By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)

When I first heard how HubSpot’s YouTube team bumped one channel’s views up by over 400%, I begged for permission to share the story. (I’m not above debasing myself on your behalf.)

It’s a lesson that applies to nearly all content marketing — and one I promise you’re not going to hear anywhere else.

Are you ready for it? Not all distribution is good distribution. And that includes your own.

Below, I chat with our head of YouTube about how and why cutting off all external distribution actually increased our YT performance. And his advice for when you should consider picking up the axe, too.

The Road to the Chopping Block

When Carl Mueller joined us as HubSpot’s head of YouTube earlier this year, he noticed that one of our YT channels had a problem the others didn’t. If a video was six minutes long, most viewers were dropping off after only a minute or two.

Though, to be fair, that’s still longer than my kid made it through Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Carl’s been producing video for over 10 years for names like Business Insider and Morning Brew. Which is to say, where media and marketing mash up, Carl knows his s***.

So when he says the content wasn’t the problem, I know he’s not just trying to avoid hurt feelings.

“I got here in late February, and the first thing I did was watch our content from a quality perspective,” he says. “But then I looked at the metrics, and the numbers were surprisingly low. I don’t think the metrics reflected the quality of the videos.”

But if the content wasn’t the problem, what was?

The call is coming from inside the house.

As Carl investigated the problem, he noticed that around 90% of the views for this particular channel were coming from external sources. That includes Facebook, Instagram, blogs, newsletters — everything except YouTube.

“What I’ve noticed is that when you’re asking someone to jump from another platform to YouTube, you’re asking them to change their consumption behavior,” he explains. “Is that person sitting down with time to spare to watch a 10-minute video?”

The answer to that depends heavily on what platform they’re jumping from.

And about 90% of those external views were coming from The Hustle newsletter.

“Which, at first glance, makes a lot of sense. It seemed like good, targeted distribution. But it meant that most of our total viewership was coming from the newsletter.”

That seems like the opposite of a problem, right? As I’ve not-so-subtly mentioned before, The Hustle has an audience of over 2.5M and above-industry-average engagement rates. It’s the kind of audience most marketers would trade a body part to get in front of. (And I mean a useful body part. Not just a pinky toe.)

And in the vast majority of cases, they’d be right. The Hustle is an absolute catapult for content, often driving thousands and thousands of views to blogs, short-form videos, and content offers. …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron