Industrial Marketing Detroit

The CEO’s Guide to YouTube

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Every CEO or business owner should understand the marketing role of their YouTube videos.


YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and YouTube videos should be a part of every company’s advertising and marketing strategy. However, your corporate videos are probably not optimized or really, doing anything to promote your B2B sales.

 

Below, we’ll show you ten easy steps to multiply your company’s exposure using the videos you already have.  But first, we’ll show you why it’s important!

 

 1  Minute About YouTube and Your Business

Let’s get started with a “10,000-foot view” of what every CEO and business owner needs to know.

  • YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world behind Google Search itself.
  • YouTube is an excellent tool to reach new customers, even if you are in the B2B sector.
  • Google Search often shows a preference for video in their search results (why you can see videos right under the paid ads).
  • Your videos on YouTube can rank at the top of search results, leapfrogging your competition even if they have a head start.
  • Your videos should be showing up in your customer’s search results, acting like free commercials, but for this to happen they have to be set up correctly.
  • Your competitor’s videos can actually suggest that your video plays next if you set them up properly. Conversely, you can ensure that your competitor’s video won’t show after your own.
  • It is likely that your existing videos are not properly configured to show up in a Google Search.  This is because your marketing people are not specifically, YouTube experts.  We know this because the vast majority of corporate videos are not properly configured.
  • Properly configuring your company videos only takes about 20 minutes for each video, but most companies just upload the video and do nothing else.
  • Your existing videos should be optimized before spending a dime on other types of advertising! If they are not properly configured, the job is only half done!

 

If you’ve read this far, you may want to spend 5 more minutes on our YouTube action list.  It shows the steps you need to take to correct the configuration of your videos.  There is nothing for sale here, you only need to follow the outlined steps.  However, if your team needs outside help, we are happy to show them how!

 

Our 5 Minute YouTube Action List

If you implement the items in this action list, your videos will be 90% optimized for YouTube.  This will cost you nothing to implement…as long as your people execute.  If they have not already done these things, it’s probably because there is a hole in their knowledge and they did not realize it.  Don’t blame your employees, just ask us for help.

 

If you have existing videos on YouTube or elsewhere, you probably paid an agency or employee to produce them.  These videos should be working as FREE commercials that pop up when your customer tries to solve their problem.  It amazes us that most companies will spend big money on paid search results (like Google Ads or Trade publications) before optimizing this FREE advertising.  Even giant corporations miss these points.

 

To see if your videos are properly configured, go look at your YouTube channel and check the following:

 

  • Is the title something your customer would search for, or does it say something like, “(your company) promotes their T1000 machine”? Put yourself in your customer’s position and think about what they would search for.  Although keyword research is useful here, that is a subject for another discussion.  For now, let’s focus on immediate improvement.
  • Is there a video description and is the title included at the beginning of the description? If the title is “T1000 Milling Machine Makes a Widget” the description might start with, “in this video the T1000 milling machine makes a coupling joint out of 2024 aluminum”.
  • Are there three hashtags (example: #T1000 #millingaluminum #machining) in the description area?
  • Does the video description link back to a page on your website (even better if that page is specifically about what is shown in the video and contains a form to submit the viewer’s info)?
  • Are there instructions for how a customer can reach you (in the description OR on the page the description leads to)? Be specific with an email or contact form link.
  • Do your videos make use of voice narration?  You can double the effectiveness of any video, by adding narration.  A professional narrator costs about $20 on Fiverr and the spoken audio helps YouTube know what your video is about.  It also makes the video a LOT more watchable by the viewer.  Think about it, when was the last time you watched a TV show with music-only audio.
  • Are the keywords relevant (you can’t see the keywords in the YouTube app, but I’ll show you how to do this below) and are some of them related to the title of the video?
  • If you turn on closed captions, is there a transcript in your preferred language (or does it say “auto-generated”)? Google looks at the transcript to “learn” what the video is about.  Auto-generated captions can contain misleading information, like in this video (which has NOTHING to do with Pandas…)
the importance of correcting auto-generated text

It’s important to correct the auto-generated cc text. This video is not about Pandas! It should say, “Ace Bandages”

  • Have you generated captions in other languages?  Your audience may not speak English.
  • Do you have your YouTube videos embedded in your website? Did you shut off the feature to play suggested videos? If you don’t, the last thing your customer may see is your competitor’s video.  Add “?rel=0” at the end of your embed frame to correct this.  For example:

 

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/XLtPd-Yu-Ws?rel=0” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

This will allow your other videos to be suggested when the viewer watches a video from your website.  Not knowing how to shut off suggested videos is one of the reasons many companies say they do not use YouTube.

