Video and any video marketing platform can be a powerful component of social media marketing content plans, and YouTube still leads the pack for video sharing and hosting. A social media marketing feature available for YouTube videos is Annotations.
YouTube Annotations enable the adding of effects to videos. The type of YouTube annotation with the most direct benefit, and the easiest and most sales-effective to work into a video, is a text annotation with a benefit and Call to Action (CTA).
How to Create a YouTube Note Annotation
Creating a text annotation in YouTube is easy. After uploading and optimizing your YouTube video, simply go to your channel’s Video Manager, select the video you wish to edit, click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Edit button and select Annotations.
For a text annotation with a CTA, the most universally applicable type of annotation to select is the Note. To add a Note to your YouTube video:
How to Convert the Prospect
Just as with Google AdWords or social media advertising, creating a well-crafted custom landing page for the advertised product or service will minimize bounces and maximize conversions.
Making the video costs money, as does marketing the video. Each incremental investment increases the importance of maximizing the opportunity. When people click on a CTA within a YouTube video, they have identified themselves as interested prospects. The destination page for the click should make it easy for them to:
This landing page should exist within your website.
In order for annotations to be able to link through to a website, that website must be linked to the YouTube account and verified.
How Not to Use YouTube Annotations
Annotations are so easy to create that it becomes easy to overuse them. More than one annotation, especially when each has its own CTA, will confuse to the viewer. Each detracts from the other’s effectiveness. The less asked of the prospect, the more likely the prospect is to acquiesce to the request.
Another common error is to superimpose text over other text. This renders both elements less readable. This is a fundamental graphic and video production best practice that just happens to be relevant to the application of these types of Youube annotations.
How to use this Information
Calls to Action (CTA) are an important and often overlooked part of marketing. YouTube provides powerful opportunities to place them in front of “warm prospects” at opportune points. When designing your video, look for opportunities to use them effectively.
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