58% of marketers believe content marketing is the most appropriate strategy to expand the product in the market. 🤓

Why do marketers believe in it?  Is ContentMarketing so essential for real?

If you genuinely don’t know where the content marketing headed to then probably you are one step away from quitting it.

Creating a content marketing strategy gives the direction to steer your customer’s attention and drive quality leads. It helps to develop a friendly relationship with the audience and stay on top of the audience’s mind through various means.

Content Marketing is much cost-effective than other traditional advertisement methods. In today’s time, it encourages you to enhance the conversion almost three times higher than traditional methods.  It gives the brand awareness of an existing brand to the AUDIENCE.

Crafting compelling content not only educates, inspires, entertains the demanding buyers but also gives the solutions to their pain points.  Apart from everything else, marketers do business to receive a vast amount of return. So for that purpose, you have to pull your audience towards your product by producing the quality content which helps them in their buying decision.

All set? 🙌

What strategies do you need for Content Marketing?

60% of marketers tried their best to produce fresh content each day.  Content is King 👑 has been the phrase of the last decade and still holds true. Before start marketing your product or brand in front of the immense ocean of customers, you must know the answers to these questions:

1. Why is Content king?
2. How does it matter?
3. Why content is the heart of marketing?

Content is a king because it keeps the ATTENTION of the audience and gives the ANSWER to the problems.

Take it this way. If you don’t know about any terminology or you want to cook something new. Do you Google for it?

I am presuming there were more YESes than NOs. So, you see, whatever your writing, your audience will read it. You just have to figure out what to write and where to publish it so as to get the maximum return off of it.

The focal point here is to craft compelling content, share an experience, address the idea that makes the pulses of the audience beat. In easier words, your content should have a solution to their query and some valuable information that earns your respect. It gives a strong brand impact and attracts the target audience towards their shop or website.

Content is the heart of your marketing, and it matters a lot to your business. It has a magical power that takes your brand where you want to. You can build brand awareness, the authority to attract the prospects towards your website, and prompt them into sales customers. ✌

And once they start trusting you, they’d literally do this.👇

Do you know Content Marketing is the most vital aspect of the company’s reputation? 😕

Absolutely yes, content marketing certainly proves that it has an integral part and also a backbone of promoting the product and building a brand’s reputation.

Don’t you get the feeling of how important it is? 🤔

Marketers crafting content, that’s somehow altered to one another in the market. Although how they relate, and delivery the content to the audience that matters. Because when prospects read your content, they will create an opinion or a picture in their mind about your brand.

Having expert-written content helps educate the audience, make them aware of the surroundings, provide a slew of benefits that create a warm and trustworthy relationship with them. Once you give a sense of curiosity related to your brand, there will be more people taking an interest in your product, and you will receive a quality lead or conversion to your landing page.

Challenges of Content Curation?

While content marketing, you might face some challenges like content curation. If I talk about myself, then I would love to stay observant or up to date, and I’m sure you would too. So, targeting the audience and your potential customers with the updated facts, figures, and highlighting their issue is kind of a complex task.

At this point, you need a fantastic social media management tool for curating content and sharing daily updates to the audience through social media channels.  So, what do you say? 🙂

Well, cut the crap and get into it. 👇

We all know, 2019 holds a lot of stuff for you in the store. Now, it’s all up to you how you make the right choices for your brand.

Yes, it is an imperative struggle to move your business out there and strive to make sure it works for you.

Quite hard? Right? 😫

So, here I will definitely recommend you a tool which is more or less the most appropriate choice for you ever (totally unbiased, promise 😉)

And, the tool is. 🥁

ContentStudio, you probably have heard about this tool before too. If no, then no worries. I’m here to give you a detailed insight into it.👍

ContentStudio helps you curate the most trending content, compose the content, and schedule the content all across your social channels merely to catch the prospect’s attention. This is what each marketer looking for.

It also allows you to write a blog, fetch the content from different other web modules, refine the content for the desired audience, and present the content in a way that is easy to digest. ✌

How influencers could help the business expose their product to the novel audience.

Apart from all, some times it gets tricky to find the Influencers who have more social audience engagement, more followers, etc. If you genuinely want to keep the online brand presence across various social channels, then you have to build a trustworthy relationship with the buyers through influencers.

