Thanks to its enormous user base, YouTube has become one of the world’s most frequented website and the second largest search engine, only trailing behind Google. And with both being owned from the same company, the YouTube videos get even more exposure from Google’s search results, which provides the videos with even more exposure to searchers. These facts make YouTube one of the most attractive marketing choices available to any online marketer.

6 billion hours of video views per month

More than one billion unique users visit YouTube each month and they watch 6 billion hours of videos monthly. The crowd comes from all over the world, with 80% of the traffic coming outside of the US. But even domestically, YouTube reaches more adults aged 18-34 than any cable network, according to Nielsen. This makes it very easy for a nicely done marketing message to go viral over the globe in almost no time. And it’s already being done. Some of the biggest brand average tens or hundreds of thousands subscribers and views going over 50 million.

You have to fully engage your viewer in seconds

Why videos though? There is a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, so if you multiply that by the number of frames in your video, you get the idea of how much you can express through it. A good video builds your brand’s awareness and disseminates links, creates conversations, boosts your SEO and most importantly, it engages the viewer. This only happens with good videos though, which means that you have to fully engage your viewer in the first bare few seconds of the video or lose it. A successful YouTube video:

  • Creates conversations
  • Encourages sharing
  • Engages the viewer
  • Gains trust
  • Provokes interest

Videos are shared 30% more than other types of content

Sharing makes your effort worth it even more. Since videos naturally increase engagement and interest, it only makes sense that they get shared more. Videos are shared at least 30% more than any other type of content across all social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Websites that include videos in the mix alongside images and plain text will create more inbound links. They also cause the visitor to stay on your website longer, extending the visit time by an average of nearly a full minute.

Successful videos answer the viewer’s questions

The key to crafting successful videos on YouTube is to ensure that the content is entertaining and educational at the same time, answering the questions that the user has and would search Google for otherwise. Videos should be targeted according to your marketing strategy, but incorporate both:

  • Localization – This is very important for companies that want to increase their brand awareness and get loyalty from their viewers.
  • Globalization – It should be available everywhere, regardless of location or device used. It is very important that the video is watchable on any mobile device.

The keys to proper YouTube marketing

When engaging the power of online marketing through YouTube, your strategies shouldn’t solely focus on the video. A strong title, description and tags optimized with your campaign’s keywords are what help a video go viral. You can then bring additional exposure to the video through your email lists, company network and social media accounts. If that doesn’t do the cut, then you can advertise on YouTube as well. Yet another advantage of YouTube as a marketing choice is all the statistics and data you get. Marketers can easily analyze how effective are their campaigns, tracking metrics like views, likes, dislikes, favorites and channel subscribes. Good YouTube marketing:

  • Embeds the video across other places, including but not limited to blogs, social pages and websites.
  • Places the video in newsletters, press releases and other marketing types.
  • Links to the brand’s YouTube channel in other places like print or PR materials.
  • Tags the videos in order to have them visible on YouTube searches as well as other search engines.
  • Uses text for content, surrounding the video with your relevant keyword

YouTube is a remarkably powerful online marketing medium which major brands have successfully implemented to boost their engagement. Has yours?