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01 Dec 2014

Streaming Loud and Clear: How to Boost Your Youtube Rankings

When comparing the various mediums of online consumption, Youtube videos take very large piece of the pie. Over 3 billion videos are watched every day, and make up a third of all online activity. It therefore comes as no surprise that Youtube is considered the #2 search engine in the world.

This makes it an invaluable tool for online marketers, especially with a platform that is so high in engagement –  50% of all videos have comments, shares, or likes – an impressive feat when 100 hours of Youtube footage is uploaded.

Youtube marketing is easy, it’s exciting, and it increases a consumer’s understanding of your product by 74%. But using it isn’t always completely straightforward – many companies have used Youtube in varying, and sometimes surprising, ways.

Contests

One of the best facets of Youtube’s user platform is that it’s very easy to create and upload videos – and people love doing it. Marketers with Acuvue hosted scholarships and mentorships through their brand, and marketed them on mini-episodes on their Youtube channel. It increased brand awareness by linking to the celebrity endorsers and following inspiring tales of up and coming young artists, while also creating an extremely positive reputation linked to their company.

Viral Gimmicks

One of the most effective ways to utilize Youtube is to hack into it’s “viral” capacities. The key to video branding is to create a video that even those who are entirely uninterested in your actual product will love enough to share with their friends and family – ensuring that many people interested in your product will see it.

Blendtec had a great campaign like this, as the company that sells blenders created the famous “Will It Blend” series, in which they blend various household items and tech gadgets to see what happens. They act as an almost subliminal infomercial, as they always use their own blenders, their brand name flashes across the screen at the beginning of each video, and sometimes the blenders prove to have an impressive capacity for blending various object, like an iPad, which serves as a funny, but legitimate testimony to their strength and capability as blenders. Their videos also have millions of views. They also cleverly linked it to their social media accounts, as the #WillItBlend hashtag and their Facebook act as a platform for their audience to suggest items that they blend next.

Follow Your Niche

If you have a product that already generates thousands of tutorials from consumers without your instigation, you definitely need to host your own tutorials on Youtube.  This means home and garden companies should create DIY projects (Home Depot does this very well), cleaning products should provide fun cleaning techniques and demonstrate them, and beauty companies should offer tutorials on how to use their products. Sephora is a leader in this particular area, as they have pages upon pages of tutorials hosted on their Youtube account, each of which is shared and viewed up to 5,000 times – some of the videos have up to 40,000 hits.

Quality Over Quantity

While it might be tempting to create many awesome, fun videos to try to hit the right stride, it’s actually been found that many successful Youtube brands, like Dove, Turkish Airlines, and Head and Shoulders Brazil have gotten 90% of their views from three or less of their videos.

This means it can be equally effective to host one to two really great, unique video ideas, rather than bombard your channel with many consistent, but perhaps smaller concepts. This can be a marketing stunt – Pepsi is popular for hosting fun pranks, like disguising racecar driver Jeff Gordon as a normal citizen and tricking a car salesman into going on a test drive with him – at NASCAR speed.

Your Youtube Arsenal

There are many different factors that can impact how you mold your Youtube campaign. Whatever you decide is right for you brand, it will all come down to where you rank on Youtube. For an in-depth guide to getting your video on that first page, here is an infographic to help you boost your rankings – and give your videos the audience you need to create a video campaign with viral capabilities.

Youtube Rankings

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Search engine marketing expert with 15 years of experience in the industry, working with small mom and pop shops as well as large corporate websites. I have experience with all aspects of inbound marketing, including SEO, Link Building, Social Shares, Usability, Conversions, PPC, Email Marketing, and more.