If you’re using YouTube as part of your marketing campaigns and aren’t quite seeing the results that you’d like, then something might not be set up in the best way for that video. Different types of video will need different inputs to make them successful for your target audience. This blog contains some of the most effective ways to drive people to watch your video.

1) Create a relevant thumbnail

According to Neil Patel a “simple and beautiful thumbnail can increase your engagements by 154%” and “over 90% of the best performing video productions on YouTube have a custom thumbnail” so it’s no secret as to why you should be designing a good thumbnail for your video on YouTube or otherwise.
Making your thumbnail stand out can give it an edge over your competitors but also make the thumbnail relevant and accurate as to what is actually in the video otherwise your retention rate will drop like a stone and most people will stop watching after 10 seconds.
The image below contains just some of the Thumbnails Audi have used for the projects we have made for them. Alongside the title of the film it’s pretty simple to see what these films are going to contain.

2) Content is King

This seems like an obvious one but it escapes more people that you’d think. To make your video successful it has to have relevant content that your target audience relates to. Make it informative, make it funny (if you feel that’s relevant), make it good (no one wants to see an animated PowerPoint of your latest financial reports) but most importantly, keep it short. Videos that are under 1 minute in length generally have around 80% retention, videos that are 2-3 minutes long will have about 60% retention and so on.

3) Descriptions

What some people may not know is that SEO rules still apply on YouTube, which makes sense given it’s owned by YouTube. So some things that you may be doing already to boost your websites standing in search results can also help here. One particularly great tip is to write lengthy video descriptions for you video. 250 words is a good start and make sure you load it with relevant keywords that are related to the video and what you think your audience wants to see. Speaking of…

4) Keywords

Given that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world (behind Google, obviously) adding the correct keywords to your video is just as important. Try and make things like your video titles as descriptive as possible so people that are looking at your video know exactly what they’re going to get when they click on it. For example if your video is instructive add words like “How to…” at the beginning. And keep it consistent throughout the whole upload process. Use the same keywords on the file name as you upload it, the film title and in the description as well as putting it in the video tags section (which you should be filling up with as many relevant tags as you can think of)
We’ve got loads of experience uploading to YouTube and helping out with YouTube campaigns so if you’d like to know more about us and what we can do for you then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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