Marketing on YouTube seems simple enough, but it requires nuanced audience understanding. And there are five YouTube marketing musts that are key to any brand’s efforts – items that are informed by social media analytics!
YouTube, by the Numbers
YouTube’s numbers are impressive. With 2 billion active monthly users, more than a billion YouTube views via mobile each day, it attracts about a third of the internet’s entire user base. It’s the second most highly trafficked site online after Google.
And everyone wants to be a YouTube star these days, it seems. The success of everyday folks, many achieving super stardom, makes it easy to see why. “YouTube video influencers with 500k+ followers charge, on average, $3857 per video.”
Among those influencers, probably the best known – and the one that tops many “Top YouTuber” lists is PewDiePie.
Let’s explore five best practices that have helped him achieve this success. And how it relates to brand marketing, because it does! Very much so. We’ll connect it back to the social analytics insight brands can capture in NetBase as we go!
Before we get to those indicators though, which can – and should – be sourced from the entire social web (social sites, forums, blogs, news, reviews and so much more), here’s a quick refresher on content we capture that’s specific to YouTube, as allowed by its T&Cs.
YouTube Analytics Overview
Our YouTube Summary widget offers brands a high-level view of its topic’s most important YouTube metric values. These metrics can be viewed as an Overview or as Converged Media.
The Overview circle chart captures Videos, Statistics and Authors. The Statistics metric is broken down by Comments, Likes, Views, and Dislikes, as seen below the circle. They’re also seen as segments on the circle graphic itself.
Brands can plot them in a timeline view, like this:
And create comparisons between different measurement criteria over time or just in general.
The Converged Media widget separates out Owned, Partnered and Earned metrics. This is a super valuable view to have at your disposal when tracking influencers’ contributions to your YouTube marketing efforts.
And then there’s the YouTube Stream, which captures comment data in real-time:
It may not be readily apparent, but the YouTube Stream widget displays lots of crucial intel once you look closely. You’ll see sound bites matching the analysis sorted in order of “richness” (our name for sentiment precision). And items offering high sentiment precision appear in blue, positive insights in green, and negative insights in red. Brands can toggle between Mentions and Posts, depending on how they want to view, tag or export the insight.
Here’s a breakdown of all the data contained in one stream mention. It’s a lot:
And now to those five marketing musts! All of these can be tracked back to audience understanding in some way.
1. Personality
This may sound basic or far too general, but it’s neither. Viewers want to feel something when watching your videos and they won’t if your brand hasn’t developed a personality. If this is new, taking a “try it and see” approach could work, or brands could sleuth out some insight in a powerful Next Gen AI sentiment analysis tool to see what has the best chance of sticking to the wall (when thrown at the wall, like spaghetti).
When each item is clickable, transparent (to track back to its origin) and offering intel to a granular level, brands have only to spend a little time exploring the insight to get a feel for who they are from a consumer perspective. They can see what’s positive, negative and which of each is worthy of playing up as a brand’s personality to viewers:
2. Enjoyable videos.
Understanding your audience’s definition of “enjoyable” will make or break your channel. Copying those leading the pack, even those in your space, is ill advised. Each brand has its own voice (or it should, per #1) and its own unique sales pitch for potential clients.
What value are you offering? And what about that value do your target segments appreciate the most? Are you offering something exclusive, super technical or an everyday item? Create a conversation around that – pick topics that will enhance their understanding or your product or service, or ideas that will help them sound super intelligent at the next staff meeting, or even tips for getting grass stains out of their laundry.
What one audience finds enjoyable, another will hate. So find some ubiquitous options as well as super targeted ones and watch the insight roll in. And do so in real-time to see how each resonates and what you must tweak just as fast!
3. Relatable.
Just because something has personality and is enjoyable, that doesn’t make it relatable – but it needs to be from a differentiation standpoint and because relatable experiences stick with us longer. Sorting out associated (and often weird) interests your audience has will help you uncover your brand’s own specific quirk to help it stand out. And keep the viewers coming back!
4. Get to trending!
Beyond understanding its audience and being relatable, a YouTube channel must have the pulse of what’s trending online if it hopes to hit the YouTube trending list. And that’s a place that offers amazing discovery potential.
The trending tab may not always relevant, but more times than not, it’s a hit for viewers so they click there often to check things out. Use your social analytics tool to sort out what’s trending in your category and create YouTube marketing content around that.
And further increase your odds by monitoring both the YouTube stream for your topic area and setting alerts around brand and category mentions so you can jump on relevant trends quickly, before they’re as stale as yesterday’s Gangnam Style.
5. Consistent Content
YouTube videos that focus more on quality than quantity win not only more viewers, but also algorithmically. YouTube wants content creators that make longer, more relevant videos, and so do your viewers. And they also want consistency – both from a schedule standpoint and (again) quality. So plan out your YouTube marketing videos months ahead to make sure you have evergreen content – quality evergreen content – that’s ready to go. And be ready to push it aside as you capture consumer insight from your analytics tool! Creating a series is always solid planning to accomplish this.
And beyond that – brands also have AI Studio insight to consider! Well, they do if they’re NetBase customers. No other analytics tool offers this kind of artificial intelligence . . .
AI Studio Theme Discovery
With all of this talk about being ready to move fast and create things (new videos), you’re probably wondering how a brand can possibly create quality content, consistently, and get on that “trending” list. Well, as we can’t all be PewDiePie and set trends (at least not yet), we do have a next best thing at our disposal – automated theme discovery
AI Studio takes brand’s defined topics and discovers related themes on its own, without any human interference. This means it cuts out any potential user bias (which can flavor results, even unintentionally) and uncovers intel that could send brands down a lucrative path that competitors have yet to get wind of.
So, AI Studio will be the new way for brands to become those YouTube marketing trendsetters, as they’ll seemingly have a magic ball whispering highly informed predictions in their CMO’s ear. And little will most know – they do!
Reach out for an AI Studio demo to see it in action, and then start creating content that will capture your category.
