Consistently growing the audience for your YouTube channel is hard. A lot of channels we see reach a point where they think they’ve hit critical mass, and they believe the views they get on their videos are always going to have a predefined ceiling limit.

In some instances, there might be some truth to this if you create content within a very small niche. But quite often there are ways of approaching content that enable you to reach a broader audience, while still catering to your core.

Reaching a bigger YouTube audience

On one such channel, they consistently gained between approximately 5,000 – 15,000 views per video within the first 24 hours, which by many standards is very good performance. The issue was that after that first 24 hours, views per hour would start to drop quite quickly, and within a week that video would receive almost no traffic at all.

Diving into their analytics, most of their views were from returning viewers. These are viewers that are either subscribed to the channel, or have consumed their content in the past. There was almost always very little traffic from a new audience.

When we started to analyse the content on their channel and their processes, we started to identify a lot of opportunities to improve their approach to content creation, which had the potential to really improve their reach.

YouTube content creation process

This channel created some really good content, but a lot of it was initially published as “live videos”, and the content was later repurposed by extracting excerpts from the live content into shorter dedicated videos.

As a result, there wasn’t a huge amount of strategy involved in the process. Because of the nature of how they edited the content, there also wasn’t always an obvious or clear point to the video, even though it might contain a lot of useful information. Existing viewers and subscribers seemed to watch the content regardless of how it was packaged, but it just didn’t seem appealing to new audiences.

The first thing we wanted to do was change their approach to how they created their content, and this started with some research.

YouTube keyword research

Because they created content within a very unique niche, what we found during the YouTube keyword research was that when we looked at some broader related terms, there were some amazing opportunities that were high demand (in terms of the number of monthly searches), but in some cases very low supply (low competition). We found a lot of potential keywords that could make up content ideas, topics, playlists and much more. This also provided a much clearer content strategy moving forwards.

We short listed some of the keywords that showed the best potential, and started creating a content plan that was prioritised based on the opportunity scores.

Changing how they approached content creation

Their approach to content creation was very similar to what we see with most channels:

• Find some content from a longer piece of footage
• Work out an appropriate title
• Create the thumbnail based on a frame from within the content

Sound familiar? Despite some initial resistance and skepticism, we changed their approach to follow this process:

• Create a compelling title based on the keyword research
• Create a thumbnail that compliments/works with the title
• Iterate the process above until we find a combination that really works!
• Create the content based on the keywords, title and thumbnail

Part of the reason this was met with such skepticism, was admittedly because this process required a lot more work. But straight away, they could see the benefit of creating the best possible thumbnail/title combination for a compelling video, without having to try and reverse engineer an existing piece of content. Of course, there were many other changes we made too, but these were the primary changes we made for the scope of this post.

Improving the video editing

Looking at the retention graphs of their recent videos, there were some obvious changes we wanted to make. There were was a big drop off at the start of many of their videos, and other addressable “dips” where viewers were either leaving the video or skipping ahead.

One advantage of creating the video after the title and thumbnail, is that we could make the introduction of the video exactly match the expectations of the viewer. This has a significant impact on that initial audience retention, and tells the viewer that they haven’t been “click baited”, and that the video will deliver on it’s promises.

There were many other sections within typical videos that we either modified or removed completely to help maximise retention rates.

The importance of data

It was finally time to publish the new video, and expectations were understandably high. Unfortunately, this video actually under-performed compared to previously published videos. Ouch. There was visible disappointment all around as we reviewed the real-time analytics during the first 24 hours.

Although this wasn’t what we had expected or hoped for, anytime you make a significant change to your approach, it can go one of two ways.

1. You get a significant boost in traffic from a “novelty” factor and renewed interest
2. You get a significant reduction in traffic as you publish something that your regular audience isn’t as familiar with

It’s also important to realise that you can’t always get things right first time, even if your strategy and reasoning is sound. You still need to implement this correctly. However, as we started collecting more data on the video, we noticed that it was actually reaching a new audience, and continued to receive views after the first week. So although initial views were lower, the long term potential of the video was far greater.

Additionally, although there were still lots of improvements we could make, the audience retention graph was significantly better, eliminating a large portion of the initial drop off and a higher percentage of viewers making it to the end of the video.

Although on the face of it, these might all seem like minor things, it shows that the changes we were making were a positive step in the right direction. We could use this data to continue to make improvements with each new piece of content that was published.

Skyrocketing the views

It was the 3rd video published in the new format where we saw some radical changes that surpassed even our expectations.

This video peaked at around 11,000 views per hour, reaching over 148,000 views in the first 24 hours. This was an exceptional result, with the total views surpassing some of the most successful videos on the channel in the first day.

Of course there was more to this process than we’ve detailed, that just simply exceed the scope of this blog post. We worked hard to understand and interpret all the data, performed the right tests, and our experience helped us make the right informed decisions. Although our the client had their reservations and skepticism about certain approaches, it was ultimately a team effort that led to these results.