Major initiatives are essential to any marketing mix, but they take time and resources to develop and execute. In the meantime, marketers must amplify existing content to keep prospects engaged. Today I’ll share some content marketing tips from my own experience. These are quick to implement and will support your hard-fought marketing efforts.

#1 YouTube Cards

Did you know that YouTube is the most visited site in the world? More than 30 million people are active on YouTube every single day. So, how do you keep your content in front of those people? One simple strategy you can use is adding YouTube cards.

YouTube cards are notifications that pop up to suggest another video, playlist, channel, or external link while your video is playing. These little ads are a great tool for suggesting related content to your audiences and keeping them engaged with your brand. They are easy to add and can be used up to 5x per video. However, the placement, timing, and usage of cards must be strategic. Here are a few tips:

  • Use three cards or less on a video for a higher click through rate
  • If you’re using more than one card in a video, spread out where the cards are placed
  • Use YouTube analytics to see when your viewers stop watching a video; add your card(s) before that point

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to add cards to existing videos. You can start adding them right now!

Open your Studio editor in YouTube, hit the edit pencil to edit a video, and click Cards on the Video details screen.  

youtube cards settings example

Additional Video Tips

In addition to adding YouTube cards to existing videos, here are two more tips to quickly maximize your content marketing with videos.

Break apart webinars

This doesn’t work for every webinar topic, but in many cases, webinars can be broken down into smaller sub-sections. Most people won’t watch a 30+ minute video all the way through. I usually create multiple videos from one webinar to highlight particular points.

For example, in a recent marketing webinar we spoke about blog content in one section and website content in another. Those two sections became their own videos. You can cut videos in YouTube Studio for free if you don’t have video editing software.

The resulting videos are much shorter (2-10 minutes) and highly targeted. Not only is the shorter length useful for keeping someone’s attention but breaking out the videos into specific topics provides more opportunities to tie in keyword-heavy descriptions and SEO titles that will get your videos found.

Create playlists

We recently recorded nearly 50 training videos for our YouTube page and website. Not only did we use YouTube cards to link these videos to one another in a relevant order (ex: A video on “How to Create a Lead” links to the next video on “How to Categorize a Lead”), but we also compiled all the videos into one playlist so it’s more natural for users to scan through all the videos at once.

#2 Promote Social Posts from Within

Want to quickly boost engagement on your social media posts? Get your internal team to help you out. Create an email group of everyone in the company. When you need major traction on a post, simply copy the post URL into an email, find your “Everyone” email group, and send it out. Request that people share, like, and engage with the post to increase visibility.

Sharing posts is particularly useful in reaching new audiences since your coworkers are connected with many people they’ve worked with, gone to school with, and met at industry events. If they share the company’s post, all of those second-hand connections will now see it.

LinkedIn recently released a feature to make promoting social posts to your company even easier. As an Administrator of a company page, you will now see an option to “Notify Employees.” If you click this, anyone connected to your LinkedIn page as an employee will receive a notification from LinkedIn about the post.

linkedin notify employees example

#3 Readability for SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the holy grail of inbound content marketing. Relevant keywords, domain authority, meta descriptions, and backlinks are all part of a solid SEO recipe. But, what about readability? This aspect is often overlooked, but it has a powerful correlation with your SEO. Here are three reasons why:

  1. Pages with better readability will retain visitors longer and reduce bounce and exit rates.
  2. 48% of consumers are using voice search for general queries, and that number is growing. Search engines are more likely to pull voice search results from content that is considered easier to read.
  3. Readability improves UX, which creates a better impression of your brand and helps establish your authority on a topic.

So, how do you know if something is “readable”? There are lots of readability measures out there, but one of the most well regarded is the Flesch Reading Ease Index (FRE). The FRE index looks at average sentence and word length and grades readability on a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is the easiest to read. The FRE scale for the English language is as follows:

  • 100 = The text is very easy to read and understand.
  • 65 = The text is relatively easy to understand.
  • 30 = The text is difficult to understand.
  • 0 = The text is very difficult to understand.

Experts recommend an FRE score of 60 and higher for most Web copy.

There are a plethora of plug-ins and add-ons you can incorporate into your website to help guide your SEO and readability. We use one called “Real-time SEO for drupal” that applies color-coding to tell us if our SEO is excellent or poor based on several factors. It gauges readability on FRE standards.

<em>Here's what the Real-Time SEO tool for drupal looks like</em>

There are also many free Web tools out there, like this one, that allow you to input your URL or text to check its readability. Analyze your existing content and fix readability issues to enhance SEO. When you create new content, keep these factors in mind:

  • Use shorter sentences and simpler sentence structures
  • Incorporate transitions words like “Because” to tie ideas together clearly
  • Break paragraphs apart to make it easier for your readers to scan the page
  • Write in a conversational tone, as you would speak to someone in real life
  • Break sections apart with subheadings and images
  • Don’t begin consecutive sentences with the same word
  •  Communicate one idea per sentence
  • Use active voice over passive voice (ex: “Batman drove the bat mobile.” instead of “The bat mobile was driven by Batman.”)
  • Stay away from jargon, but if you must use it, define its meaning for your audience
  • Incorporate lists and bullet points

I hope these quick content marketing tips sparked joy and gave you some things to think about. Check out our other blogs for more helpful resources. And of course, contact our team if you are looking for marketing software to support your initiatives!

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