 

  • Do advertisements play during your videos? It can confuse your customer when an ad plays, or worse, lead them to a competitor.  Shut this off in the advanced channel settings (unless your channel is designed to make money from views, in which case, you probably already know this).

 

Bonus:  See the keywords your competitor uses on YouTube

Keywords are subject-related words that help a customer find your website, or in this case, help YouTube to find relevant videos.  That way, when they show a video, they can locate other videos with similar content that will interest the viewer.  Remember, it is YouTube’s goal to keep you on their platform as long as possible, so they can show you advertisements.

 

To see the keywords that were used for a video, use the Chrome browser to view the YouTube video page.  Right-click your mouse and choose “view page source” to look at the page code.

How to View Page Source

Now search for “keywords” on the page and when you find it, examine the words that appear in brackets after “keywords”.  This is what the person who uploaded the video entered, to help YouTube classify the video.

 

How to view YouTube keywords

If you have a strong competitor, it’s likely that they are targeting some of these terms with their other forms of digital marketing.  They might even be using your company name in the keywords to lead your customers to their videos!  This might give you ideas for your own keywords!

 

Conclusion

If you execute the steps shown above, you can start to realize a significant exposure benefit from your videos.  If you don’t think it’s that important, look at it this way:  would you pay to produce a radio or TV commercial and then hide it in your desk?  Of course not, but that’s the digital equivalent of what most companies are doing.  The good news is you can use the steps above to quickly get the “commercial” back in circulation to drive new business!   If you need some help or want to have an outside professional evaluate your current situation, please contact us at Info@SixFootLever.com

Darren Dawes
No YouTube channel yet?  Let us help you create a channel on YouTube for business, the RIGHT way!
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A Lack of Website Content May Kill Your B2B Company

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Your technical website “content” is the difference between showing up in the search results or fading into obscurity.

The “content” on a website, simply put, is the textual and visual information that conveys a message to your customer.  At its most basic, it is a description of the product or service.  At its best, it educates or solves the reader’s problem, helping to convert them into a lifetime customer. Content is rapidly becoming critical to helping your potential customers find you through a search engine.  It is critical that you build useful content on your company’s website.

While companies that sell to the consumer market are very good at creating content for their websites, traditional industrial B2B companies are, for the most part, failing miserably. Content for such a business tends to be more technical in nature, requiring more than general marketing knowledge to create.  As a result, many industrial companies ignore it altogether.  The underlying reason for a lack of content creation seems to be this:

Your marketing professionals don’t fully understand your technology and your technical people are not well versed in marketing.

Is it hard for you to explain what your company does, to someone who is not in the business? That’s not unusual in the Industrial Business-to-Business world because these products often require specific technical knowledge to be understood.  As a result, many companies operate under the assumption that their business is too technical to take advantage of online marketing techniques. However, many businesses that formerly ranked at the top of the search results are now disappearing from the first page, due to a lack of CONTENT on their website.  Doing nothing is a path to obscurity, as younger generations rely almost entirely on search engines to discover new companies.

If you suspect your organization suffers from a lack of content, we can help.  Six Foot Lever LLC specializes in teaching your team to create beneficial Technical Content.  Our people have the technical experience and education to understand your technology, along with the marketing knowledge to get your message out.  However, there is a lot you can learn just by reading the rest of this article.  By the way, this article is essentially content marketing for our own company (whoa, meta!).

A more detailed explanation of what is meant by “content” is in order, along with why it’s important.  Have you ever read a “blog” or an online review?  When the author is genuine in their intent (not just trying to rank for keywords) they try to help the reader solve a problem or teach them something useful.  Search engines (especially Google) recognize this and try to take into account the “content” on a web page or site when displaying results.  This is why you often see consumer reviews, lists, or how-to articles in the results.  Someone has taken the time to write valuable (we hope) content for their reader and the search engine attempts to provide that information to their user.  At the same time, this content helps the search engine to figure out what your website is about.

For example, if you (as a Google user) search “how to apply sunscreen”, Google will attempt to find results that will be useful to YOU (try it!).  Those results appear right under any ads (hint, “how-to” searches tend to show fewer ads for some reason).  Because this is a consumer product that everyone uses, competition would be stiff to get your content on page one of the search results.  There will likely be a LOT of content out there for any consumer product searches as people try to lead you to their review or e-commerce website.

