As digital marketing has grown, video has fast become the go-to content format for people studying products or services before buying them. Videos educate, entertain and engage, ultimately driving conversions. Video speaks to various audiences, including the 2.74 billion monthly active users on YouTube.
YouTube remains a robust video marketing platform despite being overcrowded. Here, the problems for brands is to rank high and be visible to the correct audience. And if there’s one ranking factor to concentrate on in your YouTube marketing strategy and content production, it’s watch time.
What Is a Good Watch Time on YouTube?
Best Practices for Increasing YouTube Watch Time
Deliver a Killer Opener
You have 15 seconds to catch your audience; Let’s run through a list of helpful video openers and explain why it’s necessary to see viewers’ attention in the first few moments.
• Begin with a question, a statistic, a quote, fun or anything that provokes their interest.
• Discuss a pain point and ensure them a solution.
• Give them valuable content.
• You can apply a template to your videos, particularly if you tend to arrange them by category. Check out the opener of the series.
A powerful opener speaks to the shrinking concentration span of humans, but it also tries to deliver value. Getting your audience means you can decrease bounce rates, which is great for YouTube SEO. Bounce rate relates to the rate of visitors who left a site after seeing a single page.
Leverage YouTube Audience Retention
Working on the audience recognition YouTube metric can influence a video’s watch time. By the 1:35 mark, the video now lost half of its audience. If there were 1,000 starting viewers, the watch time YouTube would report at 50 per cent audience retention would be about 790 minutes. But if it held all of them at the same mark, the video would have timed about 1,580 minutes. Get that attention retention of 50 per cent is perfect for YouTube SEO.
Create Longer Videos
Suppose you could make a six-minute video rather than a three-minute one about a great topic. Say 1,000 people viewed each video in its completion. The total watch time for the smaller video would be 3,000 minutes. But the longer one would have acquired 6,000 minutes!
Make it 10 minutes if you have relevant to say and keep your video’s focus throughout its length.
Zero In on Your Ideal Audience
It’s no mystery that YouTube is saturated. In your trade, there might be numbers of brands competing for the same people’s attention. How do you reach out from the crowd? Don’t make videos for everyone and expect it will land. Find a niche in your trade and target people who are involved in it. This is where audience persona study, a YouTube CRO tactic, comes in handy.
Creat a Value-Adding, High-Quality Video
• Content/story is king
People relate to brands, concepts, products and services when they’re shown in a story. Your target clients or customers will click more if you make them the star of the story you’re telling.
• Good-quality sound
Audio is an ignored part of videos, but it’s a great tool to evoke emotions in your viewers. Think about the correctly timed music or sound effects in your favourite film.
• Good-quality lighting
This speaks to both the quality of your light equipment and lighting techniques. Playing with darkness and light lets you give visible depth to your video. Also, understanding when to use high-key lighting or low-key lighting helps your YouTube optimization efforts.
• Well-crafted title and description
As Per YouTube SEO best practices, add your exact-match keyword in the title and broad-match keyword in the description, make sure the usage runs naturally. These features can increase your watch time and YouTube engagement rate.
Also Read: Top 9 Trends in Digital Marketing in 2021
