How to Gain Traction on YouTube: How We Pumped Up Views by 100k in a Month

More saturation, more competition, more distractions… but also more room to grow. That’s the state of YouTube right now. 

Using the platform as a tool to encourage business growth is becoming increasingly viable, even though you might have thought the website’s heyday was long gone. In fact, according to a recent study, today’s consumers find YouTube ads to be more relevant than linear TV advertising. 

Even if you’re already aware of how effective an advertising tool YouTube can be, you still might have questions about where to start with your own marketing efforts. 

Before we even begin to talk about ads, we need to stress the importance of your organic presence. Your content needs to hit your specific demographic of viewers with a message that successfully entertains, informs, or encourages. To do that, you’ll need a comprehensive strategic plan backed up by targeting tactics like keyword research. 

Your content should be consistent, both in terms of messaging and timelines. Your schedule can be weekly, biweekly, or monthly, but whatever it is, stick to it. A certain level of predictability is a good thing, it lends credibility to your company or organization and what you’re promising. Analytics on the backend will allow you to get even more specific, and determine the best time to post based on your audience’s activity. 

Speaking of your audience, it’s important to remember that one-size-fits-all rarely works when it comes to advertising. Chances are, there are different subsets of your larger target audience that require slightly varied messaging tactics. For instance, if you’re selling products that are geared towards both adults and children, your videos should exist on two different channels. 

As important as organic growth is, we’re here to discuss how to leverage paid advertising – because sometimes, the difference in numbers can be drastic. Paid advertising strategies can dramatically increase your brand’s visibility, and quickly. Whether you want to bring in more views, drive sales or clicks, there’s a way to do that via paid ads on YouTube. 

Let’s use views as an example, since we just saw major success in a recent enrollment campaign for Pickens Technical College where that was one of our metrics. After deciding on an advertising budget of $5k for a month-long boost, we made expanding reach, building momentum and hopefully long-term engagement a few of our priorities. In that 28-day stretch, the channel got 109k views, a full 107k more than normal. Not to mention, the average percentage viewed (or the video’s ability to hold the viewer’s attention for its entirety) was sitting at an extremely solid 95.6%. 

While these numbers highlight successes we saw from a paid advertising campaign, the audience for those videos was made up of accounts that interacted with our regular, authentic content that they know they can expect on a relatively regular basis. Prioritizing this engaging content featuring behind-the-scenes looks at a typical day in the classroom or an interview with a local employer captured and kept the attention of both current and prospective students. 

Like everything else we write about in our blog, the key to success here was that each part of this strategy worked together to encourage growth and support our marketing goals. 

Let’s chat about how partnering with an ad agency like ours that is well-versed in YouTube ad services (as well as those on other social media platforms) can help your brand grow!