17th Jan 2019 – 
Recommended Resource: SEO is not dead. Random SEO is. Here are some tools vetted by marketing influencer Shane Barker to effectively improve your SEO efforts: https://blog.convert.com/the-most-effective-seo-tools-for-your-business-growth.html
Occasional, sudden bursts of YouTube video views are great, but to use YouTube as a marketing channel for driving leads, you need to build a loyal following on YouTube. Here are some ways to build it.
But to tap into YouTube’s huge marketing potential, you need to do more than just launch your company’s YouTube channel. Given that 720,000 hours of video content get uploaded on YouTube every day, you need to optimize your YouTube marketing, so your video content reaches the right people and engages them, so they actually enter your sales funnel.
Setting up Your YouTube Channel Profile/Page
YouTube’s marketing opportunity is HUGE. But to really make the most of it, you’ll have to work toward making your videos more discoverable, offer more engaging content, and consistently build your subscriber base. And in the larger sense, your YouTube marketing videos must help establish your brand voice that drowns all the noise in your niche.
- Set a Crisp Logo and Cover Image: The first step toward building a great YouTube channel is getting your branding right. A branded YouTube channel that matches with your website and brand colors is a great way to set the right first impression. Make sure you use a high-resolution logo for your profile pic and a branded graphic or a product screenshot or just a relevant and engaging image as your cover image.
- Make a Splash With Your Account’s Profile Page: Use rich bios for your account’s ‘About’ section, make sure you post regularly (so that viewers don’t see that your last published video is a year old!), and feature colorful videos (so that your viewers can access your best video content right away). Using beautiful video thumbnails is a great hack to build a YouTube page that looks awesome.
- Use Multiple Playlists, Channels: Sort your video content into multiple playlists, so it’s easier for your viewers to follow and browse through. Also, if necessary, create multiple channels, so your subscribers can subscribe to just those channels that might have relevant content for them.
For inspiration, check out Slack’s profile page on YouTube:
YouTube is basically a video search engine. And so to get your videos to rank for your target keywords, you need to follow a set of video SEO best practices such as:
Doing SEO for Your YouTube Video Content and Channel
Essentially, think of your YouTube account page as your video store’s storefront that absolutely has to look inspiring. If you’ve a barely set up account page, your users will assume that your video content, too, will be half-hearted.
In addition to following the above tips, also read up on how brands are using YouTube to reach and connect with their ideal customers.
About one-third of all internet users use YouTube. Which makes YouTube an excellent social media marketing channel for any business to reach its target audience. Its availability in 80+ countries and its accessibility (in over 75 languages) account for a massive one billion hours of video consumption every day.
- Video Title: Try to use a keyword-rich 5-word long and descriptive title for your video. Description: Use a bunch of keywords throughout your video description. Try to go with a 250-word video description with your main keyword present at least once in your first few words.
- Tags: Use your keywords as tags for your videos. This way, your videos won’t just rank better, but they’ll be more likely to be displayed in the sidebar for relevant searches.
YouTube Analytics: Look at your YouTube Analytics to see who is viewing your content. This way, you’ll learn if you’re hitting the right demographics. You can also tie your Google Analytics account with your Youtube Analytics for advanced reporting on your YouTube traffic and conversion metrics. In addition to this, you can also use YouTube video rank trackers to track the position of your videos.
If your YouTube channel doesn’t look professional, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get people to watch your content (leave aside getting them to subscribe). To make sure that your YouTube account looks its best, do the following:
Keyword Research: Just the way you perform keyword research for creating (and optimizing) the text and visual content on your website, your YouTube content creation must also begin with keyword research. So before creating video content, determine if there’s enough search demand for your video content. Here are some excellent keyword research tips to find content ideas for your YouTube videos. And these are some more tips.
Building a Subscriber Base
Let’s now look at three sure-fire ways you can use to optimize your YouTube marketing and bring more leads and sales via YouTube.
- Create a Mix of YouTube Content: Instead of making all your videos just two minutes long, experiment with their lengths. In addition to varying the length of your videos, post different types of videos like episodic video series, tutorials, help videos, etc. Look at the ‘Hub, Hero, Help” content strategy for inspiration to plan your video editorial calendar. YouTube live streams are also huge engagement boosters. They present your personality and give your brand a human face. You can always incentivize participation by running a raffle or giveaway.
- Use Emotional Storytelling: Unless you can emotionally engage your viewers, you can’t get them to subscribe to your video content. You can use Zendesk as an example for learning the art of emotionally video storytelling. Every video that Zendesk posts — right from their customer success stories to commercials — is rich in emotional content and rakes in thousands of views.
- Ask Your Channel Viewers to Subscribe: Add a ‘Subscribe’ call to action to all your YouTube videos. YouTube features like End Screens and Cards make it even easier to ask your subscribers to follow your YouTube channel. Besides, you can always go with the last screen grab of your video with the gold old-fashioned prompt to subscribe.
Wrapping it Up…
In addition to these, also optimize your channel page and playlist descriptions, so they use your target keywords.
Video Optimization Essentials: For each video you post, make sure you work on its title, description, and tags:
