Is it enough to just embed a YouTube video?

May 24, 2023

It is now well known that video is an important part of your content marketing strategy.  But is it enough to just embed a YouTube video as part of your blog?  Most people add a video because it is the thing to do - videos are much more engaging than just words.  They may not realize that the YouTube video is slowing their page down.  They also have no idea about who watched their video and for how long.

Let us review the goals you have when you put a video on a web page:

• To convey your message more effectively
• Know who your viewers are
• Know what part of the video they are paying attention to
• Engage each viewer
• Get the viewer to respond to a call to action

A visual message is more engaging than a written one.  We see this from the success of Instagram posts and the obsession with images on a variety of social media platforms.  People throng within seconds to like a post, giving great gratification to the poster. Short crisp content can grab  the viewer’s attention.  

However, when you are using visual messages  for marketing purposes, you require more.  It is not just enough to conclude that getting numerous likes signifies success. You’d like the user to respond to your call to action, because after all, action is what your desired final result is.

Also, to hone your content marketing strategy, you need to know what parts of the video content your audience watched.   This will help you refine the content of future videos.

Even better, wouldn’t you like to know exactly who watched your video?  Wouldn’t it be useful to know that the senior manager your sales team has been chasing for months, actually got interested enough in your offering to watch your video?

So are you ready to add a video to your site?  Here are some thoughts on what you should pay attention to:

1. Make sure you have good video content. The video content should be interesting in addition to being useful. It should engage  the viewer throughout its duration.  If you’re presenting a video on your company’s product, the viewer should leave with the impression - ‘this is a product that I would benefit from. I want to come back to it and  learn more about it’.
2. Make sure you have good analytics so you can know what the viewer is watching. Of course having engaging content is not enough.  A ‘feel good’ feeling that a number of people watched your video, is just not enough,  if you have no idea who actually watched the video.  In a YouTube video, the only way you know who watched the video is if someone leaves comments, which is only a small percentage of the actual viewers. And the person leaving the comments may not necessarily be a prospect.
3. Make sure you have a way to present calls to action. Use the philosophy of ‘Catch them when you can, and now’ with your viewers as they are valuable sales prospects.  The video should have a quick way to capture the information of an interested viewer.  This way the sales team can follow up on the leads quickly and helps you meet your business goals.
4. Here’s something else to consider - adding video will slow down your page unless you do it right. Having just text in your blog is not a great option either.  Long rambling text can make a reader’s eyes glaze over, which is a marketing person’s nightmare. We just talked about how effective video can be.  You want to have a way to use video and make it as effective as possible.

So what are your options if you are going to use video

1. Use YouTube. It's free and easy to use and it’s the largest video hosting site in the world..  However it has all kinds of content so you have to work hard to make your video stand out from the pack. Also, unless your channel has enough views, it’s difficult to drive engaged viewers to your website. You have to place additional information and calls to action in the video description, where they may or may not be seen by viewers. Finally you have to contend with YouTube trying to direct your viewers to other YouTube videos while you’re trying to keep them focused on your video.
2. Use Vimeo or another private hosting service.If you want your viewers to pay attention to your content and no one else's, consider hosting on Vimeo or another similar provider, then share links to your video on social media, email, blog posts and newsletters.. Vimeo is the next biggest video hosting site after YouTube with about 18% of the market. However, Vimeo is not free so you will need to budget for that.
3. Embed your videos on your own website.You can keep your video on YouTube and get the benefit  of the exposure you get from being on the world’s largest hosting site. Then, add it to a page on your website as well. Now you have the best of both worlds. You get the exposure from YouTube and, when viewers visit your site, you can engage them with your video and keep them on your site, rather than on YouTube.

If you do choose to embed YouTube videos on your website, you should be aware that the standard embed codes that YouTube provides will slow down your page load speed to unacceptable levels. Benchmark your page load speed with Google PageSpeed to confirm this. 

Want a faster way to embed YouTube videos? First read why and how you can do that, then, check out AudienceGraph. You can import your video into AudienceGraph in just a few minutes and get optimized embed codes that you add to your website. As an added bonus, AudienceGraph will automatically add the markup that tells the Google search bot about your video content and make it eligible to be featured as a video snippet at the top of Google search results.

There are other benefits to using AudienceGraph to embed your videos. You can 

1. Add chapters and make your content more consumable by viewers
2. Get analytics on which chapters are most effective at engaging your viewers and use that information to make your site more engaging
3. Add calls to action that increase conversions while viewers are watching your video

Does that sound interesting? Embedding videos with AudienceGraph is free and the other features we talked about here are free to try. Get started here!