You may have heard the age-old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But did you know that a minute-long video is worth a million words? According to a Forrester Research study, it’s 1.8 million words.
The potential to provide such a massive amount of information in a short time has made videos the future of content marketing. So it’s not surprising to see a majority of entrepreneurs and digital marketers using videos to achieve business goals.
And it’s working like a charm for most of them! A study found that over 85 percent of marketers said that videos enabled them to generate more leads, and over 80 percent of them directly attributed videos to enhanced sales. Another survey revealed that nearly 95 percent of businesses gained customers using videos on social media.
One of the significant factors of a successful video marketing strategy is optimization. If you are looking to optimize your videos, you have come to the right place. This blog post discusses ten effective strategies to optimize videos.
- Know your target audience and select the suitable topics
The first step of the video optimization process is to choose the relevant topics for your videos. You have to understand your target viewers and find out what types of content they love to watch. There’re many ways to go about it.
Consider using analytical tools, feedback forms, and other systems to select relevant topics. Find out the search terms your target viewers use to find related videos. Ask your subscribers and community members to recommend topics.
- Have specific goals in mind
After selecting the topics, it’s time to decide what message you want to convey and what you want to achieve from the videos. For example, do you want your target viewers to take some specific actions? Do you want to educate or entertain them? Do you want to enhance your brand image with the videos?
Selecting one or a handful of goals will help you stay focused and deal with one idea at a time. This will streamline your thought process, and the result will be a coherent and articulate script.
- Make sure videos are of high quality.
The quality of your video matters a lot to your brand and target viewers. Need proof? A study found that more than 65 percent of viewers care about video quality. If they watch a video with poor quality, they will view the creator and publisher negatively.
On the other hand, high-quality and professional video optimization services can enhance your brand perception and command the attention and respect of your viewers. So while shooting the video, keep a few things in mind. First, ensure the lighting is perfect. Check the background and conduct a sound check. Finally, test all the equipment required for the shoot and ensure they are working fine.
- Craft attractive video titles and descriptions
Titles and descriptions are as important as video quality and content. Attractive and appealing video titles and descriptions can entice your target audience to click on the video. That’s winning half the battle.
Now the question is, “what’s the perfect title length?” As per Statista data, as of March 2021, nearly 55 percent of top-ranking videos on YouTube had between six and ten words in the title, whereas about 27 percent of top results videos had titles with five or fewer words.
Apart from crafting attractive titles and descriptions, use relevant primary keywords in them. It will enhance searchability, visibility, and ranking. Use keyword research tools such as YouTube Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ads Keyword Planner.
- Use relevant hashtags
If you look at the descriptions and captions of most of the best-performing videos, you will find they all have two to three relevant hashtags. The right ones will make your videos more visible and enable viewers to find the content they’re interested in.
However, make sure that you don’t overstuff your YouTube descriptions and social media captions with too many hashtags. Don’t ever consider using irrelevant hashtags. Using two to three relevant ones is more than enough.
- Create appealing thumbnails
A thumbnail is the preview image of a video. A good thumbnail gives a glimpse of the video and attracts target viewers to click on it. Nine out of every ten top-performing videos use custom thumbnails as per YouTube.
After shooting the video, create an attractive and informative thumbnail. If possible, use some graphic design tools or take professional help to create special effects and include relevant texts. The right thumbnail size is 1280 pixels by 720 pixels with a minimum width of 640 pixels. The image size should be less than 2MB with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
- Create captions for better accessibility and watch time
Creating captions will take some time, but the results will be worth it. Captions enhance the video SEO and enable new viewers to find relevant videos as per the topics they’re interested in. It also will enhance the video’s accessibility to much broader viewers, including those who don’t know the language and those with some form of hearing impairment.
As per data, videos with captions have a 91 percent video completion rate. Furthermore, as per another study, captioned videos have more average view time and 80 percent more viewers watch those completely compared to the uncaptioned ones.
Even though YouTube has an automatic caption feature that can transcribe videos in 13 languages, the video-sharing platform recommends adding captions manually for higher precision and clarity.
- Include a call to action
You may have created a high-quality video with a strong screenplay. Your topic is highly relevant, and the title, thumbnail, and description are captivating. But if you haven’t added a relevant call to action (CTA), it defeats the entire purpose of creating the video. So, after completing all the above steps, work on a targeted and suitable CTA. Once you choose the right ones, you can influence your target viewers to take the desired action after consuming and digesting the content.
- Leverage social media
Apart from publishing the videos on YouTube, upload those (or their clips) on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Apart from that, upload the video or parts of it on the relevant web pages of your website. This will enable your visitors to watch your videos. This can also earn you more subscribers.
- Analyze performance and plan future content
After uploading the videos and promoting them, the last but most crucial step is to analyze their performance. Monitor the stats and insights and find out the best performers and the underperformers. That will help you plan your future content as you can learn from your previous content and know what to do and what not to.
By and large
With more and more businesses and marketers using videos, the competition to create high-quality and well-optimized content has intensified. Without video optimization, winning in the video marketing strategy is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Knowing the proper video optimization techniques or taking the help of a professional video marketer can help businesses to remain ahead of the curve.
