Last updated on June 14th, 2024
SaaS Marketing Is A Tough Environment
Competition in the SaaS marketing world is fierce. Marketers are asking: Is there a way where we can get a significant edge on our competition without spending too much money?
My vote goes to optimizing the videos you’ve already posted to your YouTube channel.
Surprised?
YouTube is essentially a hybrid animal – in a way, it’s a lot like your blog. You can post a video and it can gain traction in Google search (and YouTube search) and stay highly ranked for certain terms for months or years after it was posted. On a weekly basis, 90 percent of your YouTube views will come from old videos, your “greatest hits” on the channel. For a feed-based platform like Facebook, 90% of your weekly organic views will come from videos posted in the same week – old Facebook videos won’t keep working for you without a paid component.
How Is YouTube Like Your Content Marketing Blog?
Videos, of course, are different than blogs in that companies sometimes choose to spend more money planning and producing them. Much like content marketing lead magnets such as white papers or guides, they can and should be used long after they are produced. YouTube can be a valuable content marketing tool if the videos are shot and optimized correctly.
But let’s focus on your already-uploaded videos for a moment. When you go through your YouTube analytics, you’ll likely see a few things: Some videos have little or no views, while some old videos are getting more traffic than new videos (even if these videos may be out of date). Some videos are not getting good watch time. Some videos may have been uploaded, but because of an error, were never even pushed live. Videos may be in less-than-optimally-named playlists, too few playlists, or no playlists at all. Videos may have no keyword tags, or poor headlines. Videos may not have good call-to-actions in the descriptions – or they may not have descriptions at all.
Upgrade Thumbnails For Better Suggested Videos
And, most importantly, the thumbnail images may not have a common theme that encourages customers interested in your products to quickly find and watch several of your videos. Instead, viewers are lured away to watch videos that are not yours.
These are all common problems, but they can be easily remedied with a systematic YouTube channel optimization. If you can solve these problems, and your competitor can’t, you will win the day. You’ll get more views with better engagement than your competitor. You’ll get better leads, and will convert on more of them through marketing attribution of the links to your website.
YouTube Is Great For Content Marketing
YouTube content marketing is a legitimate part of the customer journey, one that shouldn’t be overlooked. And the beauty of it is, if you can properly re-optimize the valuable YouTube videos you’ve already made, you’re essentially just re-using assets you’ve already made and approved – and actually getting to work better than they did the first time.
There’s another option, of course – you can just give up on YouTube altogether. But that seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it?