Influencers have an essential part in today’s online business. It helps to promote your product in front of the audience and increase revenue. They have a warm connection with a different niche and a massive reach in the market.

Generally, influencers have a piece of profound knowledge about the appropriate subject, which prompted the niche audience to accept them and give more priority to their recommendations.

So, without moving from a couch or leaving a cup of coffee, you can find the leading influencers in the market by using ContentStudio. Fascinating? 😍☕

Okay, let me clarify to you. ContentStudio always tried hard to stay on the top of the audience’s mind and help their business to grow organically.

ContentStudio introduced another engaging feature name is Influencers to the audience, so stay tuned. I’m going to demonstrate to you a little bit more. 😳

ContentStudio empowers you to hunt the most famous author or leader in the market. It enables you to find the most relevant influencer, blogger, or writer to present your product to the new audiences who might be not familiarized with your band before.

You can filter your search by influencers type, region, and language. After finding the influencers in your niche, you can follow them, add into your favorite list, view their social engagement, and build the outreach strategies surrounding them. 🙌

Does a Call-To-Action improve the website?

CTAs are extremely important in PPC for content marketing. It helps you to deliver each value content to the audiences by adding a clear and engaging CTA.

In simple words, both your Content and CTA have some comparable relation with each other: Content provides entertainment, information, motivation, and CTA creates excitement to dig deeper.🤔

The most satisfying thing about CTAs is: you can produce a tailored message for the segmented audience, which assists you to educate the right audience at the right time through the right CTAs.

Interesting, right? 🤓

If you want to influence the potential buyers at the pivotal moments, then you should go with Replug which helps you to create customized CTAs for each piece of content to attract more people towards your website.

Well, this article guides you about how different companies improved their conversion statistics by simply improving their  Call To Action.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that enables you to create and distribute estimable, relevant, and consistent content to the audience that educates them, helps you build brand awareness, and grows an online presence.

Many content marketing challenges may occur during your journey. You just have to be clever when choosing the platform that provides you the answers to your questions and helps you to lead your strategy with your product.

CTAs assist you to convey your message and inspire the audience to perform a certain action against CTAs and convert them into your clients or loyal customers.

 

It has been estimated there are over 3 billion active users spend at least two hours on different social media channels every day. Social media marketing strategies make it easier for businesses to stand in the market and get quality traffic and profit through social media by adding another revenue stream.

‘People don’t buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.’ by Seth Godin. In order to effectively run a social campaign, marketers need to establish a relationship with the people and find ways to earn their trust.

Let’s take a look at the factors to maximize influence on social networks.

Identify the Actual and Potential Reach

Reach means how many people visit your website, see the targeted ad and convert it into customers. In the marketing world, customers are a significant part to boost your marketing efforts, sales and receive high ROI in return.

To reach the audience, you need to identify the group and target your product. There are two ways you can measure reach.

• Actual Reach
• Potential Reach

Potential Reach

It is based on the total number of followers you have on your social account. Let’s take an example of the ContentStudio.io Twitter account for your sounder understanding. ContentStudio has 8,602 followers, who are able to view tweets and retweets. That 8,602 is the potential reach of the ContentStudio on the twitter account.

Actual Reach

It means how much your potential customers are reaching the post on social media channels. The customers who surely viewed your shared post in their timeline. ContentStudio’s actual reach to the post is 7,184 as shown in the below image.

To identify the potential reach, you need to view the variable while classifying the customer’s group.

• Geography
• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Benefits

After that, you need to define the target audiences and create a profile for them and compare the rival profitability holding a similar product in the marketplace.

Columnist Steve Olenski provides you guidelines that helps you to connect with potential clients and generate more leads. These guidelines based on ten steps.

• Survey Customers
• Research Your Competitors And Find Out Who Their Customers Are
• Target Ads
• Smart Social Media
• Respond To Every Email, Tweet, Facebook Comment, And Phone Calls
• Affiliate Marketing
• Establish Trust In Your Community: Publish User Reviews, Get Likes, Syndicate Articles
• Connect With The Right Influencers
• Post Relevant Content On Blogs
• Craft An Engaging Newsletter To Foster Leads

Address your customer’s need and preferences

People who are new to the marketing game need to identify the customer’s needs and wants. Marketers should deploy strategies after addressing customer’s behavior. Customers are the most valuable resource for every business person to attain a share and get maximum profit in the market for a long time.

