What if you could reach your target audience more easily and Move them to action with Video?
That’s exactly what we helped Zapier do.
Case Study: Zapier Academy
Zapier’s automation tool streamlines basic tasks businesses do every day by connecting various apps so they work together to automatically execute various tasks. Zapier was using their YouTube channel to spread the word, but weren’t quite getting the results they wanted. So they asked for one of our Full Channel Audits to assess the overall channel and figure out some ways to improve.
Checking Under the Hood
We looked at everything from branding and optimization to the length of videos, titling and descriptions, file names, thumbnails, CTAs… you name it, we looked at it.
We assessed the whole picture on Zapier’s channel and put together:
- an incredibly detailed 50+ page Channel Audit
- a playbook outlining dozens of ways to
- improve discoverability
- video retention
- channel growth
- and the overall strategy
Our client was impressed with how much opportunity they were missing out on so they went to work implementing our suggestions.
The Opportunity
During the implementation, Zapier had a big realization: They have multiple audiences who need different types of content. While Zapier’s main channel works hard to showcase product benefits to prospects, the company has a growing audience of customers who are active users and need to know more about how to use the product, from basic setup to tips and tricks for really active Zappers.
They decided they wanted to start a second channel focused entirely on educational content and let their main channel continue to do the marketing work. Our audit work gave them confidence we had the expertise to help them shine, so they asked us to be their partner for all things YouTube.
The Strategy
Zapier Academy aims to educate customers about using Zapier to automate tasks (called Zaps) across hundreds of combinations of apps from Dropbox to Asana to Slack, Salesforce and dozens more. Tubeworks helped build the new channel from the ground up.
Build it Right
While the Zapier team created the explainer videos, we meticulously created every piece of metadata connected to those videos, ensuring everything from thumbnails and titles to descriptions and tags — data visible to both human eyes and search engines — was optimized to increase discoverability and increase views.
And They Will Come
Tubeworks managed the channel until the fall of 2023, posting new videos, optimizing metadata to ensure performance is top notch, and reporting on the results with our monthly “Active Channel Management Report”(™). Once Zapier realized how well the YouTube Strategies were working, they hired a full-time YouTube Strategist to their team to take over channel management duties.
The Results
From November 2022 to October 2023, the new Zapier Academy channel has seen incredible increases in some key metrics:
subscribers
watch time
views
The carefully planned optimizations implemented by Tubeworks on the Zapier Academy Channel resulted in a 1350% increase in YouTube search results.
Success
Social media platforms typically have a recency bias, which means they show new stuff. YouTube has a relevancy bias, which means the content has a much longer shelf life.
Our strategy is designed to steadily increase views over time, meaning each video will continue to garner views for years and the work we have done will pay off for as long as people are interested in automating their workflows.
SHORTS = New Format, Big Opportunity
With the hugely popular TikTok platform challenging YouTube for audience attention, YouTube launched YouTube Shorts, a new kind of YouTube experience focused on shorter content that is vertically oriented. So naturally we wanted to help Zapier step into this explosive content category as well. We started posting a daily “short”’ and monitoring the performance of this experiment to see how it can impact the larger YouTube strategy. So far the results of been mixed, but “shorts” are definitely showing up in search results so there’s little reason not to develop a “shorts” content creation strategy for your brand.
Ready for results like these?
We built Tubeworks to help brands grow their audience, influence, and business on YouTube.
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