3 YouTube Promotion Mistakes That Even Experienced Professionals Make
You’re an experienced video content creator and you’ve got your promotional video just right. You’ve mastered editing, and the first couple of seconds of your video attract viewers, making them watch your promotion.
But all of that may not produce the result you want. You may be getting little to no returns on your YouTube promotion even though the video quality is great. What’s the problem?
The problem is you may be making one of these 3 mistakes. Even the pros make them all the time. Fix these three, and you’ll be receiving a lot better results from your YouTube promotions.
1. Promotion Without a Specific Plan and Calculation
This is a problem that many creative minds face. You get so caught up with creating the best promotional video that you forget about all the work that should come after it. You forget about creating a structured plan for your promotion.
For each YouTube promotion, you need to develop measurable goals. You’re not just putting it out there hoping for the best. You need to know exactly what you want from your promotion campaign.
Think in numbers instead of adjectives. You don’t need “more views,” you need, say, 40,000 views on that promotional video.
If you’re doing YouTube promotion for a for-profit company, set measurable sales goals. Set a goal on how many leads you need from the promotion campaign and use your average conversion rate to calculate how many views you need.
Monitor the performance of your YouTube promotion to see whether your original plan is working or not. If the promotion is underperforming, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to increase whatever metric you’re tracking.
2. The Pursuit of Views/Likes/Comments
While it’s important that you set measurable goals, the type of metrics you’re tracking is important as well. If you’re too focused on increasing the number of views, likes, or comments on the video you’re promoting, you may be going the wrong way. Here are four major metrics you should be concerned about.
Average View Duration
The number of views may be a misleading statistic. A huge number of people may start watching your video but don’t watch it till the end. What you need to be looking at to get the best estimate of how well your video performs is the average view duration.
This metric is important both for regular and ad videos. It may be even more important for ads since your main pitch will most likely be in the middle of the video. A good average view duration indicates that the video does grab user attention during the first seconds.
Views to Subscribers Ratio
If you’re trying to grow your channel with promotions, you should not be concerned with the number of views a promotional video gets. You should be looking at the ration of views to subscribers. If a video you promote is getting a ton of views, but none of those people stay at your channel to watch another video and subscribe, you’re not getting anywhere.
Track the ration of views to subscribers to get a better picture of how promotion impacts your channel. Looking at organic viewer retention is a good idea as well. This statistic lets you see how many people stay at your channel.
Conversions
Are you promoting a business deal on YouTube? The number of conversions should be your key metric, not the number of views.
Traffic Source
This metric doesn’t directly impact your promotion efforts but helps you understand what particular promotion gave you the most results. Mark the link from each channel of distribution with a UTM tag, and track what performs best.
3. Focus On The Wrong Target Audience
If a particular channel of distribution shows bad results time and time again, maybe you’ve made a mistake when choosing the right audience for your promotion. This is another mistake that many marketers make, even if they’re really good. It’s easy to slip into believing that you can sell to anyone or to choose the wrong audience.
Don’t know what audience is the best fit for your channel or business? Here are two fool-proof ways to figure that out.
Competitor Analysis
Veronica Seann, Head of Marketing at Essay Tigers, comments that the safest way to gauge the right audience for any content creation or promotion is to look at what your competitors are doing.
Look up your closest competition on YouTube and hijack their strategy!
Analysis Through YouTube Search
Another good option is to do a quick check on YouTube. Type in a couple of search queries that match the user intent of your video and take a look at what demographics watch those videos.
Conclusion
These three mistakes can drown even the best YouTube promotion. Now that you’ve learned to avoid those, incorporate them into your next campaign, and monitor the results. The odds are, you’re going to see a significant increase in key metrics.
We hope you enjoyed this post in collaboration with Haley Osborne.
