On this episode Dane and Gwen talk about Dane’s running list of things that businesses ignore about YouTube that has been compiled over the years.
HOSTS: The Video Marketing Value Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden of VidiUp.tv and VidTarget.io | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube
– Gwen Miller LinkedIn | Twitter
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
Every video is not about the business that is making them. Every video is actually about the viewer and what they want.
Gwen Miller:
Amen.
Dane Golden:
It’s time for the Video Marketing Value Podcast. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners, just like you, get more value out of your video marketing efforts. My name is Dane Golden from VidiUp.tv, where we help you up your game on YouTube for business and transform your viewers into loyal customers, and VidTarget.io, where we help you get a higher return on your YouTube ad spend with more targeted YouTube ads. Along with my co-host, it’s Gwen Miller. Hello, Gwen.
Gwen Miller:
Hey Dane, I’m really excited to chat with you today.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Gwen, what do you do?
Gwen Miller:
I work with creatives and brands to use data to craft better and better videos for unique, one-of-a-kind audiences.
Dane Golden:
Okay. For you, the listener, you should know that as always, you can follow along in the podcast app you’re listening to this very moment, with the transcript in the links and a whole bunch of other stuff. Today, I wanted to talk about a running list I’ve compiled over the years, working with businesses on YouTube. I call it my … It’s now 22, so 22 key facts about YouTube that most businesses ignore, to their detriment.
Dane Golden:
Gwen, I thought I would just run through my list and you tell me if you agree or you don’t agree, because some of these things I’ve come up with over time, it’s my opinion. Some of it’s based on fact and best practice. Don’t hold back if you think something is totally wrong or incomplete or out of date. Don’t let me get away with anything. How’s that all sound?
Gwen Miller:
I mean, great. Dane, we don’t often get to chat just the two of us, so I think this will be a fun geek-out session.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Here we go. Number one. No one will ever click on a video that doesn’t interest them. What do you think?
Gwen Miller:
Well, I mean, I think that’s pretty self-apparent and hard to disagree with, but I would love to hear you dig a little bit more into what do you mean by that? What do you think that level of interest needs to be?
Dane Golden:
That’s a good point.
Gwen Miller:
Is it just a, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Or does it need to be a burning, burning passion?
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Well, I think that that’s a good point. With businesses, I just have seen them do so many things that I disagree with on their YouTube channels. Maybe this is just the most basic, basic fact, but let’s make some videos and thumbnails and titles that intrigue people and ideally it’s aligned with your business. I’ve had some clients that have had legacy videos from previous years that have nothing to do with their business.
But they get a lot of views and then they drive very inappropriate subscribers, not like dirty or anything. It’s just like, it’s not helpful.
Gwen Miller:
Ah, yes. The lure of ephemeral views. It happens all the time.
Dane Golden:
As far as clicking on video that are interesting, the mass quantity of videos that businesses upload just because they seem to need to have a place to upload it, can really tank the channel. Because if you’re uploading all sorts of videos that no one wants to watch, you become a channel that no one wants to watch.
Gwen Miller:
Ah, yes. I would put in this category the many, many conference videos that I have watched, which are mostly just like sizzle reels of people walking around a trade floor set to music. I’m sure it was a lot of fun to shoot and it was great to have the cameras there, but to your point, do you think, Dane, it’s more a function of people not stepping back and just thinking for a second? Because yeah, it seems like it should be obvious, but sometimes I think, to your point, it’s like, “We have video, let’s put it up.”
Is it just five minutes of being like, “Huh? If I was an actual consumer and not a person who was extremely passionate about carpet or whatever your business is, would I click on this?”
Dane Golden:
Now, first I want to ask you, when you say, “The many conference videos I’ve watched.” I assume you were paid to watch them.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. It’s usually a brand that’s like, “Can you look at my channel and identify why people won’t watch my videos?” I’m like, “Yes, because most of your videos are shot on a conference room, a floor with a small speaker way in the front and you’re behind all these people. They’re talking with bad audio and nobody wants to watch that for 20 to 30 minutes.”
