 Great photo by Grok. Wait. What? SEO for YouTube? Is that even a thing?
Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO gurus. But fortunately, some of our clients are. So we learn a lot. And when it’s prudent and discreet to do so, we’ll share some of the love. Hence this article. Short takeaway/spoiler: You can, and should, max out the SEO for your YouTube videos. In this article, we’ll discuss how. But first, the genesis of this story. As we’d noted above, this comes to us from an actual client assignment which, as we write this, is ongoing; they have tons of YouTube videos (most of which, incidentally, we also scripted). The challenge, as our client made clear, was to drive more search-query traffic to this huge repository of videos, spread across multiple playlists on our client’s YouTube channel. But how? There are two parts to this. Both are basic, yet nuanced. They are: 1. The actual title of the video. 2. The YouTube description of the video Let’s review each. 1. The title We’re talking B2B videos here. So you might have an existing video about a product or service that you offer to prospects. And what’s its title? Sure, it’s something like “Our Great Product.” You must understand that there’s the real world, and then there’s the SEO world. In the real world, populated solely by humans, “Our Great Product” is a perfectly good title. It tells people what the video is about. Simple. No clutter. Great. But in SEO World, it’s unfortunately insufficient. You want to “think backward” from what someone who would ultimately want that product or service would be searching on in, say, Google (or in AI; more on that in a minute). So if your Great Product solves Challenge X for, say, logistics executives, you might want to revise and expand the title accordingly: “Challenge-X-Solving Product for Logistics Executives Seeking Productivity Gains.” Not terribly exciting in the real world, but a step forward in SEO Land. But wait. That new title is pretty darned long. Aren’t there limits on this, imposed by, say, YouTube? There sure are. Titles max out at 100 characters, including spaces. The one we just noted above was only 66. So there’s room to play. Often, depending on the viewing device (desktop or laptop browser, tablet, or phone), that title will get truncated and lopped off with just an ellipsis (three dots or “. . .”) after the first few words. Meaning, the first few words are the most important. Because those are the ones that will stick. So factor that into your re-naming. Put the most important stuff first. It's not the real world. Sure, humans will read this stuff, too, but they’re only part of the audience. The rest is web crawlers, spiders, and all the algorithms that the search engines employ to serve up results which hopefully include your video. Now that you know about 1. The Title, let’s proceed to 2. The description Clearly, this is much longer than the title, but some of the same rules apply. Stuff will get cut off before you see the clickable “…more” to reveal the rest of the copy; a quick test on our desktop browser clipped it off at around 60 words. The max is 5,000 characters (not words), which can include links, text, and hashtags. That’s a lot of copy. It’s almost like a blog. About 1,000 words. Again, you want to fill this with info that your human searchers are searching for (what problems will the product or service showcased in your video solve?), as well as what the web crawlers want to find. For our recent project, these videos often offered solutions that helped with numerous arcane technology platforms, so we included bullet lists of those platforms in the description. The search engines like stuff like that. Know what they don’t like? Verbatim copy stolen from your website; they’ll ding you for that. So you want original copy. And you want it written by a human. All the search engines can spot AI-written copy from a mile away (as can we), and they’ll ding you for it. Which gets back to AI-based search vs. classic Google search. The landscape is still shaking out as we write this; even the term AEO (“ask engine optimization”) may not have legs. But what we’re seeing already is a refreshing overlap of what makes for good SEO content vs. AEO content. If you can nail the SEO side, the AEO side will likely catch up. Bottom line: Depending on the number of YouTube videos you already have posted, this could be a quick or long-term retrofitting assignment. And it should definitely shape your efforts for future videos; write the new titles and YouTube descriptions at the same time that you write the scripts. It will save you time and effort. Need help with any of this stuff? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.
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 Great photo by Grok. Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser?
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy!
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by Grok. Wait, it’s December already? We must have blinked.
Because it’s already time for the round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2025—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications. Here, then, is your chance to catch any articles you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
Phew! That should be enough reading and tips to tide you over for a little bit. But how about next year? Any topics you’d like us to address? Contact us and let us know!  Great photo by Grok. We love continuous process improvement here at Copel Communications!