A need is “something that solves an actual or imaginary problem.” says Jorge Baba from Game-Changer.  Needs are the basic necessities of the customer which should be fulfilled at any cost.

Wants:   It’s a desire of the customers to buy some products to satisfy the need. That’s why the small segments need to be a target with a unique product in the market.

Demands: The customer who is willing and able to buy a particular product at a given price.

To meet demand, your product should be a pain killer, not a vitamin. So, it’s essential for the market to research the customer’s preference through different social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and many more before designing a product.

With the technology transformation, the customer’s behavior also evolves with time. Nowadays customers give more priority to online shopping and payment rather than doing it manually.

They expect the manufacturer to be able to do so with the product in order to satisfy their needs. There are a few tips that illustrates how you can find the customer’s preference while serving the product or service in the marketplace.

• Identify who your customers are
• Find out their shopping methods
• Invest in customer research
• Conduct a customer satisfaction survey
• Develop a good customer contact strategy
• Assist in developing relevant marketing strategies

Explain your goals and objectives

The goal is measuring the end result which consists of one or more objectives or chunk. The objective should achieve within the time frame to accomplish the goal.

Every entrepreneur needs to identify the goal and objective of the business and describe it to the audience. It gives the marketers direction to the destination they are looking for.

There is a certain criterion that helps you while creating a smart goal and objective.

• Specific – Your goal should be specific that which audience you’re going to target.
• Measurable – Your goal should be a measure that means where exactly you want to stand.
• Achievable – The goal must be attainable and not hard to achieve.
• Relevant – Goal should be relevant to the objective that what you are trying to achieve or why do you want to reach this goal.
• Timely – Your goal must be achieved at its given time frame.

There are plenty of social networking sites that helps marketers to set their goals after engaged with the customers.

Using different platforms not only help in generating more leads and traffic but also assist while setting smart goals and objective. Marketers can easily accumulate the pool of information where they need to invest and utilize the resources, time and energy.

Organization goals explain the audience what product’s value they have, services, solutions to their problems and organization goal-related activities.  It motivates the consumers to acquire the product for their personal benefit.

If the entrepreneur’s goal is to hold a 40% market share with the product, then he/she need to design unique strategies that contain a set of actions to actualize the goal.

Create quality content

Creating content is all about how you attract or persuade the attention of the audience. Writing great content is the best approach to advertise your content all over the world through smart social media channels.  A marketer should come up with an exceptional content idea that inspires, educate, and inform the audience to modify their lives and business.

Facebook is the most successful platform for marketers to market the product or brand. It has estimated that Facebook has around 2.2 billion active users.  Another social networking website is Instagram, most of the marketers earn huge revenue using these social channels. Instagram has around 1 billion active users.

These social media channels make it easier for marketers to attain a market share and develop a reputation for your product or brand. Utilizing these platform markets can engage with the audience, identify the competitor’s activities and also find out the customer’s behavior.

This is very important to know which market you are going to target with the content. There are the best three ways to give value to the target audience.

• Create unique and original content
• Make content actionable
• Be a resource

The information marketers provide in the content must be accurate, based on facts and figures, short in size, easy to understand. The customers find the solution in your quality content and also enhance their knowledge experience, monitor leads, and traffic to your content.

Marketers produce content for the customers looking desperately for. You need to consider the loopholes of the competitor strategies and how you fill it with the unique marketing tactics.

As an example, the content produced by the Backlinko or Sumo is of a pure gem. If you look at their case studies, you will find most of the things are based on pure facts. Here is one of their article How Intercom Generates $50 Million Annual Recurring Revenue.

You can write visual content and spread all over the different social channels, Visual content consists of:

• Images.
• Screenshots.
• Memes.
• Infographics.
• Video

By creating quality content, companies like DollarShaveClub reached $1 billion acquisition by making only one video viral on social media channels.

A similar story is of Font Awesome which raised over $1,076,960 on Kickstarter with only a single video. Though Font Awesome has been used by many companies, to reach a milestone over $1 million is through by putting high-quality video content.

Convey a message: Put it in an infographic

Infographics bet on two words ‘Information’ and ‘Graphics.’ It means providing information with the graphic images to easily recognizable the product or brand at once.

