In today's digital age, YouTube is a powerful tool for businesses to increase their brand recognition and reach a wider audience. With over 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube offers a vast pool of potential customers for businesses of all sizes.
However, with so many videos and channels to choose from, it can be challenging to stand out and attract viewers to your brand. So we will explore a few strategies for increasing your brand recognition on YouTube and reaching more of your target audience.
Having a top YouTube strategy is the first step
If you’re in the world of digital marketing, you already know that Google constantly changes its algorithms, and it is fundamental to be up to date and knowing how to focus your SEO actions to optimize your content based on what Google prioritizes. Well, in the case of SEO on YouTube, you'll face exactly the same situation. You have to change your strategy constantly to keep gaining followers and be on the top.
In any case, having a YouTube channel is a good idea as video consumption is growing fast. Analyzing and organizing strategies to improve SEO on YouTube is practically an obligation if you take your branding strategy seriously.
This means a huge number of opportunities for your business. Let's take a look at the statistics. People prefer to watch videos over television (Google); after Google, YouTube is the most popular website (Alexa) and viewers retain 95% of video messages, compared to 10% when reading (Insivia).
After knowing these figures, you’ll agree that having a YouTube channel and creating a strategy that improves your positioning is key to success, but how can you improve your SEO and brand recognition on YouTube?
How to improve your YouTube SEO and brand recognition
Many factors influence video SEO on YouTube, including how well the video's title, description, and content match the viewer's search. But the key ingredient for effective video SEO is high engagement because YouTube needs to keep viewers on their platform for as long as they can.
Even more importantly, they want you to generate engagement in your videos and they will reward you with visibility. For measuring interaction or engagement metrics, YouTube Analytics assesses "likes", comments, CTR, audience retention, average viewing time, clicks on the cards, among others.
If you can't engage your audience, your chances of ranking your videos on YouTube for a meaningful keyword are close to zero. However, to help you start positioning your content and making your brand visible, you can carry out the keyword search for your YouTube videos in popular web tools such as:
- YouTube Analytics: YouTube is perfecting its analytics section and it now has a user-friendly interface, which shows you actionable data, metrics and growth strategies.
- Ahrefs: Recently, Ahrefs incorporated a section to the search for keywords focused on YouTube and it will help you optimize your videos.
- Keyword tool.io: although it's a free tool, it allows you to see the metrics of the keywords and it is useful when looking for longtail YouTube keywords.
You just have to follow these steps:
1. Create longer videos. YouTube values the total watch time for positioning. In fact, YouTube considers it part of your audience retention. The recommended watch time for your videos is above 50%: so if your video is 10 minutes long, the total recommended watch time would be more than 5 minutes.
The average video length on YouTube is 12 minutes (Statista). However, depending on your industry and content, your video length will vary.
2. Follow the rule of the first 15 seconds. In your first 15 seconds, you should create a clear introduction for your videos, in which you express what that video is about. Also, highlight something specific about your video that makes it different from other similar videos and finally, say that you’ll share something new or an important tip relevant to your followers.
It will help you increase retention and make your viewers remain in your video for more time.
3. Keywords in the video. If you don't target keywords with search volume, you're not going to get search traffic. YouTube's suggestions are similar to the ones on Google Trends and you should take a look at the trending topics for your audience before making a video.
4. Encourage interaction. It’s important to incentivize users to interact on your videos and channel: likes, comments, subscriptions, etc… because YouTube looks at the number of likes and dislikes of your videos. A video with many likes is telling YouTube that viewers do like that video, and if you get people’s attention, YouTube will give you more visibility as a “prize”.
5. Optimize CTR. How can you optimize the CTR (Click Through Rate) in a video? The answer is in a highly customized thumbnail that has the keyword (or a short text) that makes your viewers understand what the video is about.
Add an image that differs from the rest of the results for the same keyword on YouTube and create a contrast of colors between the foreground and the background. And take into account that according to psychology, images with people’s faces work better because they allow us to immediately identify whether or not we can trust the content.
6. Add the video to a playlist. For improving SEO on YouTube, also consider incorporating videos in a playlist since, if viewers have automatic playback on, your video will take them to another video immediately.
Classifying all your videos in several playlists is a good strategy for organizing information and improving your viewers’ experience. And the playlists also appear in the search results, so if you use playlists to group different videos, you’ll facilitate your audience in the process of searching for videos and your channel will increase its visibility.
7. Add a description, subtitles and transcription. Another factor to consider is the description since it affects positioning. The reason is very simple, the text description is relevant for SEO if you include your keywords, so make an explanatory and persuasive description about the content of your video, add a link to your blog or website in the first paragraph as this maximizes the CTR and include your keyword at least 3 times (no more, since Google and YouTube will consider it spam).