Dane Golden:
My theory on most conference videos, 99.9% of conference videos, is that even the people who are in them don’t want to watch them. I think that I want to move on to my other tips, because they incorporate my answers here. Number two, viewers will stop watching every video right after it stops being valuable to them. What do you think?
Gwen Miller:
I mean, absolutely I think where it gets difficult for brands is to define what that moment is, because I think it’s very human nature to not want to end things too abruptly. I have to say, the biggest mistake I see businesses making, and frankly, this is true for any creator, is rambling at the end of their videos. Dane, how do you usually define how they figure out what their point is where things stop being valuable?
Dane Golden:
Well, I have some ending words. I have a video of ending words. The reason I created this ending words list that people should not say in a video is because you and a small group of other people at VidCon two years ago, were talking about not saying ending words. I was like, “Well, that’s fine, but what is an ending word?” You had to explain it to me personally, because I didn’t really know what you were talking about.
Then I made a list following up on that and what I was hearing elsewhere, things that give you the clue that things are going to end. When you have done that, you know that’s one way of knowing that it’s no longer valuable. Thanks-
Gwen Miller:
Game over.
Dane Golden:
Yeah.
Gwen Miller:
Literally.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe. Anyway, to sum up, to wrap up, just in conclusion, I want to say that. All those types of phrases will give people a clue that the value is over. There’s visual clues that the value is over but there’s also talking about themselves. When businesses talk about themselves in a way that is not driving value for their customers. We could dive into this, but basically I want to talk about how awesome I am as a business, as a marketer.
Dane Golden:
I just want to tell you how awesome I am and how many features I have. Customers don’t care about features. They care about benefits. If you can’t quickly talk about the benefit, you shouldn’t talk about the feature. That’s when things stop being valuable. You know what? You can just go in the audience retention and you learn where it stops being valuable to the viewer. Over time, you can describe almost every time without seeing the audience retention, you know as a channel manager when it’s going to be dropping off.
Gwen Miller:
For sure. I always like to use the analogy, coming from the lifestyle how-to background that I do, that when you pull the lasagna out of the oven, you’re done. You have finished the recipe. Do not try to then add in three minutes of fluff factoring or like making gorgeous garnishes on top. People don’t care. What is the main topic of the video? Is the main topic of that video done? Everybody is done.
Dane Golden:
As someone who has no experience in the lifestyle video world, I am learning so much from you. I’ve learned that there’s something called a fridge tour. I’ve learned that you should never blend and now I know no garnishes.
Gwen Miller:
Well, wait till we get into the aversion to having things poke at people’s eyes in beauty videos. We get into some really weird territory once we get into the beauty space, let me tell ya.
Dane Golden:
All right. There are bad views. That’s number three. There are bad view.
Gwen Miller:
Oh, that’s inflammatory. What do you mean by that?
Dane Golden:
Bad views, I just simply mean they’re bad for your channel. They’re bad for your channel. It goes back to the idea that there was a video that was not in the same topic as the rest of the channel or not what the channel usually talked about. That I believe is a bad view for several reasons. One, you’re going to create expectations that are off-kilter.
Hey, we got so many views on this type of video, but if we go back to our old type of video, suddenly we’re getting the 10th of views. Now we’re a failure. Also, if you get a ton of views and subscribers on one type of video that you’re only going to do once a year or once ever, what’s going to happen on your channel normally is that people are going to unsubscribe or not watch, which will lower the number of views you get on future videos.
Dane Golden:
Because if you had a million views on video A and then video B really only appeals to 10,000 people and so does video C and D and so forth, your channel, even though you might have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, is going to get fewer and fewer suggested videos in browse and suggested.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. I think it’s key to explain a little bit about why this is. Essentially what YouTube is doing, is it’d see someone come in, watch your video, watch it for a good amount of time. I think that’s key. You’re in an even worse place if they drop off after three seconds, but even if this person likes that specific video, but then comes back, sees an impression of a thumbnail for one of your videos on say their homepage and does not click on it because they were here for a certain thing that you are no longer fulfilling because that was not what your channel is about, YouTube looks at that and says, “Huh, well, it must not be appealing to him as we thought it was.”
