As you already know, videos have an significant impact in communication strategies of all sort of nonprofits or Social Entrepreneurships. They are now an integral part of the online marketing mix.
Making the extra effort to optimize your video and make it easier to find and to rank in Google, Facebook and YouTube platforms is essential to improve its impact on your stakeholders. Whether it’s a funding campaign, a behavior change campaign, …
Here are some tips on how to optimize video and increase the impact it has in your communications strategy. You can find a checklist in the end of the article.
In order for you to optimize your video, you need to know how your are going to evaluate it (what are the most useful KPIs). And to know that, you need determine what is the goal of your video:
An extra tip: make sure the video is not too long. Most of the top YouTube videos are around 3 minutes long. For more info, check this article.
Google is not yet able to watch and understand what your video is about and how it relates to your stakeholder’s needs. So, you need to give relevant information about your video, in order to Google can relate it to their searches and profile, and to rank it against other videos on the same subject:
You’ll need to choose a good thumbnail image to entice views:
Submit a Video Sitemap – To speedup and enhance the discovery of your video, you can create a video sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. These entries need to include: video title, page url, video url, description, thumbnail. Click here for more info on video sitemaps.
Use Schema Markup – To help your video stand out in general search results, use schema markup to provide the information Google needs: video title,page url, video url, description, thumbnail, video duration, upload date, height and width. See here what is expected from a schema markup and validate yours here.
If you want to change a behavior or raise support and really engage with your stakeholders, you need to convert awareness into action. For that you might want to focus in a good CTA.
Thinking in YouTube platform, you can place great CTA by using annotations, end screens, cards or even the video description.
Some suggestions:
Have in mind that the most crucial hour for YouTube algorithm is the first hour after it is uploaded, followed by the next 23 hours. So it is important that you use that moment to promote and share it.
Here are some tips to promote it: