A single image is worth 60,000 words. According to a 2019 survey by Wyzowl, a leading company in animated explainer videos, 84% people become persuaded to buy a product or service after viewing a brand’s video online. Furthermore, marketers who use video marketing to push their brand, experience 49% higher sales than those who do not. These facts have not been missed by businesses, 87% of which thus uses videos in their arsenal of tools to market their brand.
Traditional marketing is an effective method to garner awareness about your brand within your target customers. However, in our modern world, as people begin to spend more and more time online, you would be missing out on some big gains if you don’t expand your marketing efforts to cover video marketing as well.
If the above information has convinced you thoroughly enough and ready to dip your toes into the wonderful world of video marketing, then we have got you covered. Here, we teach you how to market your brand online on a prominent social media platform such as YouTube.
Why Use YouTube?
There are numerous social media platforms which support video advertisements. These include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. However, YouTube trumps all other social media platforms and even regular cable television when it comes to the best platform for video marketing. This is because:
- Six out of every ten people prefer online videos over television.
- People consume 16 hours of online video content every week.
- Over 1.9 billion people (⅓ of the world) like to frequent YouTube’s platform.
- YouTube has the lowest bounce rate (43.19%) on average.
- YouTube is the second most popular website after Google with the average user spending 13.68 minutes on the platform.
Tips and Tricks to Boost Your Reach and Sales
Through the above statistics, it can be seen that YouTube is the ideal place to start communicating through video content to spread the word about your brand and boost sales. Here’s how you can accomplish this:
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Design Video Thumbnails
It is fairly easy to cut out an image from your video clip and post it as the thumbnail. However, doing so may not generate the appropriate levels of engagement you were hoping for. In fact, the right thumbnail can raise your video engagement by 154%! This is why creating your own interesting thumbnail is very important.
A great example is the notorious 5-minute craft videos that those who have been to YouTube will encounter at least once. The channel uses catchy titles and most importantly, striking thumbnails for all its videos to entice viewers to click.
If you want to add customized thumbnails to your videos, begin uploading the video and select the “Custom thumbnail” option during this process.
Below are some useful tips to create a striking thumbnail to help crank up your click-through rate:
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Fuel Enthusiasm and Suspense
The finest thumbnails are attention-grabbing and informative enough to help viewers understand what they will be watching if they click on it. Despite their negative image, click baits can make great thumbnails too if you follow through with an equally exciting reversal of expectations in the video.
Tana Mongeau’s “I SPENT $3,000 AT THE TRENDIEST INSTA STORE: haul/rant” is a good example. You may already be feeling curious to see what items could cost someone to spend that much money on.
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Be Consistent with Thumbnails
In an overwhelming horde of videos that can result from a single search, consistent branding could be your lifeboat. It makes you more distinctive so you can stand out to viewers.
For example, if you see the incredibly popular YouTuber Pewdiepie’s channel, most of his video thumbnails have an image of him on them. Whenever viewers see his thumbnails, they relate his previously great content to newer videos and this generates views on his recent uploads.
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Use High-Quality Pictures in Thumbnails
According to Google, YouTube thumbnails must have pictures with resolutions of 1280 x 720 for the image to appear crystal clear. To make sure the images you select for thumbnails comply with this rule, go for the same size or larger images that can be cropped without quality loss. Do not try to resize too small images unless you want a blurry thumbnail which will negatively affect CTR.
Additionally, you can use thumbnail creators such as Canva which is easy to use and comes with many themes to choose from so you can avoid running into sizing issues.
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Harmonize All Aspects of Your Video
Besides thumbnail, there are other crucial aspects to your video stock such as:
- Duration
- Upload schedule
- Genre
Inability to ensure the consistency of these three elements could hurt your video’s CTR. Making frequent changes to upload schedules, the length and topic of your videos should be avoided. This is why you should:
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Upload at Certain Times on Certain Days
Ideally, you should try to upload consistently at a certain time on certain days. The following is based on prime time viewership hours and lists the best times to post for each day so you can score the most views:
- 2 pm-4 pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays
- 12 pm-3 pm on Thursdays, Fridays
- 9 am-11 am on Saturdays, Sundays
On weekdays, most people get off school at 3 pm or off work at 5 pm. Hence, if you upload right before then, you will get views from people who use their spare time to wind down by watching online videos.
In addition to these timings, the best days to upload videos are later in the week. Thus, we recommend you set a video uploading schedule based on the information above.
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Stick to a Certain Time Length
The duration of your videos should align with the genre of your videos. Moreover, make sure these durations do not vary too much for all your videos.
In general, try not to make overly long videos instead of lean towards short, information-dense videos. If you make it too long and rambly, viewers may lose interest. Researchers have found that videos under two minutes often generate the most views and the number of views is inversely proportional to the duration of the video.
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Utilize the Calls to Action Approach for Every Video
Cards and end screen calls to actions are an effective method to generate more leads to your website and increase your customer conversion rate.
Being open about wanting more shares, views, subscriptions, and likes from your viewers is a commonly employed tool by most YouTubers because it gets the job done. Most people will often forget otherwise. This is supported by research done by Internet Marketing Ninjas which found that a subscription call to action increased channel subscriptions by 3,100%.
Hence, to add end screen annotations to your video, follow these three simple steps:
- On your creator studio menu, click on videos under the video manager section then select the video where you want to attach the end screen CTA.
- From the edit drop-down menu, go to the “End screen & Annotations” option then select the end screen.
- Next, click on “use template” where you can get access to many different templates to link to your website, other videos, or wherever you want to generate more leads.
You can also use cards to generate more leads to your website, do polls, or urge people to like and subscribe during your video. To add this to your videos, follow step 1 as in the end screen annotation guide and then select cards from the edit menu. From there, you can choose whichever type of card you want from the drop-down menu.
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Purchase High-Quality YouTube Views
Amongst the thousands of other content creators competing for views, it may be hard to gain a following as a new creator no matter how good your content is. You may even end up needing a lot more time to reach more of your target audience if you were to keep growing organically.
However, Buy YouTube views could considerably speed up this process. It gives your video the boost it needs to climb up the ranks. Luckily, Galaxy Marketing can help you with just that. It makes buying views incredibly cheap, easy, and you can even add real likes and comments!