They’re less likely to show that person additional videos from you, which is like, okay. That’s one person. What does that matter? They’re also extrapolating that to look like audiences. You’re less likely to be then shown in suggested in home to other viewers like him.
Dane Golden:
Right. By the way, when I say views here, I’m talking about organic use, not paid YouTube ads.
Gwen Miller:
For sure.
Dane Golden:
There’s also bad views about YouTube ads, which is not really what I’m talking about here. We’ll talk about that some other day. Tip number four, ugly fact number four. The YouTube algorithm only shows videos to people it thinks will want to watch it. That’s based on, I would sum up in these four areas, how long other people are watching the video or other videos on that channel, the info in that video, if that viewer has engaged with videos on the channel before, or if the viewer is looking for info.
Meaning they’re searching, actively searching for it. The YouTube algorithm really only shows videos for those reasons and no others. Am I missing something?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. I think the only layer I would twist back to from the last question is again, that collaborative filtering element, where they’re really looking at lookalike audiences too. This is why the YouTube algorithm is so powerful, more so than a lot of other platforms, because it does allow for that organic discovery, which in a lot of other platforms you’ll have to pay for. They do that by you get one viewer. You’re going to start with very few viewers, but they look at the viewer, they look at their characteristics.
They look at other people who have watched similar videos to that person, that has searched the same searches as that person. At the very early stages, if you’re pretty new to the platform as a viewer, they’re going to look at your demographics. After that, they’re going to really rely on the video watches and your search history. Then they just start extrapolating out from there. You can start to make these very powerful cohorts.
Gwen Miller:
Now, there are some things that are niches, like the channels that are literally just reviewing elevators and just are videos of people in elevators. That’s pretty niche. You’re probably not going to become a 12 million subscriber channel with that elevator pitch. Let me tell you, YouTube will find every single person on the platform who likes elevators for you, which is very, very, very powerful. That is the key thing here when you talk about this, is that YouTube is so focused on these few key things of what have you watched? How long have you watched? What are you searching for? That a lot of the times we can get distracted by other things. To your point, these are the only things that the YouTube algorithm truly cares about.
Dane Golden:
Our views on elevator videos are really going up, I hear. That’s the world’s worst joke.
Gwen Miller:
Sometimes they go down though.
Dane Golden:
World’s worst joke. Okay. I have tip number five. Putting bad videos on your channel will hurt videos. We pretty much covered that. Moving on to tip number six. Viewers won’t watch a video just because they like a brand. If it’s on the brand channel, or even if it’s about the brand, they won’t watch it, even if they like the brand but they don’t like the video. True or not true?
Gwen Miller:
I think that’s so true. I think this gets very confusing to brands who originally get onto YouTube when they’re used to something like Instagram. If you are a fan of a brand, you may like a picture just because you’re like, “Yes, go this brand that I really, really like.” It’s not a very large investment of your time. You need to look at it as opportunity cost for the viewer. On Instagram, it’s literally, they’re going to spend half a second looking at your photo. They’re going to double tap and they’re going to scroll on by.
On YouTube, especially with the lengths of videos lately, you’re asking them to make a commitment. That’s five, that’s 10, that’s 15, maybe even 20 minutes of their life that they’re not just going to sit there and passively watch just because they happen to like you.
Dane Golden:
Watching your conference.
Gwen Miller:
Exactly.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. They may subscribe. I might love Nike and I’ll subscribe to their channel, but I won’t go out of my way to see a video. I just will wait for the ad to be shown to me or whatever. Since I’m not watching their videos or I don’t click on them when they’re showed organically … I’m not saying Nike is the example here, but just, let’s say.
Gwen Miller:
Hey, you’re the one who called out a specific brand, man.
