Hello there! Did you post an interesting video about your company on YouTube garnering 70,000 views? Good job! Now that you are famous, let’s make a pit stop and study your marketing strategy. In the pursuit of running the mad rat race, you have forgotten the ultimate deal—to attract legitimate CRTs (Click-Through Rate) with an undistracted CTA (Call to Action).

The wonderful thing about YouTube, is that YouTube’s the only one!

YouTube is incomparably the only one in the video hosting market that gives you all freedom with regard to videos. In the bargain, it has compromised on security measures and most importantly on the attention of the audience. There seems to be no point if you have lost your audience to a competitor’s marketing video without your CTA attended to.

That’s why YouTube is wonderful for entertainment and perhaps the only one that is good at it. But when it comes to business, you must be kidding me if you are hosting on YouTube—competing with funny animal videos, fitness gurus, reviews, tutorials, DIY videos, and everything under the sun that moves and is not serious.

YouTube is great, but not great for your business. In fact, it shouldn’t be an option at all. So what is YouTube’s answer for all those advertisements, distractions? Annotations.

What are annotations? How has YouTube integrated it?

Annotations are pop ups within your video that comes up at various instances (determined by you) in the video. The annotations can hold links and CTAs to keep the user engaged within your video and to take them to your product directly, without any distraction.
YouTube also provides an option for users to turn off the annoying annotation feature—pop goes the marketing strategy!

Another hurdle is if your annotations appear in between the video and the user clicks on it, taking them to your product, YouTube considers it as a broken session. And what happens in a broken session? Your YouTube SEO ranking is lowered automatically. Hence you are forced to place the annotations toward the end of the video. And distractions are aplenty when a video ends, as a bunch of suggestion videos pop up on the player. Unless you have that many videos on YouTube, your few other videos are unlikely to appear on the player grid.

So here’s the conclusion of my teeny weeny research.

At the end of the day all that matters is that you know what you want. Do you want an awareness for your product? Then distribution is key; post videos on YouTube but remember to always have great CTAs. Are you selling something in particular? REDIRECT! REDIRECT! REDIRECT! People need to go to your website and spike the CTR.

YouTube is great. Yet, baseline, it’s not the most secure video hosting provider in the world. Is it viable for marketing? Yes. The same, however, does not hold true on the security front. That’s where we step in.

The Private Media Channel can be used in addition to YouTube. This integration is offered by many other services but our uniqueness lies in our “Onion Layers of Security” and many other features. To know more about setting up your own Private Media Channel, check it out here.

This is a relatively short post but  hopefully ‘twas informative. Now, I am going to go and do important things like marketing on YouTube, starts watching funny animal videos, or not.