Successful Brands Use These YouTube Marketing Strategies

If you are trying to build your brand, viral videos provide the kind of exposure that helps you increase your footprint in the market. It’s not easy to find the correct combination of cute kids, fluffy animals and touching or humorous moments to inspire a viral video campaign. However, there’s little doubt that YouTube is the right place to do this.

With more than a billion active users, YouTube is so big that it contains content in 76 different languages, reaching 95 percent of the world’s population.

Tips to Building a Viral Video Campaign

These tips can help you turn great content into a viral video campaign.

When you upload a video to YouTube, change the auto-generated filename to include relevant keywords. For example, a video on how to carve a pumpkin could be called “carve-pumpkin-howto.” Make sure your video is optimized for smartphones and tablet since more than half of YouTube videos originate with mobile devices and the average viewing time exceeds 40 minutes.

When you upload a video, the description box is one of the most important items that you fill in. It’s essential for SEO purposes to give your video 300 words of description, including keywords related to your brand and the target audience.

Tag your video with keywords that accurately reflect your content. For example, a dog training video can include phrases like “puppy potty training” and “puppies” as well as related topics “dog behavior” and “happy pets.” You can always come back and update keywords when new phrases and keywords become relevant.

Overlays, or small boxes of pop-up in a video, can be configured as a clickable link. You can place strong CTAs here such as subscribing to your channel, buying a product, or viewing other videos on your site. Repeat the CTA in the description box for an even higher likelihood of success.

Build an Engaged Community

Viral video content gets attention, but you have to be creative to keep your viewers once the buzz dies down. A concerted effort to create valuable content is more likely to succeed that randomly generating content you think might attract attention.

A much better long-term strategy includes building an engaged YouTube community of viewers who relate to your content and develop a loyalty to your brand. Here are a few tips to stay true to your message:

• Create great content users want to consume and share on their social media
• Develop a branded theme for your YouTube channel (Get one of these if you don’t have one already!). Refer to your channel in your video logs and branded advertising on other platforms.
• Engage with your audience to build an authentic community. Be clear on who you’re trying to reach with specific campaigns and collect feedback, opinions and ideas for future YouTube videos and marketing.

Advertising

Budget for Adwords of Facebook in order to reach your target market. However, YouTube is a great place to meet your audience to provide value and create a feedback forum for your branding. There’s a tremendous opportunity for segmentation once you establish a following.

There are several Youtube ad formats to choose from on YouTube:

• TrueView ads drive brand engagement on your YouTube channel or video. Brands using TrueView ads often reap engagement rewards on their other YouTube content (up to a 500 percent increase). Viewers can skip TrueView ads after five seconds, so make the count.
• Non-skippable ads are unpopular. They’re intrusive and unwelcome by most viewers. As a result, YouTube eliminated 30-second unskippable ads. Now, non-skippable ads max out at 15 to 20 seconds.
• Bumper ads are non-skippable ads lasting a mere six seconds.
• Overlay ads appear on a partner video or channel. These are banner advertisements that run along the bottom of a video.

Use each of these advertising types to reach segmented users. Experiment to see what works best for your demographic. For instance, display views by interest, device, demographics or contextual keywords.

Buy Views

Buy YouTube views to launch your videos and attract new views.

“By increasing your ranking on YouTube’s search engine, your videos’ thumbnails are being seen by many more targeted people and get recommended on other people’s personal feed. This exposure to a broader, newly targeted audience will result in getting many more views organically,” according to Get Fans, an online marketplace that sells YouTube views.

Benefits of buying views include the following:

• A boost for views – About 300 hours of content is uploaded on YouTube per minute. So, it’s hard to get attention for your content without an initial boost.
• 100% Safe and legitimate – Buying YouTube services is not illegal. In fact, per YouTube’s TOS (Terms Of Service), purchasing promotional services is legitimate as long as the services are generated by real users and conducted on legitimate media sources not fake bots.
• Increase video ranking – The most critical parameters in the YouTube ranking algorithm are the number of views and total watch time.

Buying views for your videos is a great way to start your campaign and build a community of your own.

Get Brand Placements

You might not land a Kardashian, but getting product placement with YouTube stars will increase your market. Choose an influencer who will represent your brand in a way that increases value, even if they don’t verbally mention it. YouTube stars that are plugged into your target demographic can make marketing efforts far more effective than traditional methods. A major benefit is that you can then use a hands-off approach and get positive results.

Implementing the tips above helps you connect to your market without spending tons of money on marketing testing. It makes it much easier to stay agile and switch gears as the needs of your target market filter in via feedback on YouTube and other channels.