What’s Your Purpose?
Depending on the focus of your YouTube marketing efforts, there are different goals you should focus on.
Marketing Priorities
• Brand Recognition – The content your are publishing needs to inform your viewers who the company is, what the product or services are, and where they can go to purchase or find more information about them.
• Viral Content – It’s important to provide compelling content with the potential for going viral. Your content needs to shared and liked by your audience to the point where they are doing the marketing for you.
• Social Sharing – You need to add some calls to action and let you audience know to share your content or tell their friends about it. Your reminder in the video will prompt them to let other know about it.
• Subscribers – Your channels success depends on growing your subscriber base. As your subscriber base goes, each video you publish will be viewed by a wider audience which repeats the cycle of growing your subscriber list even larger.
Monetization Priorities
• Valuable Content – The content you publish needs to provide value to your audience. Either by solving a problem, providing funny or entertaining videos, explaining how to do something, anything that provide values to your audience.
• Subscribers – If your goal is to make money with YouTube, the more subscribers you, the more potential you have to make money.
• Advertiser Friendly Content – Cute kitten videos may provide a certain value to your audience but how many advertisers want their placements published in front of that video? Creating niche specific videos that focus one your audiences needs are more likely to attract advertisers who are in that industry (or related industries) because those types of videos are easier for them identify a market for their products. The more advertisers that want to put their ads in front of your content – the more money your will make.
• Repeat Viewers – Video views are the life blood of monetizing YouTube… Give your viewers a preview of upcoming videos so that come back in the future to watch your content. Each additional view your content receives equals more revenue. Focusing on repeat viewers and building loyalty is critical to monetization success.
• Evergreen Content – Evergreen content is content that never gets old. Tomorrow or 5 years later, the content is just as relevant as it is today. Out of date the content does not generate views or money.
Setting Goals
It is important for you to research the competition in your niche and determine if your goals are in line with what your competition is doing. If they’re publishing 3 videos weekly and your goal is to publish 1 video monthly, your goals might not be realistic for the audience in that niche.
Also check their channel stats… How many average views to their videos receive?
Your competition is a great resource to understand what your goals should be.
Goals to focus on:
• Subscribers – Set realistic expectations to grow your subscriber base. Maybe start with 10 subscribers the first video, then 100 on your next.
• Views – Similar to subscribers, set realistic expectations for your views. Maybe you want to start with 10 views on your first video, 50 on the second one, 1,000 on your third.
• Monetary – If your YouTube efforts are focused on generating revenue, then it is important for you to set monetary goals. Start with realistic expectations like $10 for the first video, and grow from there.
• Editorial Calendar – Setting expectations on how much content you’re actually going to publish is critical. Will you publish multiple times a week or monthly? YouTube viewers demand consistency. No matter what it is, once you begin a publishing schedule, your audience will demand that you maintain it. The niche you are will determine the frequency which you must publish.
The important thing to remember is to set goals to see if your moving forward.
Once you’ve established goals, be sure to track your progress. Determine if there is an upward or downward trend and explore why so that you can adjust what you’re doing. Watch the following trends to monitor your results:
- Views in the last 30 days
- Subscribers the last 30 days
- Revenue in the last 30 days