Youtube Marketing Tips from MeasureSchool’s Julian Juenemann

We spoke to Youtube influencer and technical marketing guru Julian Juenemann from Measureschool.com about how he built his business off the back of his Youtube audience.

With a background in web analytics, business development and of course Youtube marketing, Julian is uniquely positioned to share his tips on how to grow your brand on Youtube, and get more subscribers, using his data driven approach to digital marketing.

For a taster check out their latest video series on building dashboards in Google Data Studios.

The Measureschool channel is filled with more amazing resources for marketers and entrepreneurs, plus there are private courses available on their website. 

Introduce yourself,  tell us about Measureschool and how you got involved with Youtube marketing.

My name is Julian Juenemann.  I’m the founder of Measureschool. I built some startups in Germany, but in 2013, I started traveling working without a fixed location. I was always really interested in digital analytics, so I dug into Google Analytics and later Google Tag Manager, which was a new tool that came out back in 2012. At some point, a friend of mine asked me, “Why don’t you do a course on a topic you know?” So I thought, ‘Well, why not Google Tag Manager?”

So I built up a Youtube channel starting with tutorials promoting my online course. I really put all my eggs into the Youtube basket and started building a channel seriously, learning how to scale the business through video content.

For me, the rationale of being on Youtube is actually that it’s the second largest search engine. My competition only writes about my topic. Not that the blogs are not good, but not many make videos.

Now we have 25,000 subscribers on our Youtube channel. We sell premium courses on measureschool.com and have just started a new membershipsite called techmarketer.io.

Your video production skills have really improved over time, what technical tips do you have for aspiring Youtube marketers?

First of all, I try to keep a balance between how much time and resources I put into the videos. At the beginning, I didn’t get a lot of return and I didn’t know where it was going, but I would recommend to anybody who is trying to build a Youtube channel to try it for at least six months and keep it consistent. Try to release a video at least once a week. That is important for the Youtube algorithm, but also to give the channel traction.

Obviously keeping the quality of the content high is important to get new followers, in order to build loyalty, people need to know who you actually are. So I invested in a DSLR camera, a large diaphragm condenser microphone and some editing software in order to show my face and add an intro that branded my channel. That’s why people subscribe. There are hundreds of videos that have over a million views, but the channel has a few hundred subscribers. People don’t subscribe on a video basis. They subscribe on a channel basis. That’s why I upgraded my equipment. 

Aside from the basic gear, I’m always cautious to have good lighting, and spent a little time preparing backgrounds and other touches that make the editing process easier.

We use Adobe Premiere to cut our videos, and a Mac application called Screenflow for screen-capture. One thing that we are experimenting with is live streaming. We use a software called Wirecast to actually produce the live streams.

Are you broadcasting those on Facebook Live at the moment?

Mostly on Youtube because that’s where my audience is, but we did some on Facebook as well. This whole live streaming thing is still in its infancy, and so the Facebook app or the Youtube app are designed for video capture on phones rather than screen sharing on a computer. It makes it quite hard to get the settings right in order to do high-quality streams.

What about getting more Youtube views for your videos. What type of content and optimisations should you make to get maximum visibility?

The general view is that if you want to be successful on Youtube, you need to have three kinds of content.

One is the content that is evergreen, and targets particular a particular niche keyword, and captures the traffic in the long term.

The second type would be to have some kind of engagement content to keep your subscribers coming back for updates. So, for example, that would be vlogging.

And then there’s hero content where you need to put a lot of time and effort in, in order to use it in advertising or typically on other social media channels.

The ranking algorithm itself has changed over time. One of the recent changes is that Youtube favours channels with a high upload frequency. Therefore, nowadays, I tend towards shorter videos, because although I could create great long form content, it would take me two months to produce that video.

One of the key ways to get new views is to be recommended by Youtube as a related video. Subscribed users get recommended your videos most, so you should have some kind of call to action in your video to encourage people to subscribe. 

