Whilst there’s an abundance of entertaining content on YouTube such as car drag races, car reviews, best motorsport moments and hilarious fails, it’s an essential tool for automotive marketers. Many of the automotive brands that we speak to and work with often have a presence on YouTube but the vast majority of the time, they have a very small audience and aren’t taking full advantage of the platform. Here are our top tips on how to grow your automotive brand’s YouTube channel and get more from video marketing.

Video Uploading and Optimisation

Title

We’ll start with the title as this is arguably the most important element that needs optimising. Your target keyword (following research) should be naturally inserted into the title whilst also keeping it concise and compelling. However, if your keyword isn’t a natural fit and is potentially misleading to viewers then don’t force it.

Description

The description isn’t as important as your title but it’s essential to optimise your video to rank in YouTube and Google Search. Front-load the description with the most important information including any links you want the viewer to see and calls to action as YouTube only displays the first 100 characters.

Custom Thumbnails

When users are searching on YouTube the main thing that’s going to stand out to them alongside your title is your video thumbnail. Custom thumbnails are an absolute must. They should stand out while also clearly sending a signal to the viewer about your video’s content. A great thumbnail will have a huge impact on your video’s clicks and views.

Tags

Use a range of tags (short and long-tail) that let your viewers know what the video is about. YouTube utilises tags to help understand the content and context of your video so only use those that are most relevant. As with the descriptions, we’d recommend leading with what’s most important first.

Captions

Adding subtitles and closed captions to your video is great for accessibility and also for highlighting important keywords. A supported text transcript file will need to be uploaded under the video manager.

Add Cards and End Screens

Adding cards and end screens will increase your YouTube channel’s viewership by prompting viewers to subscribe and pushing them to other relevant videos on your channel. Up to five cards can be added to a single video and the options for cards include “donation cards”, “channel cards”, “link cards”, “poll cards”, “fan funding” and “video or playlist cards”. End screens can be used to display similar information to cards and are more visually detailed but they don’t show until the end of the video.

Channel Specific

Welcome Video

Not only does a welcome video make it easy to communicate with new visitors about the purpose of your channel, but it also creates a level of personal engagement that is not possible through the written word. A welcome video is all about increasing engagement. You are not talking to someone, you are talking to your target audience. To make sure the video is not too ‘by the book’, try to create a more personal approach that appeals directly to your audience.

Channel Description

A YouTube channel description is a quick way of communicating what your automotive brand is about and what videos you produce and can quickly convert a casual visitor into a subscriber in seconds. Similarly to a video description, only the first 125 characters of your channel description show up in the YouTube search results so it is key to focus on these characters. It is also important to make the benefit of watching your videos obvious, including keywords that your ideal viewers search for. This is especially important as a business.

Video Creation Tips

Length of video

In the past few years, the general trend on YouTube has been to create longer videos, however, the rule of thumb for marketing videos for automotive brands is to keep the video length under two minutes. The optimal video length depends on where you share or embed it. The average audience retention rate on YouTube is between 50% and 60%. This is why the last part of your video is so important, if you are achieving retention figures less than average, then maybe you should consider dropping your video length slightly.

Quality

As we move into a new era of online video, with over 300 hours of video being added to Youtube every minute, now more than ever it is crucial for Automotive brands to shoot in high-quality video formats. The main reason for this is the devices we use to view videos are changing with consumers using new 4K monitors and HDTV’s to watch content. As WDA’s Videographer and Editor, modern camera systems are constantly evolving, gaining new features and are capable of shooting 6K and even 8K quality footage. While you might think this involves extremely high prices for equipment, it actually means that HD and 4K cameras are becoming cheaper and more accessible. At the moment I recommend your company should be shooting in at least 1080p HD and no more than 4K.

Keep the viewer engaged with different angles

When it comes to the engagement of your videos, the use of different camera angles can drastically change the impact of different shots in your video. An example of this is shown below:

As you can see, the use of more creative and varied camera angles will maintain the interest of the viewer for longer than if you use standard angles. One point to note however, is that it is okay to use wider, more standard shots like the first image, but make sure you also use a variation of angles alongside it.

First impressions count!

Recent research has revealed that the average attention span of humans is just 8.25 seconds. This means that if the audience doesn’t like what they see in the first 5-10 seconds of your video then they are going to leave. This makes it very important to hook your audience using different video techniques such as high paced cuts, exciting camera angles and movements, a catchy soundtrack and different lighting setups. It is also important to include narrative video techniques to spark the viewer’s curiosity.

Promotion

Creating awesome video content often isn’t enough. Your audience needs to find it! While this can happen naturally organically, particularly if keyword research etc. has been carried out, promotion is essential. There are several ways in which you can promote your automotive video content to get it in front of your desired audience, these include but aren’t limited to:

• Sharing across your brand’s social media channels as a full length video and snippets.
• Embedding the video on relevant pages on your website and blog.
• Sending out an email to your customer database.
• Invest in advertising on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
• Consider other paid advertising platforms focussed on native content ads such as Virool (video-specific), Outbrain and Taboola.

Not creating enough video or don’t have the capability in-house?

Here at WDA, we can offer professional videography capabilities and the benefits of an unrivalled automotive market knowledge and understanding. We can offer a variety of different camera, lighting and sound equipment. As well as good access to automotive resources – cars, accessories, locations, studio, personalities, influencers and props. One of the mistakes that a lot of automotive brands make is putting all of their efforts and investments into video production, only to neglect video marketing. Specialist video production agencies can often make decent content, but then fail to get it in front of the right people. At WDA, we don’t just create incredible video content, we get it in front of your desired audience! Discover our videography and video marketing services:

https://wda-automotive.com/content-creation/video/

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