Infographics are a very reliable way to share a piece of complex information in a simple and clear image. Marketers utilize this valid method to spread their content on multiple social networking channels. It’s obvious that people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they perceive and perform.

There is a case study that gives you the idea of how you can share your content on multiple social platforms and the value of the infographics.

Infographics is a kind of storytelling which capture the attention and enhance the social engagement of the audience to your brand and established a genuine connection with them

It’s is a broad type of visual communication that includes data and images. Marketers try to present extensive information in a graphic format to the audience to convey a message related to the product. 

Customers more preferred to visual content text rather than textual. Infographics have the ability to raise your sales and business reputation in an eye-catching manner.  People engage more with social media channels to know or learn about something and share the information with others.

We have an example that illustrates to you how infographics affect the content in a positive manner. Here is a travel agency infographic which demonstrates their customer from top to like a story. It tells from the destination to baggage in useful content the customer can easily classify while planning a trip.

There are seven tips to create infographics for your business.

• Make one big point
• Use simple combinations of primary colors
• Space it out
• Choose three quality fonts
• Come up with a solid, eye-catching design
• Decide on what’s important and what’s not
• Make it addictive

Boost your reach – Using Hashtags

Hashtags is a word or expression that interprets the message related to a specific topic by using ( # ) hash sign on different social channels. Nowadays hashtags are a vital element to boost the reach or target the audience all around the world utilizing multiple social channels. It helps people to find informative data and enhance their experience.

Marketers use hashtags to represent their brand reputation, convey a message related to the product and established a warm connection with the clients.

“Hashtags are supposed to be short and concise. Every time you’re writing to them, pay attention to this rule. If they’re too general, you’re likely to be using the wrong words. Effective marketing is always targeted for marketing.” – J.D., Digital Marketing Specialist at Rush My Essay.’

The one thing which is notable for every businessperson that hashtags should be relevant to the product which shows the attribution of the products, simple and easy to interpret by the audience. 

Here are some suggestions which help you while adding Hashtags on pretty popular social networking sites.

Instagram: In order to increase social engagement towards your content or post marketers require to adhering less than 11 hashtags.

Facebook:  One of the best sites to boost your marketing reach there you need to add 2 hashtags. One should be branded hashtag, relevant to your product or brand and another must be worth pursuing.

Twitter: If marketers crave to get 2* social engagement towards their product then they need to hold minimum hashtag on Twitter. Twitter has a set of rules and regulations. They restricted the entrepreneur to use minimum hashtags like one or two for each post.

According to Brandon Stanley ‘Hashtag Marketing can boost Social Media Effectiveness Up to 40% ‘

There are plenty of tools that help the marketers to the hashtags on different social channels. I’d suggest you Hashtagify to use the right tool for monitoring the hashtags and engage with the customers.

It gives you the ability to search any hashtag, explore famous trends and choose the best hashtag for the brand campaign. You can monitor the performance of the hashtags on different social channels and track influencers to produce new ideas.

You can also automate your report to view the market results and share with the people to prove yourself how well you are performing than rivals.

Use marketing tools

These social online marketing tools make convenient for the merchant to run the campaigns on various social channels and track the valuable insight and the performance of the campaign.

In the digital world, marketers can easily examine the target customer’s taste and preference through the social network. In 2019, social media users are expected to reach about 2.5 billion people all around the world every day.

Marketers should stay active on social channels because people retain more with these channels to keep in touch with others and want to know what’s going on around the world. The user follows or interacts with their favorite brand on any social channel because they perceive the content and information campaigns more valuable.

Let me explain to you some fantastic social marketing tools to improve your marketing campaigns.

ContentStudio

I hope you have heard about it. ContentStudio is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools for social media marketers, individuals, businesses and digital agencies. It helps them boost their marketing activities by curating content, automating their social campaigns and managing their brands.

It comes up with tremendous features that help marketers in various ways. Using AI technology, ContentStudio brings the most popular content from all over the world and facilitates you to use its smart features and gain more social engagement towards your marketing campaigns on a complete auto-pilot.

Replug

Replug is a URL shortener and link tracking platform that also allows you to add eye-catching and branded call-to-actions or retargeting pixels to any page on the web which you can later share on your social network channels to increase your brand awareness and traffic. 

