7 New YouTube Features And How Marketers Can Leverage Them

A compelling video is one of the best marketing tools to have in your bag of goodies. Not only does it add a whole new dimension to the marketing mix but it makes your product stories, features, or company history more interesting.

When executed properly, it can even improve your sales. According to an infographic published by the good folks at MultiVisionDigital, “consumers are 64 percent more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video.”

The infographic further explains why video is such an important part of the digital marketing mix:

• More than 3 out of 5 consumers spend a minimum of 2 minutes watching a video educating themselves about products they want to buy
• 52 percent of online buyers agree watching product videos help them make more confident purchase decisions
• 96 percent of tech buyers and IT decision makers watch product videos for business purposes
• Finally, in 2017, video traffic will account for 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic

Video Marketing and YouTube

When talking about video marketing, YouTube comes naturally into the discussion. This video-sharing website is ubiquitous these days. In fact, tens of millions of viewers visit this site to watch videos every day and share them online through social media and mobile devices.

Now, many argue that YouTube is primarily designed to serve as a social media channel to entertain, but so is Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. With proper planning and implementation, marketers can leverage YouTube to effectively achieve various strategic business objectives too.

If YouTube is crucial to your company’s marketing methods, the video giant just announced a couple of new features to help streamline channel management for creators. Here’s how to leverage them for optimal results.

1. Improved Comments

Comments are more than welcome for both marketers and users, as they are a great way to communicate with your viewers and audience. It also allows you to dig more about a topic, get feedback and of course to hunt for new ideas. However, junk or spammy comments are simply a distraction for most users. Realizing that users don’t want to see such comments when viewing and sharing videos, YouTube goes for a cleaner layout by introducing the ranking system to lower the visibility of the spammy comments.

This will help marketers not only to “combat” trolls, but also get rid of those nasty commenters who just pollute the comment thread without offering any insight or value to the discussion. In addition, the account holders will already have the privilege (from its previous updates) to ban commentators posting negative remarks apart from filtering out comments with certain trigger words.

The new and improved comment feature will further help marketers to keep their video channels clean. According to YouTube’s product manager Kiley McEvoy, this feature has helped in lowering ‘dislikes’ rates by over 36 percent across YouTube.

2. New Types of Cards

Why do you promote your content?

Of course to keep your current audience as well as reach out to new ones. YouTube’s new types of cards will help you promote your content and more. According to Giulia Angi, the product marketing manager at YouTube, “cards are providing to be a great way to increase interactions on your videos.” As said, you can use them for multiple purposes from promoting other content to raising funds and selling merchandise.

The first card offered by YouTube is the Channel card. This allows you to link your videos to other channels, allowing you to share them with your collaborators. This also gives you the ability to increase your presence like never before. Besides, this video sharing channel is working on lots of new card types.

3. Subscriber Notifications

It is nothing new that billions of viewers watch videos on YouTube every day. There is no denying that this video-sharing website has billions of extremely loyal followers that marketers can tap into when the use this channel properly.

By using the new subscription notification feature marketers and content creators can let their fans know whenever they update a new video.

YouTube claims that following this update, your subscribers won't have to worry about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) any more. They can now ‘opt in’ to receive emails and mobile notifications every time you publish a new video.

4. Easy Access to Subscription Feed

Using the subscription feed, marketers and content creators can see who is watching their video content.

YouTube’s new subscription feed makes the task even easier by allowing you to quickly access to feed and update the YouTube “mobo” app. Teamed up with the subscriber notification feature, this easy-to-use subscription feed of YouTube will help your subscribers stay on top of all your latest content.

There are also several metrics available for marketers to measure user engagement, leveraging which they can prioritize, and personalized service to loyal customers to further improve conversion rates.

5. A Better and Faster Creator Studio App

The Creator Studio app from YouTube is designed to simplify mobile channel management. As the popularity of mobile continues to increase, this feature will be extensively beneficial for marketers and business owners.

You now have more analytics tools to gain valuable insight. This, in turn, will help you take more informed decisions and improve your engagement with viewers.

The YouTube team is also working to make the Creator Studio app even faster. Better yet, they are also adding some of the most user-requested features including new notifications to help marketers take action.

6. Video Management On the Go

Since YouTube is all about video, quite naturally they are trying to improve its functionalities. The rising popularity of smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices not only requires you to publish content for these devices, but also makes it mandatory for marketers to be able to manage content on the go. Video management is no exception.

Realizing the users’ needs, YouTube has added two new features to their content mobility management. First, they are making it easier for marketers to update custom thumbnails right from their mobile devices. This was, in fact, the top requested feature. In addition, YouTube is adding monetization setting to their Creator Studio app, using which marketers can enable or disable monetization of any video on the go.

7. 360 Degree Videos

This is probably the coolest feature YouTube has introduced so far. Mariana De Felice, communication manager at YouTube says that 360-degree feature was actually an experiment to see how far they “can take the online video experience.” This feature is now available on most devices. Using this feature, users can see everything taking place at a given location.

The latest concept of drone based recording and video capturing devices like GoPro are already gaining popularity. Therefore, this 360-degree feature on YouTube will allow marketers to provide even more interesting and insightful content to viewers.

Conclusion

While YouTube is working on some of the features, most of these will be available within a few weeks. These tools will not only make viewers experience more enjoyable, they are also beneficial to marketers. In fact, small businesses using this video platform to promote their brands and products will find it especially beneficial.