Now let’s search for a more technical subject, like “how to measure roundness” (roundness being one of the technical terms in metrology).  There are a LOT of companies out there that make metrology equipment to measure this feature.  But look at the results and how many metrology companies do you see?  On the day I did this (7/12/17), exactly one metrology company showed up on the first page, Taylor Hobson (link to article).  Every other result was a definition of roundness or a methodology.  This gives a sizable publicity edge to Taylor Hobson, as they were the only company SELLING A PRODUCT to show up in the results.  So how did Taylor Hobson do this?  By writing TECHNICAL CONTENT that was USEFUL TO THE READER. Whether it was a conscious effort or not, I do not know.  But, in their efforts to provide useful content on their website, they ranked for the search term “how to measure roundness”.  That may not be the exact term that YOU would use to find a roundness gage, but it can be assumed that many people looking for a way to measure roundness, may need a roundness gage.

All of this will come as no surprise to a content marketer, but many industrial companies are missing the boat because they aren’t even aware that content matters. Anyone familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) would also point out that context matters, but this subject falls outside the scope of this article.

Google, in particular, has become more content-driven over time. This means that Google is ranking sites based on how useful they are to their own users.  Prior to Google addressing this in their algorithm, search results might have shown the site with more backlinks or the website with the most relevant keywords.  Of course, no one outside of Google knows the WHOLE story of what they are ranking sites for.  The point here is that GOOD CONTENT, in context, improves your chances of being found by your potential customer.  So, if you sell a technical product or service and don’t have good technical content, you may not even show up in the results.  Worse, much of the effort your marketing team did in the past may now be irrelevant.

You can hire marketing people or contractors, but unless they have the capability to understand your field, the best they can do is run ads based on keywords that you provided.  It is wise to supplement this by creating USEFUL content around the same keywords.  Unfortunately, your marketing people may not be able to create this content on their own.  Having your engineer create content can also present a problem as they may fail at capturing the reader’s interest, or at conveying the marketing message.

The Six Foot Lever team can assess your current capabilities and can usually train the people you already have to become more effective.  For smaller companies that do not have a dedicated marketing team, we can handle all of your content creation needs, for a very reasonable cost.  Sometimes a single presentation to key people is all that is needed to kick off your content creation efforts.  Email us to learn more, or use the contact form below: info@sixfootlever.com

Darren Dawes
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Note: This article is meant as an introduction for business owners who may not be aware of the importance of content creation.  It is not intended to be a definitive guide to content writing.  Many details were left out in the interest of brevity.

 

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Industrial B2B Video Marketing

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Merry Christmas!  While you are enjoying the holiday break, we’ll be hard at work bumping your business down the first page of Google’s search results.  Well, maybe not your business specifically, but more than a few B2B companies will return from the holidays to discover that they no longer hold a top position.  How we do this may surprise you because it doesn’t involve paid advertising.

First, a frame of reference:  Over the last ten years, Google has placed increasing emphasis on “content”.  This is not new.  Content, in this context, is the written word on your website which is useful to the reader–in this case a prospective customer.  This is well understood in the B2C world and among the larger players in the B2B world.  However, most small to mid-size businesses are doing a terrible job on their written content.  They are so far behind that they may never reach the first page of Google search results.  But there is hope, because…

Another form of content is video–and here is where things get interesting.  Even small B2B companies can reach the top of page one with video.  We know, because we’ve been doing it for the last year, displacing larger and better-funded players.  What may be surprising is that we’ve been doing it not only with YouTube, but with other video services like Vimeo.  It seems that for now, Google is giving preference to video not only from their own YouTube service, but from other platforms as well.

If you are a B2B company selling your wares to industrial customers, you probably already have plenty of video content that can be used to help new customers find you, but you need to know what to do with it.

At Six Foot Lever, we’re standing by to assist you.  But if you’ve already burned through your marketing budget for the year, here is a holiday gift for you:

Our 2019 Video SEO Checklist will get you started in maximizing your existing video content.  If you take a little time to follow the steps, you’ll be well on your way to the first page of search engine results, using the video you already paid for.

What could be a better gift for your business than free advertising?

 

 

Six Foot Lever is a Detroit-based marketing firm specializing in industrial B2B customers.

 

 

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2019 Video SEO Checklist

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Maximize the videos you already have so they appear at the top of Google search results, with our 2019 B2B video SEO checklist.

Google is showing a preference for video content in the search results and you can make this work in your B2B marketing. It’s no surprise that Google wants to bring people to YouTube, but what is surprising is that they are showing a preference for video…even if it’s on a different platform.

