You know what stinks? When you see a company or brand spend a lot of time, effort, and money to produce a video only to watch it languish on YouTube for weeks with little to no views.
That’s frustrating.
Of all the marketing tactics out there, video is one of the most expensive. This makes it important to have an effective strategy in place before you produce video to ensure that your ROI is positive.
Most low-view YouTube videos suffer from the same 3 problems. Let’s look at those problems and how to solve them.
Problem 1: The Video Was Not Appropriate For YouTube
Most YouTube marketing failures suffer from a lack of understanding of why people are on YouTube to begin with. People go on YouTube for the following reasons:
- To watch Beyoncé videos (Entertainment)
- To learn how to change the radiator on their 2003 Honda Civic (Education)
- To watch video reviews before buying a new infant swing (Information)
That’s pretty much it. Notice that list didn’t include your company’s history or updates on your newest product offerings. People don’t care about you or your company. They want to solve the immediate problems in their life or just veg out.
Entertainment – This is sort of a high-risk/high-reward play. Creating inspiring, viral, funny, or amazing entertainment is hard work and expensive.
But it can pay off if it’s done well and if budget supports it. Heck, Dollar Shave Club built an entire business around one viral video.
For another example of a brand doing entertainment well, check out this inspirational Christmas video from WestJet. Or these HGTV-style videos from Houzz.
Education – People love going to YouTube to learn how to do something new. Did you notice the video above about changing a radiator had over 354,000 views? How many views did your expensive marketing video get? Doing educational videos means looking at your audience, finding out what problems they have, and then teaching them how to solve those problems. Rinse and repeat.
Ramit Sethi is killing it on YouTube with educational content. His business is selling information products, but he gives a lot of his information away for free on his YouTube channel. This has been instrumental in building his brand and funneling people into his paid courses. Be like Ramit.
Information – Providing information to your audience that empowers them to make better decisions will go a long way toward building trust and increasing the chances those audience members will become customers. Here’s an entire YouTube channel devoted to nails, with lots of information in the form of product reviews, as well as plenty of how-to content. 173,000 subscribers. Not bad.
Problem 2: The Video Wasn’t Findable
Plenty can be said about Video SEO and that’s worth a separate post, but YouTube needs relevant data from your video before it can rank well organically.
YouTube videos with good SEO should include the following:
- An optimized title that is relevant and contains likely search phrases – like “Best WordPress Plugins 2017” or “How to nail a job interview”. Always use the language your customers use and avoid insider language.
- An optimized description field that actually contains a detailed description of what the video is about.
- Appropriate and relevant tags (this helps YouTube categorize the video and will make it more likely to show up in the “suggested videos” area)
- Closed Captions. Along with being a good idea in that they help viewers that are deaf or hard of hearing – captions provide valuable metadata to YouTube for what your video is about. Rev.com does captions for $1/minute.
Problem 3: The Video Wasn’t Promoted Well
Unless you already have a ton of subscribers and a strong brand you can’t rely strictly on organic views. You need to use either free or paid promotion to get eyes on the video. Twitter and Linkedin are all great ways to promote your video (you should avoid sharing YouTube videos on Facebook, however).
If your organization has a lot of employees, have your team members share on their LinkedIn or Twitter accounts. You can also embed the video on your company blog or on a landing page and drive paid search traffic to it.
Conclusion
Video is expensive. Don’t waste your money. Do the important strategic work before you start the process of producing video and decide what you’re going to produce and why. And then decide how you’re going to promote it.
If you execute on those items, I guarantee your video will get more than 23 views.