With Replug, you can create branded shortened links with your custom domains. You can add a call to action to every link which you shared on various domains and identify the traffic which is generated from domains where you share that link.

Through CTA’s, you can engage your audience towards your site when they are about to leave or capture leads by showing an optimized opt-in form. Now it is effortless for you to create brands and campaigns in a more optimized way.

KEYHOLE

KEYHOLE gives the ability to understand how your audience feels about your brand or product and rivals product. It helps you to understand the conversation and the sentiment around it. It gives you the chance to don’t miss significant conversion rates.

You can easily understand themes, trends and audiences to better cater to your target market’s requirements. Capture every significant moment of your event and access real-time engagement data to amplify your event reach as it runs.

Save your team hours every week by using Keyhole to aggregate metrics, monitor and analyze your campaigns, and build reports. Find and connect with the most relevant and engaging influencers in your industry.

Portray your appearance as a brand

Brand image is the general impression of the product or service.  You have listened more often ‘The first impression is the last impression’. The way you portray your product will create an impression of your business in the sights of the target audience.

According to Jerry McLaughlin, “brand is the perception someone holds in their head about you, a product, a service, an organization, a cause, or an idea.  Brand building is the deliberate and skillful application of effort to create the desired perception in someone else’s mind.”

Brand images are one of the prominent elements which differentiate your brand identification to others brand.

The brand image represents the mission, vision, unique attribution of the product, and brand voice to the target audience.

In the digital marketing world, there are multiple brand designs that help marketers while building a strong brand foundation.

• Typography
• Color Palette
• Form/Shape
• Logo

If the audience feels estimable after inspecting the brand image, then they will automatically turn into your loyal customers and spread the reputation of the brand with others on several social network channels.

The important thing which marketers always keep in mind that the character they used to explain the brand personality in the brand image has a positive perception in front of the audience or people inspired with the entity then there are the chances that the customers can easily interpret the brand message in the right way.

Let’s take an example of Coca-cola who has a massive margin all around the world with a revenue of over $44.29 billion. It is not just a firm but an economy.

Coca Cola is a brand known for happiness, pleasure, and a great experience. It is the ‘original cola’ and has a ‘unique taste’.

Coca-Cola Company has registered as one of the largest marketable brands with 94% of the state acquiring the red and white Coca-Cola brand Logo.

Coca cola’s presence in more than 200 countries and serves to 1.9 billion people on a regular basis. In fact, out of the 55 billion servings of all kinds of beverages drunk each day.

You can survey the marketing history of the Coca-cola, the strategies they were used in early ages and how they got the idea of the bottle and much more.

Stay Proactive

Proactive is action-oriented behavior, being proactive the marketers instead of waiting for the problem, change, need or things happen in future they try to seek alternatives solutions or opportunities and give their best to handle it effectively.

The marketers should continually look forward to marketing tactics and actively engaged with the audience using numerous social media channels to make things proceed.

For attaining a market share, the marketer needs to study the trends. It’s is the best way to running in a marketplace instantly. So marketers must spend quality time on different social sources to understand technology advancement.

Spending time on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and etc also gives you the strength to understand the audience so you can develop a persona according to the identified target audience.

A proactive enterprise sets the budget first because all digital tactics need an investment consist of the team, executing, implementing, advertising and etc.

Marketers just need to focus on qualitative and quantity distribution. Both are a major aspect of marketing products or services. You can find the analytics against the campaign which you spread on multiple social media channels.

It’s difficult to find the social marketing tool where you can curate niche relevant content, tracking the performance of the campaign and find the analytical of social sites under a single station.

Tackle customers complaints

Every business deal with the complaints of the customer. It is a challenge for the entrepreneur to handle it with patience and professional manner. By ignoring complaints, they quietly leave and get the product from the competitors.

To maximize the ROI, you have to listen to your customers carefully and assure them that you will work on it. Markets need to ask the question to the customers that what they expected about the solution to their problem.

As a successful organizer, you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and view the obstacles of the customer in their perspective rather than your own.

Salesperson seeks to employ ‘You statement’, whenever you’re talking to the client it feels them valuable and respectable. If the issues arise then apologize to the customer rather than blaming other staff or departments. Try to avoid giving excuses to the audience in advance.

There are five strategies to handle customers’ complaints constructively.

