YouTube is THE largest platform for video marketers.
If you consider the facts that YouTube is the second largest search engine and that it serves more than 4 billion views each day, it’s hardly a wonder for video marketing.
So for marketers trying to get in on high-engagement, high-impact video marketing, here are five ways to do video marketing on YouTube:
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Make it seamless to share
If you’re worried that no one’s going to help spread your video, here’s one simple rule: Make it easy!
For example, you can simply add pre-prepared Tweets to your video’s description through services like ClickToTweet. Your audience can then seamlessly share your video without having to edit the Tweet.
While YouTube already has a user-friendly Share function, viewers do not always know what commentary to add with the link they’re sharing, so if you have their Tweet already prepared for them, you’re more likely to watch your views grow.
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Pay for “promoted video” status or for YouTube ads
When most marketers think of YouTube, they think of a free, unlimited stream of traffic, but, frankly, video marketing doesn’t always work like that.
In fact, real video marketers aren’t too prideful to pay for more views. Often, business videos can use a bit more juice to reach targeted viewers and help generate more awareness and sales.
And luckily, paying to promote your videos in YouTube’s sidebar or at the top of relevant search results is affordable, if not cheap.
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Work with other video bloggers for video marketing
Get connected with all the vloggers that are publishing videos related to your topic of interest.
What many content creators, especially video marketers, fail to realize is that other content creators are not competitors, but allies. Combine your domain expertise with the skills, knowledge and experiences from another smart vlogger, and produce videos that are overflowing with rich content. Plus, when you develop relationships with other vloggers, you can work to promote each other’s videos and share viewers.
Another way to leverage the power and influence other vloggers have is by posting responses to some of their published videos, giving you the opportunity to contribute your ideas to their discussions while inbounding viewers from the original video to your own.
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Get some blogger love
First, you have to give to get.
One way to do video marketing on YouTube is by going outside the realm of video and crowdsourcing contributions for your next video from bloggers in your niche. For example, if you’re making an informative video on startups, you may want to message TechCrunch and Mashable writers for some of their thoughts on what to include. Other bloggers you could reach out to include Dharmesh Shah of OnStartups.com and Mark Suster of BothSidesoftheTable.com.
This is an absolutely win-win-win situation where you source information gold from some of the most respected names in the industry, send them some love when you credit them in your video, and have them share the video with their networks because they contributed to it.
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Make sure you’re video is perfectly optimized for search
This is especially important if you want to inbound more viewers who wouldn’t normally find your videos through their social networks. Since YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, you’d be a fool to neglect video SEO.
You have to think carefully about your title and description, tags, video popularity, inbound links, and ratings and comments. Whether you’re new to video SEO or need a refresher, here’s a fairly thorough guide to doing SEO for YouTube from HubSpot.
To do video marketing on YouTube, you don’t just publish a video and hope people will magically watch and share it. You have to actively make an effort to make it shareable, to promote it, and to make it easy for your targeted audience to find.
