Chapter 6 – Strategies for Increasing Your Customer Engagement
Audience engagement is a crucial aspect for growing your YouTube channel, especially in the beginning. Unfortunately, the path to higher engagement with your target audience isn’t that linear.
The YouTube algorithm doesn’t give particular preference to videos with a higher number of views, but instead, it takes the session time of a user into account. This means that you need to hook the visitor, get them to spend more time on your online video, and get them to interact with you in the comments. Here are some of the best strategies for increasing your engagement numbers on YouTube.
Create Simple and Beautiful Thumbnails
Having a simple and eye-catching thumbnail for your videos will increase your customer engagement by 154% according to BuzzFeed. Since our eyes are naturally drawn to images, you'll most likely fail to attract more clicks on your great videos if you use the usual and boring thumbnails. YouTube makes it extremely easy to create thumbnails by giving you the option to choose a custom thumbnail when you upload your videos. You want to make sure that you have a distinct thumbnail for each video that you upload and make sure that they set the users expectations for what they will get when they click on your video.
You also need to make sure that you create a compelling title to gain the attention of your target audience.
Add Annotations to Drive User Actions
If you want your viewers to do something, then you have to state what you want them to do explicitly. If you aren’t upfront with your communications, you run the risk of simply getting more views on your videos without seeing any profitable customer action or increasing your YouTube engagement. An excellent way for you to bolster your subscriptions and increase participation is by using annotations, which are little boxes that appear during the video that remind viewers to take action. The four primary goals of adding annotations to your videos are to gain subscribers, grow your viewership and watch time, interact with your target audience, and drive traffic to your external website.
YouTube also like to see more interaction in the form of comments, shares, and likes, so adding a simple annotation or encouraging viewers to share your videos on their social network can be extremely helpful. You’ll need to experiment with the different types of annotations and their timing to ensure you are getting the best results for your efforts.
The video watch time is a key ranking factor for videos. The percentage of your video watched carries more weight than the number of minutes watched, but you still want to try and improve the score of both. Thanks to our decreasing attention spans, it can be a considerable challenge to get more people to stick around and watch your videos. Reports have shown that on average, a user will only spend 20 seconds on a website. Which makes it incredibly important to grab the attention of your viewers in the first 10 seconds. You also want to keep your videos to no longer than three minutes.
Basic SEO Principles and Marketing Strategies Apply to YouTube
The fundamental marketing principles remain the same no matter what platform you’re using. The only thing that might differ is how you implement the tactics. One thing that you want to keep in mind is that to increase engagement; you have to promote your videos actively. You can do this through email marketing, embedding the video in a blog post, promoting it on social media and other avenues discussed for growing your audience.
You can also increase engagement with your videos by including keywords in your descriptions and video tags. You can utilize Google Keyword Planner to help you determine the best keywords to place in your videos. Using relevant keywords will not only help you appear in YouTube searches, but it can help your videos to rank high on Google and other search engines.
Engaging with your audience will help you gain more subscribers and build your YouTube channel. Leveraging these simple tactics can help you grow a successful YouTube channel for your business.