How to Drive Traffic to YouTube Videos

The use of videos for marketing purposes has increased tremendously over the last decade. Many businesses are embracing it and using it to not only drive traffic to their websites, but to also convert leads to customers and create an engaged community.

Marketers cannot afford to ignore video marketing because more people are choosing to watch videos online. This is mainly associated with the growth of popular social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Among these, YouTube is the most popular. It also acts as a search engine.

Benefits of YouTube Video Marketing

Before we get started on how to drive traffic to YouTube videos, here is a list of the key benefits of doing YouTube video marketing:

1. It can help bring in many new customers or clients to your business.
2. It can help market or spread the word about the products your business provides.
3. YouTube video marketing can help your business connect with potential business partners, sponsors, and referrals.
4. YouTube video marketing can also help educate both your current and potential customers about your products.
5. It can help build higher visibility for your business on Google, the most popular search engine.
6. YouTube video marketing can help build your business’ email list.
7. Finally, video marketing can help build your content library for the long term.

So with all the above benefits, what can businesses and marketers do to not only create great content but also drive traffic to their videos?

How to Drive Traffic to Your YouTube Videos

There are a lot of strategies businesses can use to drive traffic to YouTube videos. These could be done through either organic or paid methods.

1. Create a great thumbnail. YouTube thumbnails are the first thing people see when they search for your videos, so it needs to be “click-worthy”. You can use Canva to create beautiful YouTube thumbnails for your brand.
2. Write a great title and video description. Your YouTube title is critical in intriguing viewers and helps to improve your search results. This ultimately helps to attract and drive traffic to YouTube videos as well as your channel. You should also go a little more in depth in your video description — include a keyword phrase, a URL, and a mini-post that briefly describes the content of your video.
3. Add tags to all of your videos. YouTube keyword tags help in improving your videos’ performance and driving traffic. People find videos on search results through tags. YouTube’s algorithm uses keywords and tags to determine which videos are most relevant to a user’s search. The information that you provide about your videos is the language that YouTube interprets to drive users to your content.
4. Leverage cross-channel promotion. This is a highly effective way to drive traffic to YouTube videos. You can write a blog post about your new YouTube video and embed the video on the blog posts. You could also promote the videos on your social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc for video marketing purposes.
5. Focus on creating great quality videos. YouTube awards creators who take the time to create quality videos that viewers will enjoy. Once it notices that you do this, it will start promoting your videos to people’s YouTube home pages as suggested videos. Make videos that can help subscribers learn about how your company’s products will help solve their problems.
6. Pay attention to YouTube comments and engage with your audience. Take the time to read the comments viewers leave on your YouTube videos and respond to them as much as you can. This improves your engagement level and YouTube is more likely to recommend your videos to more people. If you don’t do that, it will come off as if you are ignoring your viewers and channel. In addition, engaging with your audience can help more people interested in the services or products your business offers.
7. Create playlists of your YouTube videos. This makes it easier for your subscribers or viewers to find videos related to certain topics. Start with your most popular or recent videos to get your fans interested, and then let them sift through new and old content. Not only do playlists allow you to group your videos into categories to organize your channel, but they also appeal to your viewers’ desire to binge watch your videos.
8. Run a paid YouTube ad campaign. With video marketing in general becoming more pay-to-play, you have the option to get more visibility for your business through paid YouTube ads. YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to choose from.

Conclusion

There are many strategies a business can use to drive traffic to YouTube videos. The most important thing is to start with whichever strategy you choose and iterate along the way based on performance.

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Do you have any other strategies you use to drive traffic to YouTube videos? Please share them in the comment section below!