How to Make an Engaging Video for YouTube
First of all, I want to syndicate you for leveraging YouTube videos in your content marketing strategy. It’s a wise choice. The demand for video content keeps growing, and you do not want to be left out of the game.
43% of people want to see more video content from marketers. “(HubSpot, 2016)
But how are your videos doing?
If you post videos regularly but do not see any increase in views and engagement, you may not be putting enough thought into your video creation process.
Why Is Video Quality Crucial?
You’re probably tired to hear that quality matters. But I can not stress enough about how important this is.
You have to increase your YouTube video ranking in order for people to come across your videos and get the chance to enjoy them.
Although it’s true that a video’s quality does not directly influence YouTube video ranking, it still carries a lot of weight.
If the video is bad, no amount of YouTube SEO can make it shine.
Let’s say your video ranks high in search results and people click on it. But the video’s quality is poor and users click back after a couple of seconds.
Besides not getting the chance to turn viewers into customers, this behavior hurts your ranking badly.
How is that?
One of the main YouTube ranking factors is the Audience Retention.
The longer users watch your videos, the higher the ranking . YouTube wants its users to be held on YouTube for as long as possible, so if you keep the audience entertained and on the platform, you’ll be rewarded for it.
As YouTube states in Creators Academy: “Your goal is to keep audience retention as close to 100% as you can (because this means viewers are watching all the way through your videos). potential to show up more frequently in Search and Suggested locations on YouTube. ”
I hope that you’re now convinced that you have to put effort into creating engaging content that keeps your audience interest going until the end of the video.
How to create videos that keep the audience watching?
High-quality audio & visuals – The way you deliver your content in terms of audio and video quality plays a huge role in retention. If the sound or image is bad, people will not stay around long enough to find out what they can learn from you.
Let viewers know what they’ll learn about in the beginning – Around 20% of viewers will fly off after the first 10 second of the video if they are not certain the video is showing them what they are looking for. Make sure to point out what they will learn in the beginning.
Introduction – Like I said above, it’s easy to lose the viewers in the first 10 seconds. You want to make sure your introduction is engaging and captivates viewers’ attention so you make them stay around for the whole content.
Do not ramble – Especially if you are in the beginning, you’ll be tempted to create those long introductions with unnecessary information that tend to put people to sleep. Keep your introduction on point and get down to the main content.
Script your videos – Do not just place yourself in front of the camera and start talking. Plan your videos ahead of time and script them. This will ensure you’ll stay on point and cover the most important aspects of the topic without losing your ideas on the way.
Predict audience’s questions – One way to trigger viewers’ curiosity is to address questions they might have to which you’ll be answering later on in the video. Let’s say you make a tutorial on how to be more productive and you mention about the Pomodoro technique at some point. Saying something like “You’re probably wondering what the Pomodoro technique is. I’ll get to it in a minute” will keep the viewers interested to watch the video further.
Final thought
Put enough thought into video creation as it will not be enough just to have content. You can do as much YouTube SEO as you can for your videos. If the content is bad, your videos will not rank.
When you have high-quality content and do some SEO video optimization, it’s almost certain you’ll rank YouTube videos on the first page.
