As someone with an active YouTube channel, you know your audience is one of the most important parts of building the channel and earning from it. Hence, ensuring they have the best experience is crucial to achieving any of your goals.
With the time spent on YouTube by users well over one billion hours daily, the opportunity to increase your audience size is there, just as much as a high level of competition for creators.
What you make of the above statistic depends on whether you’re a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of business, but we can all agree that your channel can lose its audience quickly if you leave them unsatisfied.
One of the ways you can deliver a better experience is through segmentation. Putting your YouTube audience in segments will help you dish out relevant content to your target audience while ensuring effective ad targeting.
This may be quite challenging to pull off, especially if you’re a bit inexperienced, but do not worry. In this guide, we will explain the best ways to segment your YouTube audience effectively.
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What is YouTube Audience Segmentation?
YouTube audience segmentation is the process of organizing and grouping your entire audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics such as geographic location, demographic, online activities, habits, interests, etc.
Audience segmentation is nothing new to digital marketers. It has always been useful for creating personalized content and messages for audiences and customers. Segmentation is a huge part of understanding customers and addressing their needs.
Many businesses segment their online audience because creating YouTube videos or other content and delivering video ads to these smaller groups is easier and yields positive results. Of course, creating more YouTube videos will most likely help you increase your audience, but through segmentation, you can keep everyone satisfied with relevant video content.
The ultimate aim for dividing your entire following into audience segments is to generate more leads and increase online business income. That’s because your YouTube channel will more likely generate interactions when you understand people’s interests and tailor your videos accordingly.
Now that you know what audience segmentation is and its importance, it’s time to reveal effective tips for pulling it off.
Effective Ways to Segment Your YouTube Audience
Know Your Audience
As you’d need for any form of social media marketing strategy, you need to understand the kind of audience you have. It goes without saying that understanding your audience is crucial to delivering relevant content to them.
And if you do not know them or their interests, you’ll have zero chance of developing a YouTube marketing strategy that works.
There are different ways to understand your target audience.
For example, you may tap into analytics or research data for viewer personas. This helps you identify the profile of those who view your channel so you can focus on creating videos that attract them.
For instance, if data reveals that people who visit your YouTube channel are people in their 50s or those with a particular interest, you may want to create more content that these people want to see.
The bottom line is for you to create any content your audience identifies with, you must know who they are first and what they like to see.
Create Lists from Your Audience
Lists are another social media marketing strategy that’s common in digital marketing. Marketers utilize lists for email marketing tools and campaigns and even on social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The same thing is possible when segmenting your YouTube audience.
Audience lists make it possible to deliver custom YouTube ads to your audience. And thankfully, YouTube already has a feature known as data segmentation that helps you achieve this.
You’ll need to connect your channel to your Google Ads account to use data segmentation from YouTube. Then follow the steps below:
- First, log in by clicking on the tools icon at the top of your screen.
- Next, go to the Shared Library section and click Audience Manager on the tools page.
- Clicking the plus button will display a list where you have to click on “YouTube Users.”
- Then, name the audience list.
- Click on “List members” to select the members of the list. For example, you may choose an audience who has subscribed or watched a video.
- Then, click on a linked YouTube channel.
- Click on “Pre-fill options” to expand and select a way of adding members using the previously selected actions or starting from scratch.
- Now, select “Membership duration” to expand and input a number signifying how long they stay within your audience list. Bear in mind that you cannot exceed 540 days.
- Finish by clicking the Create button.
This data segment you’ve created can be used for campaigns after 1,000 users have interacted with it. Simply select your preferred data segment when starting a campaign.
Target Audience Directly
Since your audience will be sharing specific characteristics, it will be easier to segment and target them directly with content and ads that are relevant to them. You may have noticed similar traits with many of your audience from research, and this could be age, family status, location, etc.
Audience targeting is a YouTube method that enables you to reach audiences with similar demographics, interests, or intents. Below are the traits through which you can segment members of your social media audience:
- Demographic groups: This lets you group people by gender, age, income, parental status, and so on.
- Detailed demographic: This option lets you access more demographics, such as education level, number of kids, owning homes, etc.
- Interests: Interests mean selecting people who are interested in specific topics. There are a few options under interest, such as affinity segments which lets you target people who are strongly interested in a topic.
There are also in-market segments that target people researching products and life events for behavioral shifts.
- Your data segments: This is the option for dealing with people who have already interacted with your content, ads, website, or apps in some way.
- Customer Match: This uses online and offline information to target and retarget customers.
- Similar segments: If you’ve succeeded with any of the segment types above, similar segments let you replicate the same thing repeatedly with newer users. It usually uses data from Customer Match and Your Data.
Target Audience with Content
Unlike targeting audiences directly, content targeting lets you segment the audience based on content. This means you can categorize users and deliver ads and content based on the YouTube videos they watch.
Like audience targeting, it also has a couple of methods that include:
- Placements: With placements, you can select specific videos or YouTube channels to display to your audience. That means you can display a sports ad on a video related to sports.
- Topics: Topics lets you deliver content and ads to people watching videos on a specific topic. For instance, if you select the topic “sports,” it means your ad will be displayed to audience members watching sports videos, whether it’s baseball or swimming.
