creators. This is a great way indeed to gain a new stream of the audience that may otherwise never hear of you.
For mutual benefit, look for video creators or influencers who cater to a similar audience. You can use some good tools to find channels serving similar demographics and audiences.
Conclusion:
YouTube creators can drive good traffic to their videos by using the above components rightly. These elements will tender a helping hand in making your YouTube marketing efforts a huge success.
Rajesh manages digital media campaigns in BrainPulse and has over 8 years of experience in directing and implementing online experiences to promote business, products and services on social networks.