Dane Golden:
Nike sucks. No. No. I love Nike. They’re a Portland company. I’m in Portland. The thing is they may subscribe to a channel, but that doesn’t actually mean they’re watching the organic videos on that channel. Just because they love your brand does not make them a viewer. Number seven, too many different kinds of videos can kill a brand or business channel. You may keep the subscribers, but they will be dead subscribers or maybe undead is the right word. True? Not true? Gwen Miller.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. I think there are some nuances here. I think one of the big issues is you might keep your current subscribers, which I will say sometimes you can start losing them. I’ve definitely seen channels which have had two dueling audiences internally to them who half will like one half of the videos and the other half of like the other half of videos. Pretty quickly you’re going to see enough of them being fed up. They may start to leave.
Gwen Miller:
What’s probably the bigger issue is that it’s going to be hard to grow because then remember what we’re talking about, YouTube is judging you based off of if they put an impression in front of that person, if they click on it or not. You’re taking down your chances that any specific person will click on any specific video significantly, if you don’t have a very focused target audience. Then again, you risk losing out on some algorithm push because you don’t have such a strong click-through rate that might merit being served to more lookalike audiences.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Key fact number eight. There are multiple ways viewers can show disinterest, which can lead the algorithm to showing that viewer fewer and fewer videos from your channel, until they show them perhaps hardly any of your videos. These possible ways include unsubscribing is the most common, not clicking, watching, but not watching for very long or also not watching consecutive videos from your channel. What else am I missing?
Gwen Miller:
I think that’s pretty comprehensive. Look, there actually is a way now occasionally where YouTube does give surveys where you can literally say, “I did not like this.”
Dane Golden:
Well, that’s true. Yeah.
Gwen Miller:
I mean, that is such a small use case. It does exist, but I maybe have seen them a couple of time in my career. While they say that they’re taking those very seriously, the ones you listed are far more likely to be the reason you’re not getting served a video.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. It’s not just unsubscribing. I forgot the dislike button, but the dislike button is not always necessarily a negative factor. On your home page, you can click on don’t show me this or something.
Gwen Miller:
Yes. You can do that as well.
Dane Golden:
Even if you’re subscribed. Number nine. Any YouTube video can be turned into an ad. The reason I feel this is important because, one, it can lead businesses to misdiagnose what their competition is doing because a lot of businesses have on their channel … You see this often. Particularly if it’s like a 15-second, 22-second, 30-second, 60-second video, and it’s not a short. These are just simply ads that the brand … Often it’s like a telecom company or something like that, is just simply making public on their YouTube channel. That leads businesses to say, “Oh, if I can’t get 4 million views on my 15-second video, I can’t compete in the same world.”
Gwen Miller:
Oh yeah. This is a classic. The classic mistake of falling for people’s paid views and thinking that you can duplicate that organically.
Dane Golden:
Or you think that you can use paid media to bring quality views or subs. Ads are really for selling, not for growing a channel. There’s a small subset of ways you can use ads to grow a channel, but they’re almost always never the way that people want them to do it.
Gwen Miller:
Well, it’s also very expensive. If you do have the money, there is a way you can do it, but it’s not the way that most people do it, which is to throw on a pre-roll ad. You got to realize that when someone’s watching pre-roll, there’s no easy way for them to click through and subscribe to your channel. You’re getting an empty view. Maybe you’re getting exposure to them to remember who you are, but the likelihood that that converts into a subscriber anytime in the future is very small.
Dane Golden:
Fact number 10. You need to publish every week on a schedule. That is likely somewhere between one and three times a week is the right amount, depending on your channel. You can do it less frequently or more frequently, but you need to have a schedule. True or not true?
Gwen Miller:
It depends again on your goal, but I think all the channels that we would be working with would want to build a sustained audience. To build a sustainable audience, they need to know when to come back, because truly what YouTube craves more than anything is people to get onto their platform. Once they’re on the platform, YouTube is very good at keeping them there, but they have to get them to open it for some reason.
