5 common mistakes you can avoid when running your YouTube campaigns
Youtube is a great platform to launch products or services to new audiences. In fact, this platform has an approximate reach of 2 billion users active, around the world. However, if you want to use YouTube for your campaigns, there are some guidelines to keep in mind to optimize your budget and your efforts.
Even the most experienced advertisers make mistakes. That is why I have compiled some of the most common ones, so that you can anticipate them and avoid them as much as possible.
- Segment the wrong audience
Many advertisers make the mistake of not correctly segmenting the audience they want to communicate to. This leads to poor performance on your YouTube channels and a low engagement rate. Therefore, if you notice that the performance of your channel is not as expected and you consider that the quality of your content is adequate, the problem may be in the segmentation of your audience.
It is very common to see entrepreneurs who are so in love with their product that they believe that everyone could buy it and that it is suitable for all audiences. However, reality tells us that this is not always the case.
Therefore, an excellent way to identify the audience that is actually interested in a product is through a competition analysis, since this is one of the best ways to know if the audience you chose is the right one for your brand.
Evaluate who your competitors are and who are the members of your target audience. Chances are that if you can find the right audience, you will see excellent performance in your campaigns.
In addition to analyzing your competitors, it is also very useful to carry out an analysis of what users are looking for on YouTube. To get this information, you can write multiple queries that match the intention of the users of the audience you are targeting, and then look at the demographic details of the users who watch those videos.
- Not having a clear strategy
For many advertisers, it is clear that they have to run a campaign on YouTube or some other platform, however in many cases they do not quite know why. Not having a clear strategy is a very common mistake and sometimes the focus is merely on the video piece and the creation of a well structured promotion plan is overlooked.
Keep in mind that it is not recommended that you rely solely on your intuition when promoting your videos on YouTube. On the contrary, I recommend that you design a plan, as structured as possible, so that you achieve a successful campaign.
One of the ways to avoid this situation is to develop your strategy before uploading any video to YouTube. In this way you will have more tools to know what works and what corresponds when creating your content and not expect it to work without good reasons. To do this, you can create a structure of clear objectives, with which you can measure the performance of your campaigns. Similarly, you should develop a content plan that includes detailed information on the role YouTube plays as part of your brand's marketing mix.
- Track little relevant metrics
Just as it is important that you are clear about the objectives of your YouTube campaign from the beginning, so are the type of metrics that you are going to evaluate throughout your measurement. Focusing merely on getting views, comments and likes is a trap that many advertisers fall into, instead of evaluating indicators according to their plan and objectives. This can cause you not to take advantage of your budget to the maximum and worst, that the effort you put into the creation of your video, does not get its benefit.
It is true that user interactions are important metrics, however they are relevant as long as they are measured based on the taste of your audience towards the message you are providing. Here are some metrics worth considering when measuring the performance of your YouTube efforts.
Conversion rate: This indicator is almost mandatory when making measurements. If your YouTube efforts have animations to promote a product or business, the conversion rate is the metric that will accompany you the most.
Average duration: The total number of views may be a value that does not tell you the whole truth. For example, out of 100 people who watch a video, only 10 may have watched it through to the end. That is why it is important to measure the average duration of views. To obtain this value you must take the total viewing time of your YouTube video and divide it by the number of reproductions and re-reproductions. This indicator will help you get the best estimate of how well your videos are performing.
Visits per subscriber ratio: If your goal is to grow your channel with promotions, you shouldn't worry about the number of views you have overall. Instead, you should look at the rate of visits per subscriber. For example, if a video that you promote is having a lot of views, but none of the users subscribe to your channel, you are not performing well. A good ratio of visits per subscriber is between 8% and 12%, so if you have less than this it means that you still have room to optimize.
Traffic source: Keeping in mind where the users who saw your videos come from does not contribute directly to your communication efforts. However, you can get very interesting information about your audience. Tracking your traffic sources will help you understand which promotions deliver the best results.
- Value YouTube optimization above content quality
Many advertisers upload a video to YouTube and seeing that the overall performance of the views was low, they focus exclusively on seeing how to optimize from the platform, through keywords or metadata. However, YouTube optimization is just a multiplier for the quality of your video. If the quality is low or the content is not entertaining, optimization will not be of much help.
While optimization can have a big impact on your channel's performance, there is a condition. Your content must be of very good quality. That is why I recommend that you focus on this aspect first and do not rely solely on the optimization of the tool.
If you are still not sure how to start your journey towards a better quality in your content, I recommend that you train in this area as soon as possible so that you achieve a better result from your videos.
- Write headlines to improve SEO
Sometimes SEO specialists focus excessively on writing the perfect titles to correctly position a video and along the way neglect what the user needs to read to learn more about the content. This approach can spell trouble if the text isn't engaging or engaging enough for users to click through to the video.
Click-through rate can have a major impact on the performance of your YouTube channel and generate more impact than any SEO benefit, which is why I recommend that you think about your headlines based on the user. If you want to strategically create your titles, make sure to write the part that is visible thinking that it is attractive to your audience and the rest thinking in terms of SEO. Remember that getting users interested in your video is far more valuable than any SEO effort.
These 5 errors can occur even in the best implemented campaigns, so knowing them in advance will save you several headaches and help you substantially improve the performance of your campaigns.
