With more than 800 million monthly unique visitors, 4 billion hours of video viewed streamed every month and the number of YouTube-based campaigns growing exponentially, YouTube has become a key marketing channel.

From Super Bowl campaigns like Audi’s 2012 “Vampire Party” to promotion for major motion pictures like The Dark Knight Rises to user-generated content, product demos, extensions of TV spots, webinars, serial shorts and other branded media of every shape and size, brands are embracing YouTube. As a result, channel content has diversified and expanded.

According to Robert Kyncl, Global Head of Content at YouTube, the next ten years will see a continued shift in focus from lower-quality user-generated videos and “viral successes” to those that can build “sustained audiences.”

Even as YouTube’s scale and potential have motivated brands to add it to their social marketing arsenal, the channel has become more crowded. How do brands stand out?

3 Steps to YouTube Success

Just a few years ago, marketers addressing YouTube only had to focus on a few factors–namely featuring compelling content and making it “sharable”–to achieve campaign success. Today, the pressure is on for marketers to make their YouTube channels unique, findable and scalable. Let’s look at how to do this.

1. Boost Your Search Engine Potential: No matter how good your brand channel is, it’s likely to be lost within the multitude of content on YouTube if it isn’t visible or “findable”. Boost your search engine potential by:
   • Crafting the Right Description and Title: Keyword rich descriptions and titles influence organic search ranking of YouTube channels, making your campaigns more visible. While writing descriptions and coining titles for videos, you should place the most important keywords in the first few words of the title, make the title crisp (and within the 70 character limit), include keywords in the description are relevant to your brand, and include the full URL in the description.
   • Tagging Your Content: YouTube offers an internal keyword system, tags, to boost SEO value. Tagging your YouTube content helps the audience to discover your content.

2. Optimize Videos for Mobile Viewing: At last year’s Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Robert Kyncl revealed, “Mobile has increased from 6% to 25% in the last 18 months across the whole of YouTube.” In short, consumers are watching more YouTube videos on mobile devices than ever before, and every YouTube brand channel should be optimized for mobile. Optimize your channel for mobile viewing by:

   
   • Limited Working Space: Restrict the amount of working space. Keep it simple by featuring only the information that your mobile consumers are likely to use. Also ensure that your product is clearly visible and that the text (if any) placed in the YouTube video is readable on a smaller screen.
   • Include Links: Again, include links in the description box. Links direct interested consumers to your brand site and facilitate viewer browsing and discovery.
   • Producing high quality audio: Sound quality on users’ mobile devices may not always be good. To prevent your audience from abandoning your channel because of poor audio, a high quality audio capturing device be used while recording sound.

3. Design Interactive Campaigns: With the availability of more powerful, easier-to-use and lower cost media production tools–coupled with the publishing capabilities and popularity of social networks–your customer has become a content creator. Brands that align their YouTube strategy with this powerful trend by soliciting user-generated content to promote products and increase visibility and virality will be rewarded. YouTube’s audience and functionality make it the perfect channel for launching User-Generated Content (“UGC”) campaigns. Design and execute successful interactive campaigns by:

   • Customizing YouTube brand channel: Welcome your audience with a look and feel that is on brand and consistent with your broader digital brand presence.
   • Moderating and filtering submissions: Curate high quality user content that is consistent with your brand values and will resonate with your audience.
   • Enabling mobile uploads: Facilitate participation and harvest more content by enabling mobile uploads and a workflow that doesn’t require the user to install a mobile client.
   
   • Allowing fans to vote and rate: This additional layer of interactivity will further boost campaign effectiveness.

   ABC’s “The Chew” UGC campaign is a great example of customization on YouTube. This DEC also allows fans to rate their favorite recipes.

Conclusion

YouTube has become a key marketing channel. As the audience’s appetite for compelling motion content grows and brands respond, YouTube will become even more crowded. To differentiate and succeed, brands should focus on keyword-rich descriptions, mobile accessibility enhancing engagement with user-generated content and other highly interactive programming.

Andrew Sielen

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