Using YouTube marketing to get seen with quality content

Video is important in every content strategy. Video gets you more attention, engagement and conversion, and it's the best way to get your message across. Especially on smartphones. 

Did you know that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world? So if you want to get started with video content marketing, it's important to use YouTube. YouTube is also the largest video channel in the world and is used for many different purposes. YouTube can give your organisation or brand a face and can be used for promotional purposes, such as a YouTube campaign. Young people also use YouTube a lot to follow vloggers. These days, young people watch more video online than on TV. 

Why do companies use YouTube marketing?

Companies use YouTube marketing as a marketing strategy to benefit from YouTube's huge visitor numbers. One example of a successful YouTube marketing strategy is uploading valuable video content, such as product reviews or tutorials. More than a billion people around the world use YouTube, and around 300 hours of video content are uploaded every minute. That's 5 hours of video content per second, which makes YouTube a popular channel. Besides Google, YouTube is also one of the largest search engines. That makes YouTube a good medium for reaching a target audience. 

• More than 1 billion users worldwide. In the Netherlands, 8.7 million people use YouTube, 2.4 million of them daily 
• For all ages, especially young people between 13 and 19
• More than 50% are mobile users 
• Mainly focused on B2C 

What do you use YouTube marketing for?

• For the engagement that happens on this channel 
• To show the face behind your company 

Benefits of YouTube marketing:

• Top of the search results 
• Videos are remembered better than text or images 
• 60% of people would rather watch a video than read a text 

If you want to use YouTube in your social media marketing strategy, do make sure the videos you upload are high quality and relevant. 

YouTube optimisation

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, so it's important that your video content can be found by your target audience. To get your video content indexed properly, it's important to give your videos relevant metadata. 

Metadata helps your video get found on YouTube, but also on Google. Google doesn't index images or videos, only text. By giving your video relevant metadata, it can also be indexed by Google, and that has a positive effect on SEO if you include your focus keywords in that data too. That's why it's important to use relevant keywords you want to be found for. Just like SEO for a website, it's important for a video that your keywords come back consistently in the title, description and tags. 

Metadata consists of the following elements: 

Title: Give your video a concise but relevant title. The title should clearly describe what the video is about. It creates the first impression, and after all, users often read the title first. 

Description: A description lets you give more information and trigger users more specifically to watch the video. Only the first 156 characters of the description are shown in the search results, so try to convey the essence of the video in those first 156 characters and, of course, include relevant keywords in the description. 

Relevant tags: Tags are keywords that YouTube's search systems use to show videos to new viewers. Use good, relevant tags that sum up the topic of your video well. 

Subtitles: Subtitles also matter because YouTube and Google can't index spoken text. If you add subtitles, they can. It also shows social responsibility, because you're not forgetting deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers. 

Interaction with videos 

Did you know you can spark extra engagement from your viewers while they're watching a video? You do this with annotations. Annotations are clickable overlays in YouTube videos. They can be used to increase engagement, give more information or help viewers navigate. You can also use an annotation for external links, so you generate more traffic to your website. 

Outsourcing your YouTube strategy

There are various advertising options on YouTube.com and with YouTube videos. All advertising, however, runs through Google AdWords. In Google AdWords you can create video ads using your videos on YouTube. A big advantage of advertising on YouTube is the ability to target your audience very specifically: you can refine the ad audience by gender, age, interests and location.