Who are your audience on YouTube and what turns them on or off?

For any serious video content creator, YouTube Analytics (YTA) is an essential tool. Using YTA regularly is the only way to assess the performance of your YouTube channel and to see any significant changes or patterns in your audiences’ behaviour. The insights that YTA provides are designed to highlight to creators what they need to do to make better videos. If you are approaching your video output strategically, YTA is your means to regularly assessing the performance of your videos and using those insights to constantly improve your content and audience strategies.

This is an introduction to the main features of YouTube Analytics. The guide is divided into two sections; firstly, using YTA to help you build your audience and secondly, using YTA to improve audience engagement.

SECTION A - Building an audience

1 Who are your viewers?

The Demographics feature in…

It isn’t news that people are exposed to more ideas than ever before. This is due to the fact that people are exposed to more media than ever before. It is through the media (newspapers, television, radio, the internet and more specifically the social media…) that ideas are spread, but sheer quantity makes it difficult to be seen and heard above all of the noise.

In this climate, what can you do to make your ideas stand out?

Two people who have attempted to answer this question are brothers Chip and Dan Heath. There came a point when the brothers realised that despite working in very different fields, they had both reached a stage where they were trying to answer the same question: ‘why do some ideas stick while others fail?’ This question became the title of…

Defining budget and timescales for video production

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Whether you're joining the video revolution for the very first time, or thinking about your next online video project, one thing will be paramount to ensuring its success: preparation.

Like any other marketing strategy, setting clear goals for video production is an essential part of your preparation. Clearly defined goals will stop you from wasting time and money, and ensure your video delivers an effective message to your target audience.

It's all very well deciding you want to increase the use of online video in your marketing strategy, but skipping the vital step of setting realistic goals will limit the success of your project.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said: by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Setting Your Goals

Goal setting is a powerful process to help keep you focused.…

A great video can change the world

A combination of the right stories, the right visuals and the right music can be powerful enough to bring the masses on board with a cause. This is a great tool for marketers who are using video every day to win their audiences over. However, video technology is now in the hands of the many, rather than the few, and the underdog has a fighting chance which can cause BIG damage to existing brands as the first example shows. The balance of power has shifted and the big brands need to be wary… their best weapon can quite easily become their biggest enemy.

Here are five great examples of videos that have been made to bring about some kind of social change – from simply highlighting an injustice, to big calls to action for a specific cause.

1. Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment #FitchTheHomeless

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Examples and tips showing how to get the best out of YouTube

While YouTube is certainly an ideal place to while away the hours before quitting time at work, many people also view it as the place to head when they want to learn about...pretty much anything. Of course, all of this translates into a lot of people spending a lot of time viewing and posting content on YouTube every hour of every single day of the week. With all of these people looking to YouTube to guide them in everything from their choice of car to the finer points of craft beer making, unless your brand includes YouTube as part of its strategy, you are likely missing out on valuable opportunities to expand awareness of your brand, increase your online visibility, attract new customers, and deepen relationships with current customers. Embarking on a new…

Facebook launches new 15 second video service on Instagram

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Instagram's Getting started on Video Help pages We recently showed how Instagram can be an effective marketing tool for small businesses. So the recent announcement by Mark Zuckerberg has been followed with great interest by small business marketers in particular. Increasingly free, bite-sized video is being used to support engagement through social media, whether it's through Vine,  the short 6 second looping video on Twitter, Google+ Hangouts or Youtube video being integrated across multiple channels.  Social media users are loving visual content sharing, shown by the use of vine already used by 13m iOS users by June when it was first released on Android. Now Facebook has responded by offering a video option to its  130m Instagram users.

What is…

A briefing and research on native video advertising effectiveness

Native video advertising is potentially quite controversial. The term refers to advertising that is designed to blend in with the page it is placed on. In other words, it is advertising that is trying to look like it isn’t advertising. Genius? Or just sneaky? Native video advertising is watched by viewers by choice. The power of choice over being ‘forced’ to watch is undeniable. When a viewer chooses to watch an advert the impact on branding is far more positive than when a viewer has no choice. In this article I am going to share the findings of two recent research studies into the effectiveness of native video advertising. I am going to look at the value of the findings and also raise some questions about the ethics of a native approach.

Sharethrough

Sharethrough are a native advertising platform who believe in thoughtfully integrated brand…

A briefing on this new branding feature in YouTube's "One Channel"

Viewers who are yet to subscribe to your YouTube channel and visit your channel page, can now be greeted by a video telling them why they should hit the subscribe button. This is an opportunity to show these potential subscribers what you do, and why they should sign up. This new feature is just one part of the new “One Channel’ design that YouTube started rolling out in March 2013. The core benefit of this new design is that your channel will have a uniform look across devices. Other useful features include the ability to create playlists and the ability to link to associated channels straight from your channel homepage. The most exciting feature, as far as creativity goes, is definitely the trailer feature. Here's one nice example of a channel featuring it: …

Could Google Hangouts on Air be the solution for your video platform?

Videos are some of the trickiest marketing assets for companies to produce. They require a lot of preparation and are expensive to produce and market. Google Hangouts on Air offer a way to broadcast your videos to the world, for free. Could it be an cost-effective tool to improve your marketing strategies by creating videos quickly and broadcasting them widely?

What are Google Hangouts on Air?

Google created Hangouts as a web-based tool to allow Google plus subscribers to communicate via video. Originally, the tool set up a virtual room where up to ten people could hang-out together to converse or carry out more complexes tasks, like group meetings. Last year, Google developed a feature that allows you to share your hangouts on your YouTube channels, and more recently, that allows you to broadcast your hangouts live to…

Online video content creation and placement options

Video is quickly becoming the most sought after marketing content with higher user engagement than any other medium. Video content is a popular marketing tactic utilised by 87 percent of marketers to improve engagement with consumers, according to a study by Outbrain. This increase in content creation gives customers better insight into businesses and their products.

Video on a Global Scale

You will probably know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. With over four billion hours of video watched every month, it provides endless opportunities for marketers. Those four billion views on YouTube are coming from all around the world. YouTube’s statistics state that 70 percent of their visits are from outside the U.S. They’re localised in 61 languages across 53 countries. Video localisation is an important aspect…