YouTube 5 Tips to Improve Your Results
A title that promises… not much, is it?
Here’s the truth: there’s no magic formula for success. Not on YouTube, not on social media, not on your blog. Tim Schmoyer, founder of Video Creators, doesn’t promise his customers quick and easy tips, and he hasn’t promised the community any either. Instead, he advises relying on a set of “consistent principles that lead to growth more predictably than others”. But if you’re not getting the results you want from your videos published on Youtube or another platform, you need to start experimenting somewhere. “We know the definition when you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, don’t we?”. says Tim. So stop creating and promoting videos the way you have until now – unless you’re happy with your results.
Tim suggests you start by focusing on these principles:
Tell a good story
According to Tim, a good story is the closest thing to a magic formula for video success on Youtube. If only creating one were as easy as it sounds. But Tim has come up with a place to look for advice: the tried-and-tested hero’s journey. You know the archetype: the hero goes on an adventure, overcomes many challenges and learns something life-changing along the way. It’s a model that, according to Tim, produces “a really good story that’s proven to grab a person’s attention, hold them and inspire them to act in some way”. But it also spoke to me because, like Mirna, I’m a woman and a (slow) runner who often feels like an imposter in this sport. It’s almost as if REI created this video to reach out to women like me. As it happens, the company did just that. REI commissioned a survey of women’s outdoor experiences in early 2017 and found that women felt the lack of female role models for outdoor activities. And they perceived that men’s outdoor interests were receiving more attention. The Mirnavator (and others in REI’s Force of Nature initiative) grew out of the REI content team’s commitment to telling more stories about women in the outdoors. Yes, knowing your audience is borderline cliché advice, but all content and marketing has to start there.
You need to understand the people you want to reach to have any hope of attracting their attention.
But what does it mean to know your audience exactly? Tim says it goes beyond demographic details.
You need to dig into the psychographic profile:
- What is their emotional story?
- Why are they looking for content like this?
- What can we create to make them say, “Where have you been all my life? That’s exactly what I’m looking for!”
The 2018 Content Marketer of the Year shares REI’s story.
The 3 strategic pillars behind every winning content strategy.
1- Emotion counts for more than hardware
Not every company has the team or the budget to create REI-quality videos. But does that condemn their videos to mediocrity? Not if the emotion is there, says Tim. He told the story of his recent trip to Rhode Island for his 16th wedding anniversary. Tim had packed a DSLR camera, four different lenses, filters and microphones to immortalize the weekend. But he didn’t use any of them. Instead, he used his smartphone. And the video still worked. “And that was because the story was compelling: a guy and his wife, 16 years of marriage, dancing alone together as the sun rises over the beach.” That’s a personal example, but it’s not hard to imagine the analogy with the business world.
In fact, Apple has built an entire campaign around this concept. The “Shot on iPhone” campaign began as a user-generated content initiative, so you can find many examples that didn’t require a huge budget. No, you probably can’t afford Park Chan-wook. Yes, you can afford a smartphone. So invest in finding stories worth telling.
2- Thumbnails and titles are important, perhaps more than anything else.
Most of Tim’s advice so far applies to any form of content. But here’s a video marketing tip you probably haven’t heard: Start with the thumbnail. It’s that important. “It doesn’t matter how extraordinary your story is. It doesn’t matter how moving it is… if no one clicks on it in the first place,” Tim explains. And the way to get people to click? Create a thumbnail that stops scrolling. That means the thumbnail has to pass what Tim calls “the eye test”. This means making your thumbnail as small as it will be when people scroll. Look away, then look back. Ask yourself:
- What came out?
- Where have my eyes gone?
Do this test,” says Tim, “and you’ll probably find that text distracts from the curiosity you’re hoping your visual will arouse. What’s the optimum amount of text on a thumbnail? Tim says you should aim for no text at all. Instead, focus on finding a clear, eye-catching visual that will make people say “Whoa, what was that? Let me back up a bit!” Next, the title can offer the pitch or promise of the value the video will bring on Youtube and other social networks. Most video marketers fail at this stage, failing to create a question that entices viewers to click. But some of Tim’s clients (with millions of subscribers, he says) focus on the thumbnail before anything else. “It’s not uncommon for them to spend a day thinking of all the headlines and thumbnails they think their audience might click on,” he explains. “They don’t bother making the video if they don’t come up with a good title and thumbnail first.” I’m a self-proclaimed word geek, and I found Tim’s “zero text on thumbnails” advice hard to take. So, I went to YouTube and scrolled through a bunch of thumbnails. And… I’m skeptical. (Next step, test this on the CMI audience). But I found enough to convince me that words matter less than the chosen image. So, yes, text played the smallest role in getting my attention. The bold, clear images did the job. But how to get the click? I found myself drawn to vignettes that created intrigue, as Tim suggested. In some of these, text plays a role (in combination with the video title). Like the one I found on the Video Creators YouTube channel: The text “FORGET THIS” combined with the red X covering the Google logo caught my eye. The “talk to the hand” gesture of the woman on the right told me this video had a strong point of view about something. What am I supposed to forget about Google? The title (even though it’s partially cut off in the image) hooked me: “The “Google mentality” keeps you from moving forward…”
I clicked.
I looked.
I learned.
Still, I don’t intend to take any strategic action after testing Tim’s advice on myself. But I am going to work with our PR manager and video producer, Amanda Subler, to try different approaches to thumbnails and titles for our videos (and we’ll report back on the results).
3- Create a feedback loop on video engagement
How are we going to find the signals among the mountains of data provided by YouTube? Here again, Tim gives us some good advice.
Look at the data corresponding to what he calls “the viewing path”.
- What brings them to the video?
Look at click-through rates on titles and thumbnails. - What keeps their attention? Study the audience retention graph. Do you regularly lose attention within the first 10 seconds? Why? What could you change to keep more spectators?
- What motivates them to act in the end?
See if people click to watch another video after the first.
Try different things to get people to act.
Don’t forget who you’re talking to
Tim’s list of principles began with a reminder of the need to know your audience. And there’s one thing it’s especially important to know about your audience. They’re all people. It seems obvious. But marketers sometimes forget this. When an audience member asked Tim if his approach changed for B2B and B2C videos, he said no. Here’s why: “You don’t target a company. You’re always targeting someone within the company who has a problem they’re trying to solve.”
