The Best Source of Views

This week, a client asked a great question.

“Should we prioritize driving traffic to our new videos from our email list?”

For context, the client is a niche consumer software company with tens of thousands of email subscribers. They are ramping up their marketing on YouTube.

Here’s the outline of my answer, with a few details changed to protect their privacy

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If you’ve got a video concept that you are completely certain is a hit, then it makes sense to promote the video right as it is being released. 

Stoke the fire so it can really blow up.

Otherwise, try not to promote the video with direct links right off the bat. Here’s why;

The number one signal that YouTube takes into consideration for video engagement is how users interact with the video within the platform.

That means that the two highest signal paths a viewer can take to a video come via the YouTube homepage.

If they type your channel or the video title into the search bar, that shows high intent to consume the content. 

If they look at the lineup of videos displayed on the YouTube homepage and choose yours over the rest of the alternatives, that shows high intent to consume the video.

In all other formats of viewership, the signal of intent is far less clear. 

If an external link drives you there, it’s hard to tell if you knew what you were clicking on.

If the video auto plays after a previous video, it’s hard to tell if you meant to keep watching.

How do we know this matters?

The biggest youtuber in the world never tweets links to his videos. Instead he just shares an image of the thumbnail and tweets “new video is out”, trusting his audience to take the high intent pathways I articulated earlier.

Now you may be thinking, I’m not MrBeast, though….

True, but by focusing on the packaging, idea, and intro of the video, knowing that you’ll need to compete on YouTube to really succeed long term, you’ll find far more success than just spamming your email list with links over and over again.

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