This short article will provide the necessary essentials for optimizing your YouTube video content for a blended video marketing strategy that will drive qualified leads for your organization. We’ll start with the basics such as content types, tagging, labeling, optimizing YouTube content, to the landing experience on your site and what that should look like.
1 – Content Selection
Before you put any content on YouTube you need to decide what your strategy is. If you already have videos up on a channel with subscribers that’s okay, this first step will apply to you too.
First decide what the you want YouTube to do for your business, such as:
A) Get as many views and subscribers as possible
B) House all your organization’s content
C) Serve as an online video platform and video player to embed on your website
D) Drive traffic back to your website and boost SEO
E ) All of the above
Most people will probably go with “E.” While we think E is important, we completely disagree with B and C, housing all video content on YouTube is bad for so many reasons that we won’t go into right now — not using a video player that’s plugged into your marketing stack will rob you of powerful insights. For the B2B video marketing use case you need to start narrow, so let’s start with letter D.
If the goal of the YouTube channel is to drive traffic back to your site you can look at using shorter, teasing content. A good first suggestion is recorded webinars, every B2B company runs webinars regularly, and in most cases records them for later playback.
Can you record 30 second teasers of webinars to post to your YouTube channel that will entice viewers to click through via a link in the video or in the description to watch the extended version or learn more about your product or service? You get our drift.
Do you have customer interviews? Chop those up, optimize YouTube to lead the viewer back to your website to watch the whole video with detailed messaging and value-adds that weren’t shared in the YouTube video version.
2 – Landing Experience
Once you have picked the type of content you are going to host on your YouTube channel, next think about the landing experience you want viewers to have when they click through from YouTube onto your website. Consider the following:
Make sure the video doesn’t repeat content that the viewer already watched on YouTube (in some cases you may need to create a unique landing page for YouTube arrivals)
Turn autoplay on so the video starts playing right away.
If the content is longer in length such as a webinar, enrich it with interactive chapters to make easier for the viewer to get to the content they care about.
Use in-video gating to capture the viewer’s identity and get the lead conversion
Create a landing page on your website dedicated to the experience you want the viewer to have when they arrive from YouTube. Imagine the viewer watches a teaser for your webinar on YouTube, they click on the link that entices them to ‘watch more.’ Next they land on your landing page where the webinar starts playing automatically, a chapter menu pops up and and the viewer selects the point in the webinar they want to watch. You now have a new lead and a successful conversion.
It’s important to note that the video playing back on your landing page must not be a YouTube video. To achieve interactivity and in-video gating you will need a video marketing platform. To view a list of video platform solutions perfect for this use case, click here.
3 – Optimizing YouTube Content for Click Through and SEO
Now that you have video content both on YouTube and hosted via a video marketing platform on your website, it’s time to optimize for success. You optimized your landing page when you set it up, now let’s drill down on those YouTube videos.
Here are a few things to consider for optimizing your YouTube content:
Add meta tags to your videos
This is absolutely vital for success. Meta Tags make it easy for viewers find your content. They also increase the chances that your video will be recommended based on similar content. A neat little hack to see what tags competitors or high ranking videos are using, check this out:
Right clicking next to their video
Selecting ‘Inspect source’
Press Ctrl +F and type ‘Keyword’.
Use that knowledge to optimize your content
Add cards to your videos
If you are not familiar with YouTube Cards, they are interactive elements that encourage viewer interactivity. Most commonly known as the little teasers that appear in the upper right-hand corner of YouTube videos. Use the Cards for a variety of use cases such as link to other videos in your channel, poll viewers, promote your website, or even ask for donations. It’s possible to add up to 5 cards to a single video.
Uploaded a watermark and brand
It’s important to keep your content branded and controlled, even on YouTube. Upload your logo which will appear in all your videos.
Upload a transcript for closed captions
Add an auto-transcript or upload one. This makes your content more searchable and also increases your video’s accessibility.
Now go out and try it for yourself and let us know if you see your video lead generation machine turn on.
The post How To Use YouTube For B2B Video Lead Generation appeared first on Video Marketing Software and Strategy.