The Video SEO Challenge 2013

In 2013, we’re putting our knowledge where our mouth is and asking companies to give us their promotional film so we can get it to rank on YouTube and get more views.

YouTube – it’s a wonderful tool when it works…

It’s staggering to think that of the 4 billion films  viewed a day on Youtube,  almost a third (31.5%) get less than 100 views in their lifetime* with a further quarter (24.5%) never making it beyond 500 views.

And yes, this includes cat videos as well as highly produced promotional films.

That’s incredible – half (56%) of videos uploaded to YouTube fail to get seen by a wide audience!

Or is it? When shooting a promotional film, most companies hire a in a crew, shoot a quality film and then to stick it on their website – even taking the time to embed it on YouTube and give it a well thought out title. Then sit back and wait for the phone to ring… after all they need to make back the often hefty price tag associated with a promotional film.

Unfortunately, if you just stick your film on your website (embedded through YouTube) without doing your research into keywords and following YouTube’s advice with regards to title and description AND keep checking back on it and tweaking accordingly …you will almost certainly fall into that 56% we mentioned before.

This means the film can end up costing you a heck of a lot more. Lets say you spent £1,500 on a promotional film, even reaching 500 views that means each view cost you £3 and how many of those where friends and family?

“If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.” George Bernard ShawPygmalion. Harsh, but very true in many cases.

In a Brightcove study, they ask their clients “why are you using video on your site? ”

• 25% answered that it was because competitors were doing it
• 7% answered that it was because their boss asked them to do it
• 61% (luckily) answered that it was to strengthen the company’s brand

Which brings us back round to the question, if companies have paid for a film to be made why are they not utilising the world’s 2nd largest search engine and getting it in front of potential clients?

We write a lot about how to harness the power of YouTube; for 2013 we’re going to put our knowledge where our mouth is.

My Fair Lady – 1964 (an adaption of Pygmalion don’t you know).

The Pygmalion Project

We’ve got lots of case studies for our clients who we’ve produced films for, but being a bit Curveball as we are, we’d like a new challenge for 2013.

This year we’re going to start a case study for what we’re calling The Pygmalion Project (see what we did there).

We want to take a film we haven’t produced and use our knowledge to break it out of that 56%. This is where you come in.

The fact is that although you may have not created your promotional film for the purposes of ranking on YouTube – all is not lost, it can still rank on YouTube. We’re not promising miracles, but rather than having a film that is stagnant on YouTube (check your stats!), we can get it to a state of play whereby it’s getting seen by a relevant audience.

Why The Pygmalion Project

Let’s not get into the semantics of George Bernard Shaw’s comments on social structure and creation and we’ll quickly floss over the reference to prostitution… the reason we’re going for Pygmalion is because we want to show that it’s not always the film that is at fault, it’s the way the film has been set-up on YouTube. Although it’s fair to say ‘Audience Retention’ will have a big impact.

Hopefully this exercise will highlight how you can set-up YouTube films to be more successful in the future.

Although unlike Pygmalion, Curveball Daniel and Curveball Olly will not be donning smoking jackets, laying bets and seeing this as some great folly !

How to enter

Simple. Email a link to your film to hello@curveball-media.co.uk

A few terms…

Yes, we have to have a few stipulations with these things…

Entry for the competition has no end date, although we will only choose one entry at a time of our choosing

• We will need access to your YouTube channel to make the necessary adjustments
• We may create an ‘Adclip’ to show how this can be used to drive traffic to an existing video
• We may display the video through YouTube’s advertising network, but will detail which views were ‘organic’ and which through ‘advertising’
• We may use existing films to drive traffic to your film using annotations
• We can end the project at any time without notice
• We may adjust the length of your video, but only for the purpose of reducing the time the logo shows at the end to increase your audience retention
• We reserve the right to chose any video that is entered based on any criteria we see fit
• We may ask entrants for a screen grab of the film’s ‘Absolute Audience Retention’

All these points are needed because they form part of any successful YouTube campaign.

*Statistic from Tubemogul*

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