Secret Sauce for Engaging YouTube Videos - Understand Your Audience

YouTube is clearly the biggest video content serving platform today. According to a recent stat, 24 hours of video content is published every minute on YouTube. This brings in a great advertising opportunity on YouTube videos, the hottest video advertising property on the planet. And this is good news for YouTube creators – they would be well incentivised for the quality video content they upload on their YouTube channel.

Like the old saying goes, great power comes with great responsibility. You might have something very valuable to offer to your audience but it’s important to think ‘audience first’. You should put every effort to ensure that the audience do not have to strain themselves to grasp your Youtube videos.

If you are making a Youtube video catering to a non English speaking crowd, last thing you’d want to do is prepare the content in English. Starting with the language, all elements of the video, be it the colours, background, script – everything should be tuned well to suit the audience.

After all, they are your customers! (read audience). Having said this, you can’t expect all YouTube users to be your audience – that would dilute your messaging. If you are creating an unboxing of lego toy set video, its important that you realise that your target audience is probably 5-10 years old kids and not post doctorate scholars and this gives you a lot more clarity on how to present the message. Once you have figured out your audience, there are a few things you can do to reach out to them effectively:

1. Tell them a story

People don’t like a dry presentation with facts. They love stories – a problem, a character and the resolution of the problem. Whenever possible, create your YouTube video script to incorporate a natural story flow – this will help your audience link events or information presented in the video better.

2. Keep it short

You might have a 100 things to share with your audience, but please don’t do it in a single video – your audience might not have time for all of it. So what is an optimal duration for a YouTube video – there isn’t one. But general advice is to keep the video as short as possible so that your audience do not become overly concerned about the time they are investing in watching the video.

3. Add beautiful con(text)

Like we discussed before, audience is the king. If your intention is to help them retain the content that they just saw on your YouTube channel, you better start taking the right steps to ensure better engagement of audience with good content retention. And one thing you can try doing is highlighting the important parts of the narration/visuals with text supporting the same. And why is this important?

Almost 50% of the brain is involved in visual processing and 70% of the sensory receptors are equipped to handle visual stimulus. This clearly indicates that any improvement on the visual representation can go a long way in enhancing the messaging in a video. And what better than a pinch of beautiful text – it adds an aesthetic appeal to the YouTube video as well help the audience grasp and retain the important parts of the video better.

There is a lot more you can do to become a successful YouTube star. But it all starts with your audience. Treat them well!