Our Guest:
Jeremy Vest is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vid Pow (vidpow.com), a video marketing company that helps clients increase reach using high impact tactics. They are Youtube certified, video marketing strategists that often get hired on a monthly retainer basis as a video marketing team for clients.
A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- How to use make your thumbnails rank in the suggested videos area (it’s easier than you think)
- The two things you need to add to your Youtube videos to increase viewership
- The trick tactic that is so simple, yet so effective
To See These Tactics In Action:
Click Here To Learn How Jeremy Vest Increased FUNimation’s Video Views By 50% With Three Tactics
To See The Transcript:
Tim: As YouTube continues to become a higher impact content channel for marketers, the discussions around how to leverage that channel become increasingly important. But sometimes in the pursuit of the next smart ideas, the basic high impact tactics get lost.
Today’s guest is Jeremy Vest, the founder of Vidpow which helps companies increase their reach using video marketing. He implemented some of those basic high impact tactics to get incredible results for his client Funamation. Funamation by the way is a massive company in the anime world including properties like Dragon Ball Z, Akira, Afro Samurai and more. With millions and millions of views on their channel, any increase in results would be exciting but 50% more monthly playlist views is astounding. Marketers using YouTube listen up. I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.
Hey Jeremy, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show.
Jeremy: Hey, thanks for having me.
Tim: Absolutely. So I’m excited to talk about this case study because as you know and a lot of folks know, I’m also a voice actor so I do a lot of that kind of stuff. One company that works with a ton of voice actors is Funamation. I would love to hear the results that you were able to get in your work with Funamation.
Jeremy: Sure. We are able to get a lot of results. We’re able to increase their monthly playlist views by 50%, we’re able to increase their overall organic views by 9.8% and we are able to increase their organic monthly views by 7.5%. That may not sound like a lot but when you’re talking millions and millions of views, it’s pretty substantial.
Tim: Yeah, this is no small number of views so getting those kinds of increases even though they may seem small, it is, it does move the needle big time and that’s why I love talking about this stuff. Sometimes people are like well I need those big huge, 390% increases but it doesn’t always work like that. The small increases if scaled can be a big thing. SO I love it.
Before we get into though that you did, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Jeremy: Sure. My name is Jeremy Vest. I’m the cofounder and CEO of Vidpow.com. That’s Vidpow.com. Essentially we are a video marketing strategies and a YouTube certified company. We help businesses understand not just YouTube but video marketing and then we actually go in and do monthly retainer work where we’re your video marketing team.
Tim: That’s fantastic and were you on a monthly retainer for Funamation?
Jeremy: Yes.
Tim: Okay, awesome. So just setting the foundation for where it came from. So tell us what you did to get such phenomenal results.
Jeremy: You know, it’s pretty funny. What we did was a whole bunch of small things. For example, the 39% more views every month just by changing the thumbnails and that equates to over 3M more organic views a year.
Tim: Wow. So what was the change that you made to the thumbnail?
Jeremy: It’s pretty interesting but our brains work like the brains are looking for patterns right? We want to see things. So believe it or not, the right hand side suggested videos when you’re surfing in YouTube is usually the number one ranking, organic ranking factor.
Tim: Wow.
Jeremy: So if you were to make a thumbnail that had a similar color or a similar logo where the eyes popped out more. The image had more contrast than the images around it and you combine all these visual theories together, you’re going to pop out from your competitors.
A thumbnail is a billboard right? So what we did is we basically put a color bar, the show’s logo and just really pumped out the saturation and colors and the vividness of what the thumbnail was about. That’s really our philosophy. We call this the connection theory. So if you see five or six colors and logos that are similar on the right-hand side, you’re going to click on that before you even click in the first position video.
Tim: Interesting.
Jeremy: You know, we do a lot of research around here so we actually have a lot of experience that prove that.
Tim: Awesome. So the first thing you did was you changed the thumbnail to have it kind of have a lot of color and really kind of match what – was it matching the video itself, like the video that they were currently watching?
Jeremy: Actually the main thing we do, the big difference there is we popped the actually for example with Funamation they do anime shows and for example if it was Dragon Ball Z, we just really put the logo and the color of Dragon Ball Z. We just pop it hard and that color strip and logo are on every single thumbnail.
[0:05:07]
And then we make sure the eyes are very close. Eyes are the window to your soul so obviously you want those really close and when possible show a lot of action as well.
Tim: Got you, okay. So that was the first thing, what else did you do?
Jeremy: Well we also did a lot of other basic stuff. For example, we understood what people were actually searching for when they went to YouTube. For example, I think they ranked number one or two in the world for HD anime, free HD anime and that’s a huge, huge, huge thing right there. I mean a lot of people are searching for that right?
Well if you have a show like Dragon Ball Z, we’re not- most of us marketers aren’t thinking that way. So one of the biggest things we did is we actually went in and said okay, what is the world searching for? A lot of people are searching for free HD anime. So we’re able to rank number one in the world for that term for them just by including that into actual free anime shows first off.
Secondly, we made playlists, we added it to titles. We put in the description, we put in the tags, and the combination of the meta optimization plus having those phrases in playlists that combination of doing it in all these different avenues of meta that is, the common nation is what makes it work.
Tim: Interesting.
Jeremy: If you just put free HD in one video, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.
Tim: Right. I love it. So you made the logo really pop and really stand out in the thumbnail and then you really focused on kind of combining a lot of things that focused on that strong keyword chain.
Jeremy: Absolutely and as you could tell you know, with the company that has over 300 shows, there’s a lot of keywords. So you have to rank for the actual show name, but you also need to think beyond shows for them so that they can start ranking for bigger universe words. We call those the connection string theory and it’s essentially what it is you have topics and then you have what your video is about the topic and then you have the brand name or the episode. So free HD anime is bigger than Dragon Ball Z.
Dragon Ball Z happens to be free HD anime. So what we like to do is have this nested philosophy of you always – your video is always part of a bigger group. So don’t make one video, make 50 about anime that happens to be about Dragon Ball Z by Funamation. When you have this nested philosophy you’re able to rank for ten times more things than you would have ever realized you’re able to rank for.
Tim: And how is it that you know, just to get really specific how do you optimize the videos for the specific key words that you’re looking for? I know that some of them will be for free HD anime, some of them will be for Dragon Ball Z and that kind of stuff. But how specifically do you adjust the keywords?
Jeremy: You know, it’s pretty absolute. I mean if what we do is we make sure we have 15, 20, 30 videos about the main keyword and this case would be free HD anime. And then the show name is the show name right? We can’t change that. We just make sure that we’re using words people are actually searching for. For example maybe some people misspell it, maybe they put a space in there when it’s not supposed to have a space. So exactly understand how people are searching for the show name and then obviously we always include the brand name so that you have a more likelihood to show up on the right hand side. Showing up on the right hand side of suggested videos is an algorithm by YouTube but there are things you can do to help. For example sometimes episode names you know, numbers help you rank more and then obviously having something similar like a brand name.
Tim: Awesome. Okay. So is there anything that you feel like we’ve missed that’s important if somebody wants to get results like these?
Jeremy: You know, I mean there’s a lot. We can talk for 58 years about this.
Tim: [Laughs] I’m sure, okay.
Jeremy: One cool little trick, we were able to increase theirs subscribers by over 40% and all we did is add, there is a little watermark, I’m sure you guys have seen it, on the right-hand side of videos.
Tim: Yeah.
Jeremy: That little watermark people really don’t know what it is believe it or not. So what you need to do is put a red subscribe button there.
Tim: Interesting.
Jeremy: Make it YouTube read so people –you know, what’s really cool about it is you just click on it and you can subscribe to someone’s channel in stream. So you’re not going to another page. It just kind of happens.
[0:10:17]
So if you don’t have a visual cue and you just have your logo there, odds are people are not going to subscribe to you. So we increased their subscriptions like I said 40% which is by the way they have 1.5M subscribers so increasing someone’s monthly subscriptions 30% or 40% with 1.5M subscribers is pretty substantial.
Tim: Yeah that’s kind of a big deal. [Laughs]
Jeremy: [Laughs]
Tim: I love it.
Jeremy: [Indiscernible [0:10:43]] that says that. I’m kind of a big deal, no I’m just kidding.
Tim: [Laughs] Perfect. I love it man. Well this is good. You know, these are a lot of really simple tactics that can get pretty significant results and although I know a lot of the folks listening are not necessarily in the entertainment space, this kind of these tactics still work the same way. You just have to look at it as a bigger picture you know, kind of as an overall channel and strategy that way. So I think that’s really interesting. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this stuff. I really appreciate it.
Jeremy: Thanks for having me.
Listen To Discover Three Tactics That Increased Youtube Views By 50%