By the way, subtitling your videos in your own language (and other languages) will help you reach a bigger audience and it will help you grow faster.
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Advertising on YouTube Ads: 6 keys to successful ads
YouTube Ads is a video marketing system to manage and create YouTube advertising. Through this system, you can create ads in different formats and insert them before, during or after a video.
People are consuming more audiovisual content because it’s entertaining. Through a video, it is easier to tell a story and turn your ad into a video that users want to see because it makes them curious. This is what is known as Storytelling. Thanks to storytelling, you can ensure that your ads are not intrusive, but rather as entertaining content that the user wants to watch.
As you can see, the advantages of using YouTube Ads for digital advertising for increasing your branding recognition are multiplied. You’ll get traffic to your channel, website, blog, store, etc. It is up to you where to send you leads and that's why YoutTube Ads have the potential to take your brand to the next level.
And If you don't get enough traffic organically on YouTube, you can try advertising to take even more leads. YouTube is the second platform with the most active users worldwide, after Facebook and the potential of advertising with YouTube Ads is enormous; 2 billion monthly active users, 30 million daily users and YouTube attracts 44% of all internet users (Omnicore).
Advertising on YouTube is not just a trend, it's a powerful and effective digital tactic to boost traffic and positioning your brand. Building brand awareness on YouTube is easy. You can show your products to your potential customers in engaging videos... and losing this business opportunity is never a good idea.
That's why we give you some tips and tricks to punch your competitors and succeed at YouTube:
1. Take care of the appearance of your YouTube channel. This is not an advertisement tip, but the first impression counts, so pay attention to the design of your YouTube channel and make sure it is attractive and pleasant for your audience.
Choose a username that identifies your brand and what you want to convey. Likewise, choose an appropriate profile image and the cover image. Ideally, you should choose a responsive design functional to different devices, and also try to make a good description of the channel with keywords related to your niche.
In addition, set a presentation video for new visitors and subscribers... and keep it short, it is just a brief introduction to your channel and a call to action inviting them to subscribe.
2. Correctly segment your ads. It’s not enough to segment your ads, you need to know how to segment them well and take advantage of the targeting options that YouTube Ads offers. In this way, you’ll minimize costs and increase conversions.
The targeting options for advertising on YouTube Ads are:
- Demographic details
- Intent-based custom audience
- Lookalike audiences
- Remarketing
- Content keywords and contextual segmentation.
- Mobile phones only
- And more!
One of the advantages of YouTube SEO is how easy it is to segment your audience because the platform offers various statistics on your visitors; for example age, gender and location. All this will help you know your audience and plan a strategy to reach them.
3. Add keywords. An interesting aspect of YouTube is the use of keywords in the dialogue. Keywords are not only in the ad text, they are also in the voiceover. Currently, YouTube algorithms analyze sound content, so if you include keywords in the audio of your videos, you will be greatly enhancing your advertisements.
4. Calls to action. For advertising on YouTube, you need to include CTA’s in videos to redirect viewers to your website or landing page, or to take actions such as subscribing.
5. Generate a final screen. Another effective element is the end screens and outros. They consist of engagement ads that appear between the last 5 to 20 seconds of your video and their objective is to attract subscribers to your channel, promote your social networks and increase engagement with your brand, etc.
There are two types of end screens:
- YouTube end screens, which are custom designed in YouTube Studio to attract more viewers, suggest content or promote products.
- Automatic end screens, which are automatically generated in Google Ads to show details about your products or services.
6. Create engaging and creative content. In advertising, it’s fundamental to express the message in a quick, clear and attractive way to achieve a good audience response. You can take advantage of emotions and interesting topics to get views. The more emotional the ads, the better. The idea is that you manage to empathize with your audience and make them feel empathy with your content.
Videos are the main marketing content that people expect to find value in. That means you need to create content that is interesting, useful, and unique toward meeting the needs of your audience. Think that there is nothing more direct than content marketing, so try to respond in your videos to the possible concerns of your audience.
What did you think of these tips and tricks to start taking advantage of video marketing?
Now you know where to start, so focus on your digital marketing strategy and design a strategy for your YouTube channel. Apply these tips and invest some time getting your strategy set and when you upload a video, you’ll notice the difference.
Branding on YouTube is vital to reinforce your brand image. It is important to point out that YouTube by itself does not improve the brand image. For this reason, a good action plan is one that allows you to achieve your long-term branding goals.
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