Gwen Miller:
Their best route is to have you have a super fan audience who knows that you go up at Tuesday at 10:00 AM and is going to come back Tuesday at 10:00 AM to watch your video, and then watch six other YouTube videos after it. Giving your fan base a cadence is very important. Now, I will say that if you’re a business that’s just starting to do this, I often see you probably have a small staff. Do not burn yourself out. If that is once a week, do it once a week. Don’t go up to immediately being like, “I’m going to do five times a week.” Because you will do it for two weeks, burnout and never do YouTube again.
Dane Golden:
Fact number 11. You never want to dump several videos on your channel at the same time. I know none of the channels you work with do this, but I actually see a number of business channels because I’m subscribed to a number of them. These are big brands often. I think that what’s going on is they’re just hiring somebody to produce a whole bunch videos.
Then somebody in some department that’s in charge of uploading them, uploads like three or four or seven, all on a Friday night or something like that.
Gwen Miller:
Oh God, my pet peeve. This is my biggest pet peeve that businesses do this. Way to flush your content down the toilet.
Dane Golden:
That’s a great quote.
Gwen Miller:
Why even make the content at that point? I get it. It’s a task on your task list, right? Get these videos on YouTube. You go through the process, you press publish. You’re viewing it as like you’re uploading it to fricking Dropbox. No. You got to see like every time you release one of these babies out into the universe, picture it as having its own organic marketing period that YouTube is doing for you for free. If you start to crowd out that marketing period … Think of it this way.
Gwen Miller:
If you release three videos at the same time, let’s go back to the fact that YouTube’s showing those impressions to people and getting them to click on it, right? Let’s say the small minority of people come across three videos of yours in a row on the subscription feed. They’re not going to click on all three of them. Suddenly you’re competing with yourself for clicks. You’re reducing the click-through rate on your impressions for those three videos. Why would you do this? Just give it a little bit of breathing room, depending on your cadence. If it’s once a week, do it once a week. If you’re doing every two days, give each video that full 48 hours to properly breathe and bask in the sun for a little while.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Yeah. You’re not Netflix. Netflix has tens of millions of customers that they can shove down their throats, that this is a new show that you should binge watch. No one wants to binge watch seven of your branding videos all on Friday night.
Gwen Miller:
Plus, they’re going to binge watch anyways. You’ve hopefully been putting up videos for quite a while. Over time, you’ll see that binge watching behavior happen. YouTube is in no way a linear platform.
Dane Golden:
You don’t have to release them all at the same time.
Gwen Miller:
No. Correct. Because you’ve been slowly building up. It’s like the perfect blend of what the kids call the Disney+ model these days, which is that weekly television release schedule that we’re used to, and the Netflix model, right? Where you get to binge, but the new stuff is slowly releasing, but you’re going to have, over time, hundreds and hundreds of videos for them to choose from just because you’ve been doing your weekly uploads for a couple of years.
Dane Golden:
All right. Number 12. Some videos just do not belong on YouTube at all. Instead, there are other options that do not affect the algorithm. You can upload it via Vimeo or Wistia or Vidyard to your website.
Gwen Miller:
Yes.
Dane Golden:
That conference video you think belongs on YouTube, put it on Vimeo, Wistia, Vidyard.
Gwen Miller:
Yep. Your flashy corporate sales pitch video. The YouTube audience is not a B2B audience, like-
Dane Golden:
I’ll argue with you there. I’m helping people B2B.
Gwen Miller:
You think?
Dane Golden:
Yes. I am helping people and they’re doing very well, but it’s not the same.
Gwen Miller:
Well, if that is your target audience. Yes. If it’s literally half your business is like, “We sell products to people, but then we’re also putting together a flashy corporate sizzle piece that we show to investors.” Do not put that on your YouTube.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Because even if people … Well, I don’t even know if this is one of my list, but even if people love your brand, they’ll only watch one ad, which is essentially what that is.
Gwen Miller:
Correct.
