In other articles, I’ve discussed how to raise more money on Indiegogo using press releases, paid marketing, and more.
Today, I want to share a few little known ways that you can use YouTube to rack up pledges on Indiegogo. I’ll be discussing YouTube analytics and how you can use them to your advantage.
As an example, I’ll be looking at the Olive: Next-Gen Hearing Aid with a Social Mission, which was funded in January of 2017 and has raised over $327,300.
As you can see from BackerKit, the campaign received steady interest over time, with a big jump in December.
I’m going to be drawing from both MY YouTube analytics and their campaign to show you how you can use YouTube to get more Indiegogo backers.
1. Track When Interest Drops Off
One of the reasons that I love YouTube is that the platform gives you SO MUCH in the way of analytics. You can see exactly when people tune out of your video, and when they perk up.
For example, let’s take my video on how to get media attention for your crowdfunding campaign, which you can see below.
First, you’ll notice a ridiculously handsome blogger with rugged good looks. Sorry ladies, I’m taken.
After that, you’ll see my stats. This video got 769 views at the time of writing.
Now, that’s all well and good, but how do I know which portions of the video people actually listened to?
That’s where “audience retention” comes in, which can be found in the analytics portion of your dashboard. If I look at the audio retention report for my video, you’ll see that attention slowly wanes throughout the video, as is to be expected. However, there are small spikes in the graph.
This is when someone goes back and looks at that portion of the video.
You can also see the major drop off points where people begin to tune out. This is an incredible amount of data! You can go back at that minute in the video and see what you said that turned people off, or that made them perk their ears up.
“Absolute audience retention helps you see how often each moment of your video is being watched as a percentage of total views. Rewinding and re-watching can result in values higher than 100%” – YouTube.
If you’re putting out YouTube videos leading up to the launch of your Indiegogo campaign, you can also use this information to get a feeling of what people are MOST interested in about your product.
2. Do Competitive Research
Along with many other tools, you can use YouTube to do research on your competitors. For example, if I go and check out the Olive YouTube video, I’ll gain access to a bunch of information.
First, you’ll be able to see how many subscribers the company has and the number of views on the video. If you wanted, you could do a little math to figure out their conversion rate. You’d divide the number of views by the number of backers that the campaign has.
If you dive a little bit deeper, you’ll see even more rich data on the video.
These graphs show cumulative and daily view counts for the public YouTube video. The video was shared 25 times and drove 4 subscriptions.
Considering that this is a pitch video for a product, it makes sense that there aren’t a huge number of subscriptions that were driven. If the call-to-action was “subscribe to my channel,” then there would be more.
We also can see that there was a pretty big spike in the video watch time around December, which correlates with the influx of pledges in December. If we had access to more analytics, we could conclude that it would make sense to SPEND MONEY advertising the product to a select audience, given the revenue per view that’s generated.
P.S. I am quite fond of the Olive product/company given their social mission, so go check them out!
3. Use Annotations and Cards To Track Clicks
I’m a big fan of using annotations and cards to track clicks on YouTube. Basically, if I mention an article or a video, I can track what percentage of my audience clicks that link and checks out that resource.
Of course, annotations don’t show up on a mobile device, but you can still make use of cards and end screens. I made the use of cards in my recent video on creating a landing page, as you can see below.
I also included an annotation in this video, which links to my recent Amazon guide. I’ll include a screenshot of what it looks like below.
You might be getting lots of video views, and even lots of subscribers, but if people aren’t actually willing to take action, that’s a problem. Annotations, cards, and end screens are easy ways to track and see engaged your viewers are.
4. Measure Profitable Traffic Sources and Locations
As you’re building a business, your #1 goal should be to learn as much as possible about your customers. You want to know where they live, what they want, what the value, and who they are.
YouTube will give you a lot of information to get you started, like the locations that people are watching your videos from. You can also see which websites are driving traffic to your videos.
For example, on my video which we were discussing earlier, you can see that the majority of my external views came from this very website, along with my Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
I can also look at the location breakdown of where my external views are coming from. This includes the Unites States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Hong Kong.
Now that I have this information, I know how to better allocate my time. I know that if I take 1 minute to market the video on Instagram, I’m going to get views. The same goes for the other social channels.
This information also tells me that I have audience members around the world, and should be conscious of that fact. If I had a physical product, I’d have to factor this into my shipping and fulfillment plans. I would also consider how that information could affect my marketing and advertising expenditure.
By using this information to my advantage, I can grow my company more quickly and more profitably. I won’t be wasting time, money, and human resources.
Your Homework
I know that it’s scary, but the more you put yourself out there online, the better. You’ll start to gain SO MANY insights about you, you team, and your customers.
If you can’t put your product launch video on YouTube, that’s fine, but at least start sharing videos of your product and your team on YouTube and Facebook. This will help you improve your marketing efforts going forward.
Some of you might have no idea how to get started. That’s okay!
That’s why I’m here!
This video will share some of my basic filming tips. Hope you enjoy.