• Stay calm
• Listen well
• Acknowledge the problem
• Get the facts
• Offer a solution

Analytics tools for measuring performances

Analytics is a more refined way to accumulate data related to different marketing trends. It also gives you the direction where marketers need to make improvements to achieve their goals more effectively and grow share in the business.

With the extensive use of social media channels, marketing strategies dramatically evolved to satisfy their customers. Businessmen need a tool to enhance campaign performances and marketing efforts all around the world on multiple social networking channels.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a platform that helps the entrepreneur to get a profound understanding of your customers. It gives them the ability to understand site and app users to entirely evaluate the performance of your marketing, products, and more.

Marketers can operate with Google’s advertising and locate valuable insight to reach to the target audience. Process and share your data instantly with an easy-to-use interface and shareable reports

According to Mariam Naficy, Founder & CEO, Minted

‘Google Analytics helped us optimize our art marketplace, resulting in 400% year-over-year revenue growth for our art business’.

 

Conclusion

The factors mentioned above are simple and obvious to understand the impact of the social networking channel to advertise your product or band all over the world.

We have discussed briefly how you address your customers and provide them with a quality product and content to give the idea of your business.

With ContentStudio, Replug and other marketing platforms to track the performance of the campaign and brands in your marketing strategy.

 

 

The Importance of video content marketing

As reported by CISCO, videos amount for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. Youtube, the Mecca for online videos report that an astounding 5 billion videos are watched every day. Within the digital marketing community, videos content persistently aids in lead generation. A video allows you to see the face behind the case and gives a sense of confidence while online purchasing.

With such humungous daily traffic, it was only imperative that digital marketers joined the party. With so many eyes, it is an ideal opportunity to present your case. The only thing that needs to be perfect is your ad copy. In this article, we will discuss how you can share links on YouTube to keep your viewers engaged.

Links on Youtube

Many businesses are of the impression that only having a presence on Youtube is enough. This is not true.

There are quite a few ways you can share links on Youtube for advertisement. This includes sharing links in the description box, the comment section and linking within the videos. Sharing a link on the video itself can be done by two methods, one from either ‘cards‘ that pop up in the frame of the video, or clickable ‘end screen‘ elements that are overlaid on the video itself.

Let us explore these methods one by one.

Channel page and banner

This is the default channel of any brand on Youtube. It contains all basic information regarding the creator, type of content, a small video showing the nature of the content and a banner image.

 

 

The first place you will see the links on a Youtube channel is the bottom right-hand side of the banner image. The link you should be posting here should be to your main/ money website or to your landing page. Placing it here will invite people to click on it and draw traffic leading to conversion.

Right beside the link to your main website is a space to link your social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Linkedin pages. This can be done by clicking on the “about” section, click on the “links” icon and filling in the necessary URLs.

You can add multiple links here which will then appear on your banner.  The first link you put here should be your main website or landing page. One important thing to remember is that the first link will be a “Do Follow” links which means that it will contribute to your SERP. The remaining links you can use for your social channels or other URLs.

Your banner link in also associated with the analytics feature. This means that you will get statistics about how many clicks your primary banner got.

Links in the Video Description

Many YouTubers who want to give shoutouts to other pages and references to songs in their video use the phrase “Links are in the description”.  It is an easy way to promote your secondary channel or for affiliate marketing.

There are however a few challenges to sharing links in the description. The first one is that people usually use the link without copying the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Not using “https” with the link you use in the description will make the link you share seem as normal text.

Strict rules by Youtube ensure that you always use “https” so that the links stand out from the text and looks like a clickable item.

The other thing that people forget while sharing links in the description box is using “Branded links”. If you have a healthy number of views on your videos, using branded links is an opportunity for advertising and conversion.

Let’s take an example.

This video has been viewed 35 million times. This means using branded links, there are 35 million possible conversion opportunities from just one video. Let’s see another one

PewDiePie is a very famous video game player and commentator who has a huge following. Look how in the image above he has used branded links effectively to promote a brand to 83 million people just from a single video.

The other great thing about branded shortened links is that they increase brand recognition. Sharing engaging and relevant content with your branded domain associated with it will increase visibility and improve recognition.

A branded link instills trust which in turn increases your CTR. By being willing to share your brand name with your link it offers a guarantee that you are leading them to the destination suggested in your link.

