Distilled are excited to announce the launch of the Distilled Guide to Online Video Marketing.
This interactive guide helps take on the daunting task in easily accessed and saved chapters for your future reference.
Check out the Distilled Guide now or download the pdf version to work through offline and start integrating video into your marketing plan.
The YouTube Creator Playbook covers two dimensions of YouTube marketing very intelligently: content and audience. But as we mentioned two months ago when Version 2 was published, a third dimension was missing: advertising.
Now, there’s an Advertiser Playbook that shares best practices and tips on how video can be a core part of a company’s advertising program. It covers: getting started with video, managing your videos, promoting your business, and tracking your success.
The new Advertiser Playbook also includes a collection of templates to help you develop a creative strategy and write a script about your business as well as a storyboard and shot list and an equipment checklist. You will want to set aside at least six hours to read the 122-page step-by-step guide.
Download the Playbook to learn best practices and strategies to create compelling content and build an audience on YouTube.
Facebook is the go-to social network for social advertisers, and the site has certainly proved it’s value in returning good results and awareness for brands. Youtube is a less obvious choice for many marketers, yet it’s an excellent platform for running social video ads and can prove to be cost-effective while delivering real business results. Many businesses of course, will be put off by Youtube as they may not have the necessary video assets to fully capitalise on this, but Youtube’s promoted video option is something that brands should focus on and you don’t necessarily need to invest in full-scale video production, if you have a clear strategy in place to make the content work for you.
To provide some context on how Youtube advertising can work, the video below shows the impressive figures behind Youtube homepage takeovers. While this is a much more significant advertising undertaking for brands than a standard promoted video campaign, the figures show how engaged audiences are on Youtube. Google and Compete recently ran a report into the effectiveness of Facebook ads, with some surprising results. Given that the ad report was commissioned by Google, these findings are of course skewed towards the positive, but they are useful nonetheless.
Read More: effective Youtube video ad campaign
Optimize the raw file before upload with the same catchy yet keyword rich title you plan on giving it for life. Flip to your title and may trigger related videos from keywords in the file name.
Title, Description & Keyword Tags - Create a catchy title and description and choose your keyword tags. Make sure your desired keywords are present in all three.
Description Link - You have the option to place an active link in the description. Take advantage of it! Just make sure http:// is there.
Choose Your Thumbnail – Videos gives you an option for the thumbnail users will see in the SERPs.
Select Your Category - internet, education, entertainment, how to & style, etc.
Channel & Watch Page Views - Share in other social channels. Engage your community and seek to build it! Feature the video on your channel page.
Advertise in Promoted Videos, Facebook, Stumble Upon and much more Try TUBE MOGUL to upload in several video portals
Engagement (Comments, Thumbs Up/Down, Favorites) - The easiest way to boost engagement is to actually be a part of the community. Give and you shall receive. Remember, users must be logged in to their account in order to engage with posted content.
A user who finds your video from a Facebook embed will be less likely to comment, rate or favorite your video than a logged in user who found your video in. One last tip: always allow comments. If you’re concerned of what users will say, set the video to allow comments after approval.
Annotations – If you have several videos, use annotations to link them together. Use annotations for calls to action as well.
Links & Embeds – A diverse set of links and embeds: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Vimeo, Website, Blogs, etc. You never know– any given account user could also be a very active member of a forum that could potentially drive tens of thousands of views to your video.
Subscribers – Users often subscribe to Video users who regularly post content and are active in the community. There are benefits to having both types of connections.
Widgets - Use Widgets like Wibiya, Meebo & others to share video via social Networks
Over the last few months, YouTube has made it clear that it’s keen on helping its premium content partners monetize as effectively as possible — and it’s obviously having some success doing it, with the number of monetized views increasing rapidly. Today the site is launching a new feature that will give those monetization rates another boost: YouTube Promoted Video campaigns will now be able to appear on a video’s ‘watch’ page, turning the product into what’s effectively an ‘AdSense for YouTube’.
For those that aren’t famililar with the terminology YouTube uses to identify its pages and advertising products, here’s what that means. Up until now Promoted Video campaigns have been primarily shown on search result pages — I might run a campaign with “guitar” as a keyword, and when someone did a search for that term, my video would show up as a promoted result. In this sense, the program was quite similar to Google’s AdWords feature. Today, though, YouTube is going to begin showing Promoted Videos on the ‘Watch’ pages, where videos are actually shown alongside comments and related other content. Promoted videos that appear here will be matched with the content that’s already on the page, hence the AdSense comparison. Anyone running a promoted video campaign will be able to choose if they’d like to stick with the old product (displaying their video in search results) or on the Watch page.
Premium content partners will also benefit from the product — whenever a Promoted Video is matched against a piece of content they own (or that they’ve identified using Content ID), they’ll get a cut of the revenue as well.
I spoke with YouTube Product Manager Matthew Liu, who says that the addition is part of YouTube’s overarching goal of increasing the amount of money its partners can generate (the more money they make, the more content they put up — and YouTube makes more money in turn). Before now, the site has done this in a few ways: it makes it easier for partners to monetize more videos with Content ID, which lets them monetize UGC, and highlights parter content as Featured Videos, which drive more traffic by heavily promoting the videos to YouTube users. And, obviously, today’s release will let them earn revenue through yet another channel as users begin running Promoted Video campaigns against their premium content.
See the YouTube Biz blog
for more.
If there was any question about the significance of the iPhone 3GS’s impressive video functionality, here’s your answer: YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by a whopping 400%. For a single phone model to have such a major impact on the site is simply phenomenal.
Even without the iPhone, YouTube is seeing major growth across the entire mobile space — the site has seen uploads go up 1700% over the last six months. It’s not hard to guess why. Video-enabled smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, as are high speed data connections. YouTube also attributes part of the growth to a streamlined upload flow (note how easy it is to upload a video from your iPhone to the site), as well as its improved sharing capabilities (you can now syndicate your videos to services like Facebook and Twitter).
As the still-nascent iPhone 3GS continues to take off and more people figure out how to use the video sharing functionality, these figures are going to skyrocket. Other phones are increasingly getting in on the action too, like Android phones, which introduce direct-to-YouTube uploads with the 1.5 Cupcake update.
The implications for this are huge. Lowering the barrier to uploading a video will probably result in an increase in the silly user-generated content that litters YouTube, but it will also streamline the uploading of more significant videos. As our commenters point out, an increase in mobile uploads could very well spur the ‘iReporter’ movement, as citizens upload video taken at the scene of a newsworthy event as soon as it happens (we need look no further than the protesting and tragedies
in Iran for examples).