In this article, cash in on all the tweaking and optimizing we’ve been doing, literally for years, with different clients of ours, to make things as efficient and repeatable as possible. Today, we’re going to talk about B2B “demo” videos. Does your company ever make these? We’re talking about those “watch this screen and see what happens” kinds of explainers which also, of course, sell. So it could be a product demo. A software demo. A service. A SaaS platform. A training session. There are tons of these. They are common. And chances are, if you need to make one of these, you probably need to make a ton of these. And this is where optimized efficiency—that “Big Mac-ifying” of the process—really comes into play. In this article, we’ll describe (in broad strokes, with the details purposely blurred) how we do this for a couple of clients of ours. Pay attention: We guarantee that there are elements of this process, perhaps many elements, that apply to your situation. And the more that apply, the more you can benefit. The challenge at hand As we’d stated above, we’re going to anonymize these specific client assignments. But you’ll get enough detail to follow the process, and recognize opportunities to improve your own workflows. In the first example, this client of ours will do a screen-sharing demo of the prototype of a use-case solution they create for their clients. And they do lots of these. The big opportunity here: If you could anonymize these brilliant solutions, and pare them down into, say, little two-minute stories, you’d have marketing gold. You could use them to quickly populate, say, a dedicated playlist on your YouTube channel. You could use that to show to prospective clients, who stand to be awed, once you hit the critical mass of sheer videos posted to that playlist. Not to mention your ability to feed the voracious appetite of the SEO algorithms and web crawlers of YouTube, Google, and so on. It’s one big virtuous snowball. Turning those client demos into marketing videos, incidentally, was not as obvious a choice as you might think. You’re starting with a lot of sensitive material. You need to see the bigger marketing picture, strategically… and be able to literally blur the lines of sensitive information, tactically, once it comes time to execute. So. This client does more than have one of their reps conduct (and record, via Zoom) the client demo of each new prototype. The prototype itself is based on a use-case that was presented/sold to their client beforehand, in order to get the green-light to make the prototype. Follow? Between the raw footage of the demo Zoom call and that original use-case PDF, we’d almost have everything we need to script the video. But not quite. So here, after lots of back-and-forth and tweaking with the client, the third of our three pieces of input evolved. In this case, it’s a super basic Excel sheet. In one column, it lists the timecode of the demo video; in the column beside that, there’s a quick description of what is happening on screen at that time. Example: “00:32 – 00:41 User logs into platform, using two-factor authentication with an emailed six-digit code.” Someone on the client side makes that little Excel, typically only about ten rows deep, for us. It takes them about 30 minutes. And that’s all we need! From there, knowing this client well, we can pen the video script using a basic three-act structure:
Even easier As you can clearly see, the big lift, for the client, in the scenario above, is to create that little Excel sheet for us. But more recently, we’ve started making videos, for a different client, with no Excel required. That’s because, for the cool things that this client is creating (we can’t share details, sorry), they already create three PDFs which are not only goldmines for us, but they’re also all we require to start scripting. The three PDFs, broadly speaking, are:
These PDFs are so detailed that we’ve been able to write video scripts from them, using their details as the visuals, with the simple addition of a basic voice-over. So there will be shots such as “Zoom in ultra-tight on the detailed box at the lower right of Page 3, and pan across the different functions listed in its flow chart.” In other words, no “lift” from the client at all! It reminds us of Craisins. Huh? You know Craisins. Those “dried cranberries” originally created by Ocean Spray. While making cranberry juice, they would throw out all of the skins of the actual cranberries used. Until someone got the great idea of drying the skins and adding sugar to them, and coming up with a clever portmanteau name like “Craisin,” which implies “cranberry + raisin.” (Read our article about portmanteau names and how you can profit from them.) Think about that: All those cranberry skins were not being used. Today, they’re a massive source of newfound revenue. Ditto for the three abovementioned PDFs. They were used to create a client deliverable, and then effectively shelved. Today, they’re the basis of a “found money” marketing effort. With very little effort! Need help “McDonald-izing” some of your existing deliverables and processes into efficient marketing gold? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Priceless photo by Grok. There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again.
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. To webinar or not to webinar This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. Those are huge assumptions. A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. Phew. If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. Building unbearable suspense Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: Clickbait! Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it. Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Intrigued?
“ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes?” Has Copel Communications completely lost its few remaining brain cells? Not yet. Stay with us on this. And learn how—no kidding—this observation can help your business make more money. Here’s a dirty little secret. While we specialize in marketing here at Copel Comms, we’re really “closet salespeople.” Think of the playwright who shudders at the prospect of getting on stage… but is completely comfortable writing a powerful speech for the play’s leading man to deliver. That’s us. Okay. Shoes? ChatGPT? Is there a thread anywhere in this story forthcoming? Sure there is. As we’d said, stay with us. ChatGPT, and all of the generative large-language-model AI platforms of its ilk, have really changed the way that people sell. The way that you can sell. And, upstream of that, the way you market. Shortly after it appeared on the scene, ChatGPT basically torpedoed email-based marketing and outreach—and thus the sales that those were supposed to generate. The reason is simple: It used to be that only reasonably intelligent English speakers could create grammatically correct outreach notes. ChatGPT eliminated that requirement. Since its advent, every mouth-breather who can click a “Generate” button has been able to churn out grammatically flawless… spam. Yep. Spam. The ISPs quickly clamped down on this. The spam filters got tighter. Even now, Google (in a related story) is tweaking its algorithms to filter out AI-generated content. But ChatGPT is old news. The platform debuted during the pandemic, for goodness’ sakes. The “old news” aspect of this story is good news for our clients and businesses like yours. We’re seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of email outreach again. Isn’t that nice? And, just like in the old days, quality matters. Remember the ol’ “three-legged stool” of email marketing? It consisted of the quality of:
Guess what? That’s true again. Which gets to shoes. Specifically, “shoe leather.” We’re talking about the old days, when salespeople would “pound the pavement,” going from business to business, to the point where they would wear holes in the leather soles of their shoes. Hence “shoe leather.” ChatGPT does not wear shoes. It doesn’t understand how you can (and perhaps should) “pound the pavement” to actually generate sales. Example: We recently penned an email (is that a mixed metaphor? We actually used a keyboard) for a client of ours, directed toward their current clients, introducing a referral program for their services. Per best practice, the offer was “two-sided”: “Refer a client to us, and they’ll get a massive discount on our services. And you’ll get an Amazon gift card. Everyone wins!” So. It was a matter of taking this good offer (Leg 2), turning it into a compelling message (Leg 3), and sending it out to our client’s list of existing customers (Leg 1). Another dirty little secret: The client’s list of clients was small enough that no automation was needed. So “Dear [First Name]” was typed in as “Dear Linda,” and so on. Sure, it was old-fashioned manual labor. But it was effective. Proving that pounding the pavement, in its modern iteration, can still yield sales. And proving that ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes. Need help with a marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. We recently saw what we’re about to describe, and it left us aghast.
Learn from the little tale we’re about to spin! What you’re reading—this article, these very words—is a blog entry. Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been posting articles like this, every two weeks, for more than ten years, now. Thank you. We knew you’d be impressed. But what is this horror-inducing tale? you’re surely asking. And what does that have to do with the title of this article? Okay. Maybe you’re not asking. We already knew you were smart. And likely figured it out already. But stay with us. So. We post blogs on a regular cadence. Twice a month. At the top of the month, each month, our blogs are more focused on our consultants audience. At mid-month—like this article—they’re more broadly geared toward our creatives audience. And yes, they certainly overlap. You don’t need to be running an ad agency to get a good takeaway, from this article, for your business. As we’d said. Every two weeks. Like clockwork. Now you don’t need to do them every two weeks. That’s our cadence. But man oh man. It is a cadence. Here’s the story: We were recently connected with a gentleman who was running his own creative agency; it specialized in web design. We’d been introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and had booked a Zoom call. Prior to the Zoom call, we did our due diligence. That is, we checked out this web designer’s website. And this is where we had our holy !@#$ moment. Just like our site—and almost everyone else’s—this designer’s website had a “Blog” section. (It could also be called “Recent Posts.” Same thing.) So we decided to check it out. And when we got there—we are not making this up—we saw—promise, we are not making this up: One blog. One. Just one. One. And—to make matters worse—it was date-stamped. From about two years ago. Oh-my-goodness. Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect searching for a web designer. You Google. You find this designer’s site. And you check it out, just as we did. And, out of curiosity, you decide to catch up on their latest thought leadership and/or musings. And you see one sole blog, time-stamped from two years ago. Quick: What’s your reaction? You got it: Are they still in business??? Our reaction precisely. Whoever you are, reading this article, do not repeat this suicidal mistake. Do not project to the world—and to your prospects, for goodness’ sake—that you, once, two years ago, had an idea, just one, and then went completely brain dead but somehow managed to keep paying your URL hosting fees. It is worse, far worse, than not having any blogs at all. Clearly! Now extrapolate from this story, this extreme example. Could you solve this by having two blogs? One from two years ago, and another from merely one year ago? Of course not. See where this is going? If you’re going to post, then post. And keep at it. But what if you’re not a content machine? That’s entirely possible. Then do this: Create at least, say, a half-dozen entries. And make sure they’re not date-stamped when you post them. Needless to say, make sure that the topics of these articles are evergreen, too; you don’t want to, say, comment on that morning’s big headline from the news. Of course, if you’re a web designer, you may want to show off that you’re good at building, and updating, websites. Starting with your own. Need help with a challenge like this? Or any other? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. This is a perennial—and paradoxical—challenge. If you don’t update your brand after too long a period of time, it will look and feel stale.