Link on YouTube Videos

In the early days, annotations were the only way to add links directly in the video. However, people did not like this method because of its intrusive nature. They popped up unwanted and disrupted viewing of the video.

To improve the user experience, Youtube introduced Cards and end screens.

Youtube Cards

Cards are used in Youtube videos to incite actionable results from the content. They let you add more visual components with underlying objectives to your YouTube videos instead of just annotations, making your videos more interactive.

There is no specific point in the video where the card should appear. The card may include images, outside links, and even content that’s downloaded when viewers click.

Youtube cards can be categorized into 5 categories.

• Video or playlist: Promote your video content.
• Channel: Promote another channel.
• Donation: Feature a nonprofit or cause of your choice and encourage donations.
• Poll: Encourage viewers to engage in a multiple-choice poll.
• Link: Link to an approved website off of YouTube.

Adding Cards to your Youtube Videos

Let us explore the steps required to add cards to a Youtube video. Navigate to Youtube video manager in your profile and select the video you want to add the card to. Click on edit, right below the video title.

In the top navigation bar click on the Cards tab.

Here you can create new YouTube cards to add to your video. Click “Add Card” and then click Create to the right of the card you want to create.

Fill in the necessary information for the particular type of card you have selected to create. Let’s assume you selected channel.

Once you’ve added the card to your video, you can adjust when the card will show up in the video. Just drag the card on the time marker below the video to the spot when you want it to appear.

You can set up multiple cards once you have verified that the first one looks fine.

End Screens on Youtube Videos

The purpose of an end screen is similar to that of a card. The difference is that whereas cards can appear anywhere on the video, end screens appear in the last 20 seconds. They provide the user with the option to view similar videos or be redirected to a website of their choice.

Optimizing end screens for better results

End screens drive the most traffic out of all link sharing methods on Youtube. Your CTA should be clear and persuasive, and it should flow naturally from the content in your video.

Here are some tricks and tips to optimize end screens to drive more traffic.

Start With a Call-to-Action in Mind

Creating a video for your viewers, it is important to keep the end game in mind. Having the end screen and call to action into consideration, your video’s will be better poised to deliver the message. Before making the video, ask yourself the following questions.  Do you want your viewers to

• Subscribe to your channel
• Opt-in to your email list
• Visit your website and make a purchase

If you know the answer to these questions, your end screen will appear as a natural step towards the end.

Keep Device Type in Mind

If you know the preferred device type of your viewers, you can better design their journey. If most of your viewers are desktop users you can guide them through the opt-in, sales and upsell page.

In contrast to that mobile users do not tend to follow the same number of steps. For them, you can create a CTA to sign up for your mailing list so you can follow up with them later.

Enough time to click

The end screen is shown for a maximum of 20 seconds, which means that you have to make each second count.  Use all of the 20 seconds to display your links and if you want to give instructions, do them in the video.

For example, let’s pretend the end of your video has a voiceover that says:

For more digital marketing tips and strategies straight from the pros, including Facebook ad tutorials and copywriting tricks, click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

In this case, show your end screen at the end of this sentence. Because people aren’t going to click on the subscribe button until after you finish explaining it.

Use UTM Parameters

In order to analyze and optimize the performance of your end screens, you’ll want to keep track of all website visitors who come to your site through an End Screen.

To do that, just add a UTM parameter like this to the end of your website link:

?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=endscreen

This way when you log into your analytics, you can segment your visitors by source or medium and see exactly what they did on your site.

Conclusion

Both the cards and end screens are a great way to keep viewers hooked onto your content.  Linking videos together and linking to preferred landing pages creates a seamless user experience for the viewer.

An important point to keep in mind is that linking to external website option is only available to those channels which have signed up for a partner program with Youtube. It is not allowed to link any type of website to your videos.

Youtube is a great platform to showcase and advertise your brand by sharing links. The thing you need to be careful about is to adhere to the rules and regulations laid down by Youtube.

While sharing links on Youtube videos, why not use Replug to share branded shortened links. While commenting on related videos, using the description box, use branded links to better convey your message to the targeted audience. One word of advice is to NOT use branded links in the end screens and cards as they have to be Youtube links or websites.

Interactive video content is becoming more and more influential each day. It allows you to keep visitors engaged in your content by suggesting them relevant content. Use the cards and branded links to enhance your brand’s image.