Who is your video for? Video gamers? Conspiracy theorists? Fitness fans? Model makers? No matter how niche your target audience is, they will exist on YouTube, and they will be consuming content just like yours on a regular basis. Identify who you want to watch your video and make sure your video is as strong as it can be.

It’s also important to have call to action. If your video is the first in a series make sure you tell people that. Offering a discount price on a product? Make sure it’s clear. The clickthrough link should be relevant to what you’re promoting in your video, whether it’s yourself or your product.

It can be awesome to see the view count on your video ticking up and up, but it might not necessarily be the best approach for finding your audience. Remember, a view from YouTube promotion only counts if your video is watched for more than 30 seconds, so it’s important to make those 30 seconds count. If you’re simply looking to boost the numbers, with no concern for return on investment, then you can get views for less than a penny. If finding the right audience is important (and it really should be if you’re spending money to promote your content) then you will want to spend plenty of time making sure you find them.

This is where you make sure your campaign performs as well as it can. If you’re looking for a cheap approach, then zero targeting campaigns (worldwide and no topic/interests) are effective, but you may find that most of your views come from countries in Asia. Because you’ve already established your audience, setting up the targeting should be relatively simple. Make sure you select the countries/towns you want to target, as well as ages, parental status, sex, and of course the topics, interests and keywords for your target audience.

With highly targeted campaigns you may find that it costs a little more per view, but your view rate will be far higher (people who watch more than 30 seconds) and you’ll find that they’ll watch for longer, and be more likely to click through to your website.

Once your campaign has been set up and approved by Google it will be live and being shown to your target audience. Make sure you monitor the topics, interests and keywords you’ve set up to see which is performing the best. If some are struggling with lower view rates or retention rates then consider removing them and put more focus on those which are performing better. Check regularly, because these can fluctuate, so don’t assume that once you’ve set it up your job is over.

When a promotion starts it can be scary. Sometimes the views will fly in, and other times they’ll trickle in slowly. Ensure you set a daily budget so you don’t use it all within a few hours and monitor your spend regularly.

Once your budget has been exhausted, or you’ve paused the campaign having achieved your targets, make sure you pull the stats from YouTube and analyze the results. Try to identify where the campaign excelled, and where perhaps it underperformed, and apply changes to any future campaigns you may run.

For more information on running the perfect YouTube promotion, get in touch with the experts at Viral Seeding who can help you and your video find their audience.