Consequently, Youtube are very clear that they want people to stay on the platform. Therefore the time spent watching on your channel are very important. This even extends to the session time the user spends on Youtube as a whole! Therefore, If you refer a user to another channel after they watch one of your videos, the time they spend watching your recommended resource will actually make a contribution to your own ranking.

Of course, you also need to show up in search results, so be sure to use an optimised title and include relevant keywords in your description.

Finally people will click on your video if you have good thumbnails. So if you have an engaging or outstanding image that is not just a screenshot of the video, then people will start  to click on it and actually watch your video. Again this is another way of branding your channel, so that eventually users recognise your thumbnails and click on your videos to see your latest upload.

Aside from the revenue from selling your course, are you able to monetize the audience that you have built up in other ways, such as through selling advertising or influencer marketing?

I’m earning a small but regular sum of money for the Youtube PPC advertising running on my channel. It’s not particularly significant, but the CPM (cost per impression) that I’m getting is higher than what mainstream channels are getting because I have a very niche audience that is very targeted towards software and digital marketing.

Youtube has also recently enabled a super chat for live streams, so people can give you a donation right through the chat. A couple of people did that because they didn’t want to pay for my course, but they wanted to give something back and so they chipped in some money. So that’s really nice!

Youtube is also developing its own influencer marketing platform, and have just bought a company called Famebit. It isn’t really relevant to me, but all these beauty vloggers out there, these tech vloggers out there, they can go on that platform and compete for brands to give them brand deals. There are other influencer platforms also, like the one you guys at Hello Social are running which are probably more carefully curated!

Overall the platform is super keen on encouraging Influencers or Creators like me to make money on the platform, as it’s the content that captures the audience. So right now they are trying to add more tools to make it more profitable and a better experience. Not to mention the cut they get from my profits of course!

You are at the 25k subscribers mark, qualifying you as an official social media influencer! How do you like to be approached for sponsored content, and what kind of incentives are most valuable to you?

Now, unfortunately, Youtube doesn’t give us very good tools to sell advertising slots on our channels. So we have to take a more DIY approach to arranging brand deals. This makes it really important that the brand is a good fit and slots into my existing content easily.

Few brands understand also that the smaller an audience is, the better, because they are acting in a niche like us. We are not a million subscriber-based Youtube channel. If you think about an influencer who has a million subscribers, he or she probably has a channel that is very general, maybe in the entertainment niche.

If you are a brand in a very specific niche, even people who have 10 thousand subscribers, it might be a good fit for you because they are reaching exactly your target audience. Now, Youtube doesn’t really give you a good tool to reach these people on scale, but it’s definitely something that a brand should consider for doing influencer marketing because I think they’re just going to get better results with it. 

Incentives are usually about mutually beneficial exchanges in exposure, providing useful software tools, or even just information that is relevant to my audience. I think this would be very different for a more mainstream channel, as for me everything is well confined to my target group.

How about the future? What’s next for Measureschool?

It’s always evolving. For me, I built the channel around my interests.  With our courses and free tuturial videos on Google Tag Manager, we’re already the top channel out there. Quite a lot of the higher level learning can’t be done on Youtube alone, and that’s where the courses come into things, however many of my subscribers find that they need to learn more technical skills in terms of programing languages such as javascript in order to progress.

I never had a good place to send these people, so at some point, we asked ourselves how can we expand our audience, but also build something new around exactly that problem? That’s when we came up with the idea of techmarketer.io, which is our new membership site, which teaches technical marketers technical skills. It’s also hosted on the Measureschool channel, and we are also doing more technical videos around digital marketing in general.

I suppose the short answer is more videos on more diverse topics, piggy-backing on the trend for the growing number of people learning how to code, and putting my own spin on the concept by teaching javascript to marketers.

To learn more about Julian visit Measureschool.com and Techmarketer.io and for help marketing your brand on Youtube contact us for a detailed proposal.