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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

For campaign objectives

  • Analytics. Analytics help you see how your channel is performing. It gives you key indicators on views and watch time.
  • Playlists. Playlists are a good way to categorize your videos. Also, you can use them to guide your viewers to watch videos in a specific order.
  • Info cards. Info cards are a good CTA tool that can help you drive your audience to your website or to other videos.
  • Annotations. Annotations allow you to layer text, links, and hotspots over your videos, so you can drive your audience to websites, videos, playlists, or channels.
  • End-screen annotations. End-screen annotations are just like regular annotations, except they are limited to the last 20 seconds of each video.
  • Branding watermarks. The dynamic branding watermark appears at the bottom right of each video and allows viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
  • YouTube Live. YouTube Live allows you to do live broadcasts, which can help you directly engage with your audience in real time.
  • Featured videos. The featured video option allows you to tell your YouTube channel to feature one specific video across every video on your YouTube channel.
  • Google Ads linking. Connecting your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel will help link both accounts, giving a smoother correlation between ad performance and video/channel views, and for better campaign measurement.
  • Verified websites. YouTube allows you to associate one URL per channel. This means that you can associate your brand website to the channel, so you can insert it into annotations and end cards.

Analytics and playlists

  • YouTube analytics gives you detailed information on how your content is being consumed. It can help you see what content is working and what content your viewers are liking. It can also provide key indicators on how your content should be optimized.
  • YouTube playlists allow you to create designated lists of videos that users can watch in a specific order. They allow marketers to guide viewers through multiple videos in a series, and to build a desired brand narrative or timeline.

Info cards, annotations, and watermarks

  • Info cards appear on the top right of your videos as an ‘i’ icon. These cards can help you drive your audience to where you want them to go; for example to a playlist, to your website, or to another channel that you manage.
  • Annotations are in-video pop-up messages that allow you layer text, links, and hotspots over your videos. They help to enrich the video experience by adding information, interactivity, and engagement. It’s important to know that annotations do not work on mobile devices.
  • Dynamic branding watermarks appears at the bottom right of your videos. You can designate that they appear throughout your videos or at the end of your videos. This watermark helps to identify where the video comes from. It’s particularly useful when a video is embedded on a third-party website.

End-screen annotations

  • End-screen annotations can appear during the last 5 to 20 seconds of your video. You can add up to four different end-screen annotations per video. You could use them to ask people to subscribe to your YouTube channel, watch other videos, visit your website, or watch playlists.

YouTube Live and featured video

  • YouTube Live allows you to live-stream your content. Live streams are a great way to engage with your audience in real time.
  • Featured video allows you to set up a pop-up suggested video across all owned channel videos in order to drive views to that video. Featured videos appear as pop-ups on the bottom right of your videos.

YouTube and Google Ads linking

If you plan to run ads to promote your YouTube channel, it’s a good idea to link your YouTube channel to your Google Ads account. This will help match your paid media statistics with that of the videos you plan to promote.

Associating a website to a YouTube channel

YouTube allows you to associate your website to your YouTube channel. This will allow you to drive viewers off YouTube to your desired website from YouTube annotations, info cards, and end-screen annotations. YouTube channels can only be linked to one website url at a time.

Watch history

Watch history allows users to view what previous video content they have engaged with, and is only available to users who are logged in.

Subscriptions

When signing up to YouTube, a user automatically gets a YouTube channel. Signed-in users can subscribe to channels they like and want to follow. This way, they’ll be notified when new videos are uploaded by the channel they’re following.

Subscribers are important. They have indicated that they want to watch your content, so they’ll watch it for longer. To get more subscribers:

  • Use annotations and end cards to drive viewers to subscribe
  • Ask your audience to subscribe within your content
  • Put a link in your channel description, asking people to subscribe to your YouTube channel

YouTube API

YouTube’s API is available to developers. This means if a developer wants to build tools to help YouTubers and brands manage their channels, they can do so.

Voting (likes and dislikes)

Viewers can give feedback by clicking ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ on each video. This is a great way to see if they’re enjoying the type of content that you uploaded.

Watch Later

Watch Later is a function on YouTube that lets users add videos to a playlist that they’ll watch at another time. Not everyone will watch a video the moment it has been uploaded. So don’t get discouraged if only a fraction of your subscribers watch your videos on day one. Many will return to watch the videos in their Watch Later lists.

YouTube Red

YouTube Red is a paid membership that gives you an enhanced experience across YouTube. It allows viewers to watch videos without interruptions, and offline. It also has a background feature. This means that you can watch or listen to videos in the background, while you’re doing other things on your mobile device. From a marketing perspective, this means that your audience won’t be exposed to paid ads. However, all YouTube content is still available to watch via YouTube Red.

Plugins and Apps

TubeBuddy and VidIQ are Google Chrome extensions that help you manage your YouTube channel and video content. They help you streamline your tasks when you have channels with many videos. You can bulk-update titles, tags, thumbnails, and much more.

TubularLabs is a cross-platform video analytics and intelligence tool that helps you with your channel engagement. Its dashboard helps managers track high-profile channels that engage or follow your channel, and gives an overview of what the competition is doing on YouTube.

Amara is a tool that helps you with your closed captioning. You can use it to write your own closed captions, or you can use its services to pay somebody else to do closed captioning for your channel.  

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Carlos Pacheco

Carlos Pacheco is the Vice President of Audience Development at Boat Rocker Media. Managing a team dedicated to online audience growth, Carlos has grown YouTube channels to have millions of subscribers and billions of views. Follow Carlos on Twitter on @carlospache_co for great social media tips.

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

YouTube and Social Video
Carlos Pacheco
Skills Expert

This module introduces the concept of social video marketing, focusing on YouTube. It begins by outlining the benefits of incorporating social video into your marketing campaigns, and provides best practices for doing so. It then teaches you how to set up, customize, and manage a YouTube channel, and how to use the platform’s features effectively. It also teaches you how to use enhancement features to improve your video content. Finally, it provides you with the tools and knowledge you need to build an audience for your videos, and to use YouTube Analytics to measure their performance.