Yet when you update it, you risk diluting it and squandering all of the brand impressions you’ve worked so hard to build. So what do you do? Is there a happy medium, a bright shining line to follow? In this article, we’ll give you some pointers, some do’s and don’ts, and a little experience of ours based on a recent client assignment. Let’s start with that last part, first. Re-Branding 101 For this client assignment (and remember, we’re always fuzzing the details to add anonymity), our client wanted to create a new “2.0” version of one of their signature branded products, which had been well established, and received, in the marketplace over the past five years. So why the update? Good question. You don’t just do these things for light or transient reasons. In the case of our client, they had made significant revisions to the product itself, to the point where it warranted a new release and brand update. So the rationale was there. That’s good. (If it’s not, push back. Simply updating for the sake of updating is a mark of, well, fashion, and that’s a whole different planet from what we’re discussing here.) A good question to ask at this time: Has the audience changed? The brand, really, is for them to consume. In our client’s case, the answer was, “Not too much.” Which let us turn, rather organically, to the mandatories which would remain. In this situation, we were locked in to the client’s color palette. They had a certain bold approach that served them well and reflected their brand identity. And they had a few little visual elements that needed to carry over, in the whole branding picture. All in all, this is a very good, solid re-branding assignment. So what did we do? Well, we listed out what needed to stay (the aforementioned mandatories) and what should get updated. We got the client’s blessing on this two-column list. Then we made some quick thumbnails—nothing too detailed, mind you—of how this new branding might be visualized. We then turned these over to the talented graphic artist we were working with on this account, and let her do her thing. Narrowing the field Our designer wowed us with lots of great options. As we had hoped, she took the ideas from the thumbnails, and then really ran with them. In lots of creative directions. They were just enough to get her going in the proper direction, while letting her creativity shine. We’re happy to report that our client had a hard time choosing. The classic “embarrassment of riches” situation. That’s as good as you can hope for. Eventually, our client chose their favorite. This then went through several rounds of tweaking revisions. And the end result was strong. The client was happy. And so were we. There was a story, a number of years ago, about the then-latest Pepsi re-brand. It was, in short, a disaster. The design firm issued something like a 40-page white paper explaining why the new logo was supposedly so great. (Not to mention expensive!) Fast-forward to today, and that re-brand is history. The newer logo is better. It respects its heritage. And it’s instantly grasp-able. Those are the do’s. The don’ts? Man, if you need to write a white paper to try and justify your brilliance to your client, start over. Need help with a re-branding initiative? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. We were recently tasked with writing some marketing copy for a B2B client of ours, utilizing real-life success stories from their client files. The goal, not surprisingly, was to lure other prospects into becoming clients, too, when they read about these great successes.
