If a photograph is worth a thousand words, then how much more valuable is a video? That’s the concept behind video marketing, a forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging video into your marketing campaigns.

Video marketing can be utilised for everything from building customer engagement, to directly promoting your brand, services or products. The videos used to do that can cover a wide range of topics and types, including how-tos, FAQs, generally entertaining content and more.

Video SEO refers to a set of tactics that can be implemented to help a video gain increased visibility in both general search engine searches and where appropriate, YouTube searches.

There are some who suggest that videos designed to boost your marketing efforts should be hosted on your own website. For smaller companies, however, whose websites are not tied to huge standalone servers in the way that BBC, CNN and large newspapers and magazines are, that is usually far too resource-intensive and slows the whole site down, something that is almost guaranteed to have a negative impact on SEO. For this reason – and many others – most people choose to host their videos on YouTube.

As YouTube is, in itself, the world’s second-largest search engine having your videos ‘rank’ in a YouTube search is important, and so developing and implementing ways to do that can be as important as any other aspect of an overall marketing strategy. Some of the SEO methods used to help YouTube videos gain visibility are very similar to standard SEO (keywords, tags etc.) while others are somewhat specialist and unique to the platform.

A featured channel is a setting that those who upload a video to YouTube on a regular basis can make use of to organise, highlight and streamline their content to make it easier for search bots to find and for human viewers to engage with. A featured channel, when properly implemented, is also a great way to help build your company’s brand in general.

YouTube actually allows users to add as many tags as they like as long as the total character limit across all tags is less than around 400 characters. Ideally, a well-optimized YouTube video should have between five and eight tags.

YouTube videos are content pieces, and so can be promoted in the same way as any other content piece. They can be shared on social media, embedded on your website, added to an email or directly promoted via Youtube’s paid advertising options.

The term ‘YouTube advertising’ can be used to refer to two different things. Users can pay YouTube to promote their videos outside their usual audience and, in addition, content creators can make money from their videos by allowing YouTube to place preroll ads of the platform’s choosing ahead of their content.