- Got a great question from Matt Hughes.
What about paying YouTube to advertise your videos?
Is it effective?
If you have a little bit of budget to spend promoting
your videos, Google Ads is a popular choice
because for a little bit of money,
you can get a lot more eyeballs on your content
and hopefully grow your channel.
But is this the best way to use your budget
to grow your channel and bridge more people.
Well, today, let's talk about some of the data
behind some of those campaigns
and talk about some strategies
that you can implement with paid campaigns,
as well as maybe some other ways to spend your money
that actually, might actually work out
a little better for ya'.
(upbeat music)
Hey guys.
My name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to Video Creators here.
We are all about helping you guys grow
your YouTube audience so you can spread a message
that reaches people and it changes their lives,
and to answer this question, overall,
generally speaking, my opinion, no.
Using paid campaigns to grow your channel is not a good use
of your money and there's a few reasons why.
Number one.
Most creators assume that their content is amazing and that
the only thing that's really holding them back is exposure,
and I have found that after working with, like,
over 1000 creators that that is pretty much never the case.
YouTube search and discovery systems
actually want to promote your videos.
They want to promote your content
and they're looking for videos that people respond well to.
So just dumping a bunch of money to pay to promote it
and get exposure on it doesn't, like, automatically make
your content start performing better just because
you're getting more eyeballs on it.
Number two.
Google Ads isn't really designed
for promoting YouTube channels.
It's mostly designed for getting
your conversion off of YouTube,
getting the viewer onto a landing page or an email address
or a sign-up or a transaction of some kind.
Obviously, you can promote your videos with Google Ads,
but if your goal is to grow your subscribership over all,
I found that, generally speaking,
there's no good way to track this,
but about 1% of the subscribers you actually paid for
will become ongoing viewers who will engage
with future videos on your channel.
So you can do it, but it's probably one
of those expensive ways to grow your channel.
At the end of this video,
I want to share with you guys some other tactics
and strategies that I would use to grow your channel,
I think would be better use of your resources
and your money, but if you want to do paid campaigns,
let me give you a few strategies that might actually help
make that more effective for you.
First, promote a video
that's already performing well for you.
That way, when you put the money behind it,
you know that you're going to be more likely
to get your return on it.
Now I would only pay to promote that as an in-display ad.
That means putting at the top of the suggested videos
on the right sidebar on a desktop computer on YouTube,
that way, someone needs to click on it to actually watch
the video, and when that happens and so,
typically a little bit more of an engaged viewer,
which means that they convert into a subscriber,
they're probably more likely to become
a more active subscriber on your channel down the road,
as opposed to someone who just passively subscribed
because it was an instrumentry map right in front of them
and they just kind of saw it and didn't know what to do
so they clicked subscribe to get it out of their face.
Second, consider using a Google Ad campaign to,
instead of growing your YouTube channel,
grow your email list instead.
Maybe you can give away, like a free info product
or free course or free download of some kind
in order for people to sign up for your email.
Google's ad system is designed better
for getting people off of YouTube to sign up for something,
and so and then you can grow your email list
with that campaign instead and then use that email list
to send them your videos when you publish each one
and you can stay in touch with them with other information
and content besides just videos on your YouTube channel.
Third, if your channel has enough traffic already,
consider doing primarily remarketing campaigns.
And what remarketing ad is it lets you follow people around
the internet after they've watched one of your videos,
and there's a lot you can do with Google Ads with this,
but maybe, for example, you say, show this ad only to people
who have watched three of my videos before
in the past 30 days, but did not subscribe.
That way you know that they're potentially more
of a warm lead and they'll be more likely
to re-engage them and get to subscribe
because they've already had contact with you
and your channel, and they're already a little bit familiar
with who you are from previous videos that they've watched.
Now there's another strategy that I'm going
to be experimenting with here on my channel
with a goal of re-engaging passive subscribers.
So I have series coming up on my channel.
One of them you've already seen,
it's called, How They Got One Million YouTube Subscribers,
and we cut like a 60 second trailer for that whole season
and we're gonna run it as a remarketing campaign
on YouTube promoting it only to subscribers
who have not watched a current video of mine
in the past 30 days.
We're hoping that by doing that we can reintroduce
our video creators' brand,
there's new series to those older subscribers
and see how it converts in getting them to re-engage
and viewing that new series.
Now, unfortunately, there's not, like,
a lot of great ways to track the goals that we have
for that type of campaign and Google Ads,
but I think we're just gonna look for
how this thing gains traction overall and just kind of do,
like, a gut level feeling, unfortunately.
I also have a series coming up next year
that I'm gonna pay to do a campaign behind
that will hopefully engage current, active subscribers,
and so we're putting a lot of resources into this series.
I'm really excited for it,
gonna cut another 60 second trailer
and gonna run it for a few weeks, I think,
to really try to gain momentum, all that energy,
that excitement for the series,
before it launches with my current base.
That ad will only go to current subscribers on my channel
who have, who have watched the video in the past 30 days.
And I wanna see if I can really get that current audience
really excited and build a lot of hype so that when I launch
the series, it launches with a bang and a lot of energy.
Now if you have some promotional money
to spend on your channel,
I recommend that there's a few other ways
that will probably be a better investment for you that would
have a bigger bang for your buck in the long-term,
and the first one is I would recommend that you fly out
to another creator who shares your same target audience
and do a collaboration with that person.
Not only will you build a relationship with that creator
that can pay off in huge dividends down the road,
but also, you're getting, like, the fastest,
quick shot in the awn of new subscribers
and new exposure from the other creators audience.
Second, I would suggest that instead of just assuming
that your content strategy is solid and that your videos
are amazing, maybe spend the money to get into
a consultation session with me or someone from my team
where we can sit down, look at your videos,
and really help you put a plan in place
for helping you reach those goals
in that next level on YouTube.
We'd love to sit down with you, talk about your channel
and your goals, give you feedback and develop a plan
that really help you take that next level.
I have found that when people invest
into their channel strategy overall,
it usually pays off much bigger, in the long-term,
longer down the, pffff, (man laughing), I had it.
I have found that people who invest
into their YouTube strategy, typically,
you know, in the short-term, it's a lot of work,
and it's a slow grow, but in the long-term,
those are the people who exponentially beat the competition
because they're not growing a volatile channel
with quick spikes of viewers up here and there,
but they're investing into a strategy that's gonna continue
to work now and build momentum as the channel grows.
If you're interested in working with me
or someone from my team, you'll find a link
in the description below that goes to VideoCreators.com
where you can book a session with one of us,
we'd love to do that with you.
But I'm gonna be honest with you guys,
like, I have worked with thousands of creators,
many of them have multimillion subscriber channels,
and not once has any of them, have I heard any of them say,
Tim, you know what, the main way I just grew
to one million subscribers was by paid campaigns.
I haven't heard that once.
Not from one of them.
So I'm not saying it's wrong or it's bad,
but I'm saying that channel strategy and intentionality
and, like that pays off much better in the long run.
It really just comes down to making videos
that people want to see and getting the watch time
and the engagement and everything that you need
to really grow a strong channel.
Now if you wanna know behind the scene secrets
at what some of these top creators are doing
to really grow their channels fast, click this video
you see right here, it's a short playlist
that will go in detail about all, behind the scenes
in a lot of these channels and seeing what they're doing
so that you can replicate some of the same results
that they have.
So subscribe here and I'll see you guys
over in those next videos.