12 YouTube Video Marketing Tips

Here are twelve YouTube video marketing tips that will make your videos more memorable and effective. The first group of tips require minimal additional effort on top of what you may already be doing. More time consuming items are included in the second group.

Low Effort YouTube Video Marketing Tips

1. Use a Keyword Rich File Name

Even though the file name is not exposed to viewers, the keywords in the video file name may count toward your ranking in the YouTube search results.  It’s better to use a file name such as youtube-video-marketing-tips.mov rather than video-2011-08-25.mov

2. Set the Video to Unlisted During the Upload

You can change the default setting of Public to Unlisted while the video is uploading, so that the video is not public until you have had a chance to properly set all the options. Unlisted is better than Private if you want to send the link to a few people for review before you make the video public.

3. Use a 16:9 Aspect Ratio for Content

If your marketing video includes a screencast, set your browser and your capture tool to 1280 x 720. For video footage, also use a 16:9 aspect ratio. 720p is fine for YouTube, since most viewers don’t change the resolution from a lower default.

4. Keep Your Video Short

In our short attention span world, it’s best if your video is no longer than three minutes. Some people even consider this to be too long and recommend two minutes as a maximum length.

5. Consider Your Mobile Audience

An ever increasing number of people access YouTube videos via their iPhones, Androids and other devices. Avoid using any tiny print or any other elements that can’t be easily read on these devices.

6. Use Intro/Outro Music or Persistent Background Music

You can purchase very reasonably priced music tracks from sites such as AudioJungle. It’s easy to fade music in and out with applications such as Camtasia, (PC or Mac),  ScreenFlow (Mac only) or iMovie. Incidentally, ScreenFlow and Camtasia both have very easy to use video editing features for non-experts.

7. Get the Voice Audio Right

Never was there video so good that the finished product couldn’t be rendered almost ineffective by poor voice audio.  The maxim “audio is the most important part of video” is a good one to heed.  Here are some audio tips for video.

8. Watermark Your Content

Adding a watermark will discourage others from using your content without your authorization.

Higher Effort YouTube Video Marketing Tips

9. Tweet, Post, Blog and Email Your YouTube Videos

This almost goes without saying, but you should take the time to publicize your video content across a variety of channels.  Blogging around a video can be very effective and we have found, anecdotally, that not as much written content is required for search rankings when a video is embedded in a blog, as compared to a blog post with no video.

10. Add Captions

It is somewhat time consuming to add captions to your video, but captions can add to your SEO value. YouTube lets you upload captions after the fact. Camtasia provides a simple interface for adding captions and exporting a caption file, which can be uploaded to YouTube.

11. Zoom In on Important Content

Zooming in on important content, such as parts of a screen, make it easier for viewers to absorb your message. In the case of mobile viewers, zooming may change content from illegible to readable. However, the production time increases when you add zooms to your video.

12. Post Your Video to Other Sites

While YouTube is the dominant video site, it can’t hurt to make your video available in other places on the Web. It’s very time consuming to manually upload your video to a number of different sites. Fortunately, there are sites such as Hey!Spred that make video distribution much less time consuming.

Please comment below with any other YouTube video marketing tips.