Narration: Get ready for you daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School, with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil: I'm Eric's friend Neil Patel.

Eric: I'm Neil's friend Eric Siu. Today we are going to talk about how to increase audience retention in YouTube.
Think about it. If you look at YouTube you have a bunch of videos that you're creating, you want people to stay. You don't want people to just drop off 10-20% into it. Your watch time also matters a lot. Audience retention, it's something you want to look at in your analytics section. Just click on analytics, go to audience retention and what you're looking for in general, and this is something I learned from Tim Schmoyer of Video Creators. He's a pro YouTube-er. He's got a couple hundred thousand subscribers. You want to try to aim for a retention that's about 60+%. If you're able to do that people are actually staying and they're watching your stuff.
What I found was, we also publish Growth Everywhere and Marketing School, what I see from Growth Everywhere and Marketing School is people start to drop off at 10-20% in. The reason is because these are just audio files. They're not any videos at all, so people drop off quickly. We're not creating content that's for that platform. You have to think about, not even just audience retention in YouTube, but whatever platform you're on you have to create content that's dedicated and specialized for that platform. That's the first thing.

Neil: You need to have visual hooks. As you have visual hooks, it can be entertaining, it can funny, it could be storytelling, whatever it may be. If you're using storytelling it has to be in visual way. If you have some sort of visual hooks that keep people on there, you're much more likely to have more retention. If people are entertained, which is why they usually watch videos in most cases, they're going to stick with it a lot longer.

Eric: What I found this week, especially after we started releasing this week on the Growth Everywhere channel is I'm seeing audience retention of up to 75%. What we did was instead of just saying let's jump into ... Here's the thing with Marketing School, right? Or Growth Everywhere. There's a long intro with the music. The intro might take 30 seconds or a minute or so. You're going to lose people quickly. What I do instead, with the videos is, there's a nice thumbnail, thumbnail doesn't really have to do with audience retention but think about this. Before I even jump into things, in the first ten seconds or so I say, "Hey, this is basically what you're going to get from this video." Then I do an introduction of myself then we jump into the strategies or tactics. I really only go for five to ten minutes or so because people lose attention quickly.
Here's what I do. When I watch YouTube or when I watch TedTalks, it's perfect because they're only five to ten minutes or so. I just want to get to the point. When I eat lunch that's what I do. It's five to ten minutes, boom I'm done. I move on to the next thing. It's really hard to hold people's attention completely with something like YouTube. Keep it shorter and then also get to the point as well.

Neil: Getting to the point is actually the big thing, that was going to be my next point. Don't just have videos that are long because you want people to be on there forever. If you get to the point, the information you're providing is useful or entertaining or educational, then people are much more likely to stick around.
Also with your video camera, whether you're using a phone or professional video camera, you're going to a studio, make sure they cut into different frames. What you'll notice is, if you're watching a TV show, they're not using the same frame over and over again. They're using a lot of different angles and cuts, and by doing that it keeps you engaged versus if it was the same frame over and over again.

Eric: Great. I don't have much more to add. That's it for today. Before we go we have 90 free day trial of Crazy Egg to give away to you. That's available for each and every one of you. There's to credit card required. Just go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to learn more and we hope to see you inside and see you tomorrow.

Narration: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. Don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.