Dane Golden:
Tip number 13, key fact number 13. How-to videos bring new users in because they are searching for something they want to know how to do, but the topic should be chosen carefully based on what your customer is searching for, or you already know they like, not just something that you want to tell them about your product. You can do that some of the time, but that should really only be about 20% of the time about you, 80% of the time about things you know about in your industry that may overlap into your brand. Is that too long a tip?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. No. I think I get it. It’s really like, you should be focusing on how to fix the problem. Not reeling off the shiny things that your product can do that no one may actually need to actually use. This is an opportunity to help them solve a problem. If your product’s features do that, great, otherwise don’t give them the laundry list of here’s the 20 shiny things about my product.
Dane Golden:
Fact number 14. You have to keep repeating and improving the formula every week. I recommend that businesses don’t actually batch shoot a whole bunch of videos until they’ve done about 50 videos, because-
Gwen Miller:
Interesting.
Dane Golden:
Because very often, at first, they’re doing it wrong. If they’ve shot 10 videos already, they’re going to be doing it wrong for two and a half months. 10 weeks.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah.
Dane Golden:
Until you have been doing it for a while, I really recommend you don’t batch shoot.
Gwen Miller:
That’s smart.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Fact number 15. Look at the camera. Always look at the camera. The camera is the proxy for the customer. When you are on YouTube, you are acting as the number one salesperson for your company. Never would a salesperson look over the shoulder of the customer. You have to find a way to not be interviewed in a way where it’s like this … You think it’s a Ken Burns video and people are looking over their shoulders. I love Ken Burns videos. I love them. I never watch them on YouTube because it doesn’t work with the platform. It’s a one-to-one platform that’s confused as a one-to-many platform. You have to look directly at them.
Gwen Miller:
I always say think about it. YouTube is like you’re talking directly to another person. Can you imagine if you were looking someone in the face and talking to them and they slowly moved over and stared at you at that side of your face? That is how it feels when you do a side angle on YouTube. It feels like this conversation just went really weird really quickly.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Fact number 16. Not every video will be a success, and you actually shouldn’t even want every video to be a success because you’re going to be trying new things. You shouldn’t be trying … and I said there were bad views so you shouldn’t go totally against what you’re doing, but you should be trying new things, but not something that’s so crazy that it’s totally off. It’s more in flavors and versions and nuances.
Gwen Miller:
Baby steps.
Dane Golden:
I think I’ve heard you speak about this, haven’t I?
Gwen Miller:
Yes. Taking baby steps. Always be experimenting else you’ll be irrelevant, but you don’t want to take a flying leap off a cliff.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Yeah. Try new things. Some things will be failures and that’s okay. You don’t want to keep spiraling down that drain that’s not working. That’s another reason you shouldn’t batch shoot everything at once if you don’t know what you’re doing yet.
Gwen Miller:
Yes.
Dane Golden:
Fact number 17. Every video is not about the business that is making them. Every video is actually about the viewer and what they want.
Gwen Miller:
Amen.
Dane Golden:
Do you think that’s a hard concept for people to get even today?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. I think because when you’re talking about a marketing strategy, everyone immediately goes to, how am I going to sell my product? If you come across as you’re selling anything on YouTube, you might as well pack it in and go home. You have to be audience-first, but it’s natural when you’re coming up with a ‘marketing plan’ to want to make it all marketing-y.
Dane Golden:
How do you spell marketing-y?
Gwen Miller:
With a lot of Ys.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Fact number 18. Assume every viewer is watching on their phone. Faces and close-ups always need to be much closer than something you would be shooting for television.
Gwen Miller:
This is one of my favorite ones. Preach it. I don’t think there’s much more yap to say about that one besides, remember if you are doing something on your computer, zoom out, so you know what it’s going to look like on someone’s phone. Just please, please.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Because the vast majority of people are watching YouTube on their phone. Number 19. A video should only be about one topic. If you can’t explain the topic in a few words, it’s probably too broad and it may not get those clicks because it’s too confusing.