If you aren’t ready to pay a pro to do this for you, don’t worry.  You can go a long way by following the checklist below.  The checklist does not tell you every small detail, but with a little searching, you CAN do this yourself.  Our YouTube checklist is also helpful if you aren’t looking for a Detroit-based marketing and advertising agency but still want to use the know-how of the Six Foot Lever team.

Beginner’s Video Content Checklist:

  • Create a video in HD (a minimum of 720, but 1080 or 4K is better). This video should have narration because YouTube (Google) has the ability to identify spoken keywords in a video (first Pro Tip to maximizing your video’s impact).  Obviously, everyone wants their video to have perfect editing and branding,  but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress.  A product video shot with your iPhone is better than nothing.
  • Upload the video to your YouTube channel. Don’t neglect to fill in your channel description.
  • Fill in the video description!  We’re surprised at how many people skip this step or put just one line of info because some “marketing expert” said the description doesn’t matter for SEO.  Although it’s unlikely you will be able to measure an impact in search engine results, YouTube still needs to know what your video is about so it can be associated with other videos.  This is key to someone discovering your company after watching your competitor’s video.  Explain what your product is doing in the video and be sure to use keywords from your industry (words and phrases your CUSTOMER would use to find you).
  • Put a link in the description back to a relevant page on your website. If this product can be purchased on an e-commerce site, make sure to link it as well.  Preferably, these pages have some of the information from the video description, which lets Google know the page is relevant.  Put your contact info as well, so a prospective customer can find you.
  • Fill in the keywords section with terms that YOUR CUSTOMER would use to find your product or service. If you engage in keyword research, remember that in the B2B Industrial world, key terms may not show significant usage.  This is where conventional marketing agencies often fail, using keywords that have more searches, but much lower relevance.
  • Embed the YouTube video on the page your video linked back to.
  • Now repeat these same steps on Vimeo.com (second Pro Tip). The format is different, but all of these steps can also be implemented on Vimeo.  For the time being it appears that Google is being “fair” to Vimeo by showing their videos alongside YouTube results.  This could change in the future, or maybe Google is doing this because they are going to buy Vimeo later.  Who knows.  What I can tell you is that we’ve ranked Vimeo videos above competing YouTube videos.  We’ve even ranked a Vimeo video right next to an identical YouTube video, pushing the other video competitors to the right, in the slider (off the page).
  • This last step is the hardest to do but can have a significant impact on the search performance of your video: create and upload a closed caption script.  Although YouTube will auto-generate captions, many technical terms will not translate correctly.  There are services that will do this for you, but we find that an easier way is to just correct the auto-generated text through your channel dashboard.

 

Bonus Pro Tip

If you’ve read this far, you should be rewarded, so we will outline a strategy that no one (if anyone) is using.  When you link to a YouTube video from your webpage, you may have noticed that other videos play at the end of the video.  Often times these are competitor’s videos.  We see this all the time when people use a YouTube link on LinkedIn (if your marketing team has done this….PLEASE let us show them how to handle video promotions on LinkedIn).  You need to use the embed code for the video, rather than a simple link and then change your end of video settings so they do not autoplay.  But there is another way.

Instead of putting your YouTube video front and center, put it at the very end of the page with a sentence above it that says, “Here’s the same video if you prefer to watch on YouTube”. *

Now go back and embed the Vimeo version of your video on the web page, where appropriate.  On the Vimeo platform, you can control what video plays next (set this in the video settings).  So your customer will see other video content from you after the first video, even if they follow the link to Vimeo.  Vimeo also allows you to embed an email sign up form, or buttons to bring them to your store, front page, contact info, etc.

Chances are, your customer will not watch the video on YouTube, because they’ve already watched it on the Vimeo link.  However, by putting it at the bottom, your page will still enjoy the benefit of being cross-linked to a Google platform.  You should also consider that many IT departments block YouTube from their employees (last Pro tip) but Vimeo is often left off the blacklist.

In summary, the Vimeo video is the content for your customer, but the YouTube video also brings in outside viewers and helps with SEO.

Hopefully, this tip list gets you started in the process of ranking your videos at the top of search results.  Remember, you don’t have to be in the Detroit area, or even in Michigan, to hire the Six Foot Lever digital marketing team.  Email us at info@sixfootlever.com to see if we are a good fit for each other.

*Make sure to turn off the YouTube suggested video feature (as shown in this post), which will force the player to suggest your other videos at the end.  However, this only works if the viewer does not follow the link to the YouTube site.

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