This is so straightforward that it’s boring. Right? Nope. It warrants an entire article. Who wants what? Granted, we need to cloak this story in anonymity—just as we’d needed to cloak this assignment in anonymity. We couldn’t tell the world, for example, that our client’s specific client suffered from broken systems, couldn’t serve their customers, and so on. Similarly, you don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on the technical side. And herein lies the gist of this story, and its lesson. Let’s get specific. For our client’s client—the one in the success story—they’d used Systems A, B, and C to do their work. They had problems with Systems A, B, and C, which our client helped them solve. So we could have been very specific, in calling out Systems A, B, and C by name, even when we never mentioned who-the-client-was, by name. That would have been accurate. It wouldn’t have gotten anyone into trouble. And, on the surface, it seemed to be the thrust of this assignment. But you’ve got to take a customer-back approach here. (Yes, you can make a drinking game out of how many times we say “customer-back approach” here at Copel Communications.) Here’s the rub: The goal here, if you really look at it, is not to explain how the client in the success story succeeded. It’s not? Nope. The goal, rather, is to tell a prospective client how they could succeed. Aha. That’s different. Which gets back to Systems A, B, and C. In this world in which our client competes, there’s a lot more than Systems A, B, and C for their clients and their prospects. There are systems which compete with Systems A, B, and C. Put it this way: You don’t want to turn off a prospect just because they’ve opted to use System D. Get it? This gets back to the marketing challenge. It’s subtle, yet important. For this assignment, we didn’t want to call out Systems A, B, and C by name… but rather by function. We wanted to create blanket terms for them, for the exact reason of not alienating a prospect who uses System D. So instead of saying “We helped our client with System A,” we said “We helped our client with their transactional reporting platform” (or whatever). This way, whether you use System A or System D for transactional reporting, you both perceive the value of what the company does. As we’d said, this is a subtle difference—the matter of just a few words here and there—but it really makes the difference between attracting the prospects you want, or having them self-select elsewhere. Remember: This distinction was not spelled out to us in our marching orders. It was incumbent on us to read between the lines, to take that customer-back approach, and do the right thing by our client. Need help with a similar under-the-radar marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. Sometimes, the success of your creative marketing hinges on some decidedly un-creative input.
Here’s a true story. We were recently tasked with scripting a video for a client of ours. Granted, we have to cloak this in anonymity, but you’ll get the gist: The client of ours is a consultancy. They had created a breakthrough technical solution for one of their clients. Our job was to script a video, showing the whole world this breakthrough solution—while also anonymizing our client’s client. Follow? On the surface, this is a pretty straightforward assignment. We had to write a script which would show prospective clients (for the consultancy) how amazing this technical solution is. But it quickly became trickier than you might think. Our point of contact at the consultancy was one of the super-sharp technical people who had actually worked on this breakthrough solution. Let’s call him Steve. Steve was our source of input. And so Steve—not terribly shockingly—told us all about this breakthrough solution. Every nut and bolt. Every feature. Every output. Every paradigm-shattering spec. And we couldn’t write the script. Know why? Think about it. Our task was to write a brief—as in, two- to three-minute—video, dramatically showcasing this breakthrough solution. Yet what had Steve, in all his ardent energy, failed to provide us? Of course: Act One. Huh? Two sides to every story (and marketing piece) A video like this—or any marketing piece like this—should follow what we call “a two-act structure.” Steve had given us all of the input for Act Two. That is, the solution. But of course! Now it’s super obvious, isn’t it? A solution solves a problem. What was the problem?? We asked Steve. And he said “Well, our client couldn’t do X.” And yes, he technically answered our question, but he didn’t exactly help us. And here we get to the gist of this article. Steve is not a creative pro. That’s not his job. He excels at plenty of other stuff, and the world is a better place because of it. But he needed a little help, a little nudging, from us, to give us the input we’d craved for Act One of this script. And so we asked him, “Could you tell us more, please? Why couldn’t your client do X? What were all the contributing factors? We want to know, as much as possible, about the sheer chaos they were confronting before your solution came along. We want the ‘Before’ to be horrendous! Inundate us with details! The messier, the better!” You could see the light dawning in Steve’s eyes. Of course! The messier, the better! Because The Great Wonderful Solution isn’t so great or wonderful unless it really clears what appear to be insurmountable hurdles. Once Steve got it, he got it. After all, who would know that client’s “before” situation better than him? He piled on with gory details, and voilà! We were able to pen a truly effective video. Clearly, you can extrapolate a lot from this little story. Marketing and advertising routinely require creativity. And just as routinely, your input sources may not be people who are naturally creative. But they can be coaxed. The information is there. You just need to tease it out. Need help with a creative challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! |