Gwen Miller:
I would even take this one step further, Dane, and say, you get less clicks but the clicks that also click through are more likely to leave halfway through, because they’re going to be there for one half of the equation. When the other half of the equation starts, if it’s too many thoughts in one, they might be like, “Eh, I’m leaving.” That sends bad signals to the algorithm and you get less push.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Fact number 20. This is my own thing. I don’t know if you believe this or not. Don’t do a numbered series of videos like, I go to the office, episode one, I go to the office, episode two. Because YouTube makes it really hard for people to find the other numbers. If they start by seeing episode number two or three, from my part, I will say, “Well, I’m not going to watch two or three until I get to one, but I can’t find one.” I never end up watching two or three.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. Look, any extra thought that you have to take when you look at a title to say, “Do I want to watch this?” Immediately lessens that click-through rate. If you’re looking at that and being like, “Oh, this is part two, do I need to find part one?” Instantly 50% of your click-through rate is just gone. Why would you do that to yourself?
Dane Golden:
Okay. Key fact number 21. Answer the stupid questions that everyone has. Sometimes they are the wrong questions, but that’s okay. Insiders to any industry hate the stupid questions. They hate the wrong question. For instance, for us, it might be someone saying, “How can I get more views?” Right? You’re just like, “Okay. Yeah. I know you want more views, but what you really want is watch time and watch time is really what …” That really is the wrong question, but even though it’s the wrong question, whatever is in your industry is the wrong question.
You know what they are, whatever business you’re in, because you always get those questions. You should still answer that question in some videos, because that’s a top-of-funnel question. That’s the entry-level question that they are not smart enough yet to ask the right question. They come in and then you can say, “Okay. This is the wrong question.” For us, it might be keywords. You should really have all the good keyword tags because that’s really important.
Dane Golden:
People look up, “Oh, okay, I’ll look up keyword tags.” Then someone says, “Hey, keyword tags. You know what? I’ll tell you how to do them. They’re not really that important. Here’s what you really should focus on, but here we’re back to keyword tags. I’m going to show you how to do it. Furthermore, in answering these questions, you should actually repeat these entry-level topics every few months. You should come back to them, even though you’ve already answered them, because new people will be exposed to new videos about these same basic topics. I know this is not usually the area you focus on, but what do you think?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. Look, I always say, especially if you’re working in an area that has a lot of new information, if someone sees a video that’s more than a year old for a how-to topic, they may not click on it because they’re like, “Oh, this is old information.” You might be like, “I made a video about this four years ago.” I don’t care. Redo it because people want to feel like … even if nothing has changed.
It’s the exact same information, still redo it because people want to have the most up-to-date information. They want the latest edition of the book, so to speak.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Number 22. Storytelling wins. However, it’s harder to do storytelling than how-to tutorials. I recommend that businesses start with tutorials because everyone knows how to show someone how to do something. As you get better, adopt storytelling techniques, because that’s sort of a higher level thing. I’m not really so sure I believe in this a hundred percent. I’d like to know your opinion.
Gwen Miller:
I would argue that you will learn how to storytell through your tutorials. It might seem natural, but there’s a lot of technique to doing a good how-to video that isn’t just a boring step one, step two. You will find that there’s actually a story arc to your how-to videos. As you practice, you make a thousand pots, you’ll get better every single time. You will naturally learn those storytelling beats. Then as you approach doing different types of content, you will have a good foundation to take that storytelling into other genres.
Dane Golden:
All right. That was my list. 22 key facts about YouTube that most businesses ignore. My name is Dane Golden, with my cohost, Gwen Miller. We want to thank you, the listener, for joining us today, right Gwen?
Gwen Miller:
Exactly. It’s always fun to geek out with each other and with you.
Dane Golden:
All right. Now, I want to invite you, the listener, to review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other marketers and business owners find us. Check out the links in the show notes for all our social stuff. We do this podcast and other projects because we love helping marketers and business owners, just like you, do YouTube and video marketing better. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through videos.