- Keywords: This is another popular one; it displays your content through keywords. It will treat YouTube videos and channels with selected words and phrases and assign your ad and content accordingly.
- Device: This is more straightforward, and it lets you target people watching your videos or YouTube channel through specific devices, like a computer, smartphone, other mobile devices, or TV screen.
Leverage Social Media Segmentation Tools
You may also refer to this as targeting tools, and there are numerous tools that let you do this. Social media segmentation tools are software that makes it possible to research and obtain crucial data that will help you improve your YouTube marketing strategy.
These tools can come through many phases, including keyword research, competitor research, SEO, and content creation. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz effectively research relevant keywords for segmenting and delivering content.
Google Analytics is another free option that could be very useful. These software can also reveal key data about how your competitors are generating more traffic.
Optimize YouTube Videos for Your Audience
It is always a good strategy to optimize your YouTube videos, but for better results, you should optimize them to resonate with your target audience rather than for traffic.
The difference between both strategies is that optimizing for traffic will promote a particular video while the opposite will promote your channel.
A video may stop generating traffic at any time, but a channel stands a better chance when it has a loyal audience who subscribe and anticipate more video content.
Of course, this will require consistency, but the result will ultimately assist you in building a larger audience you can build a relationship with and sell to.
Add YouTube Videos to Playlists
You can create a playlist while adding videos on YouTube. Video playlists are like an album containing related videos organized as a list.
That means these videos are treated like a family, and when one plays to the end, the next video on the list is played automatically.
YouTube playlists keep your audience longer on your channel. They make it easy for YouTube viewers to find related videos, and the reality is that many people will love a continuation of a video they finished watching.
It is an easy strategy that can help YouTube creators easily build a segmentation concept easily. Use these steps to create a playlist.
- To create a playlist of your own videos, click on the channel icon in the up-right corner and select “Your channel” from the drop-down menu that appears.
- The next screen displays all your videos, and you just have to locate the first video to add. Click on the three dots beside it and click “Save to playlist.”
- Click on “Create new playlist” and input the title.
- Select the privacy setting by clicking the drop-down arrow. You can make your playlist and the videos within it Public. They will appear in search results, and anybody can find them. They can also be Unlisted, meaning videos will not come up in search, but you can share them with anyone or Private (videos will be available only for personal use).
- Click on “Create” to finish setting up your playlist.
Define How to Use Metrics
What you cannot measure, you cannot improve.
Metrics is the statistical representation of your channel’s performance. It details the views, impressions, conversions, etc., your videos get. When used correctly, this information can clarify which segment is working out and which ones you need to put more work into.
YouTube itself will reveal a lot of information to you, but you can also use Google Analytics or other targeting tools like Ahrefs and Semrush mentioned above.
Below are the main categories and how you can use them to segment better:
- Views and Impressions: This lets you understand the videos and ads that people are watching more. YouTube will also show you how each video helped others get views.
- Audience: The audience category helps track metrics based on data segments like age, gender, income, etc.
- View Rate: This tells you how many video ads people watch rather than skipping.
- Conversions: Conversions tell you if you get anything from your video ads. That is, if your ads are converting or not.
Tracking these metrics consistently will enable you to assess your goals and channel objectives. In addition, they will aid in developing more video content and determining which one to use for ads.
Take Advantage of Less Competitive Audience Segments
YouTube is a huge social media platform, and it’s easy to see how competitive it is. That’s why you should take advantage of lower competitive keywords first before moving to the competitive ones.
This will help you build an audience easily before trying your hands on the more challenging aspects.
Use YouTube End Slate Correctly
YouTube end slate is the tiles of video suggestions that appear at the end of a video. Unfortunately, many YouTube channels ignore this technique, but it can be an excellent method for directing YouTube viewers to related videos from similar segments as the one they finished watching.
End slates can help you promote more videos to those who enjoy your video. In addition, it creates more interaction with your channel and enables you to build an audience of YouTube subscribers.
Engage and Educate Your Audience
Engaging your old and new audience is key to growing your YouTube channel and maintaining your social media audience. Engagement on YouTube comes mainly through education and entertainment, and unless your channel is explicitly dedicated to the latter, you can only build your brand by dishing educational content.
Also, striking a good balance between the two is important, but the final aim is to pay attention to what you will offer your social media audience with any content you make.
Ensure Consistency
Consistency is key when segmenting your social media audience. That’s because being consistent makes it easy for your audience to identify with you and find the content they love.
General consistency refers to always showing up, and your YouTube channel must also remain consistent with style, thumbnail design, naming, content delivery and arrangement, formatting, video shooting methods, etc.
However, what we mean by consistency in this instance has more to do with maintaining the same style and methods for similar content, especially when your YouTube channel has different types or series of videos.
For example, if you operate a YouTube channel where you educate people with computer and phone tips, it would make more sense to format videos on phone tips similarly and do the same for videos on computer tips. Likewise, if you treat a topic in three parts, use the same design and style with clearly stated part numbers.
This strategy will help you maintain your segment, and your YouTube viewers will find it easy to locate the videos they’re interested in, increasing how long they consume content from your channel.
Conclusion
There you have it! The top effective ways to segment and get more from your YouTube audience. When followed properly, these tips can be the key between where your YouTube channel is currently and where you want it to be.
However, these tips do not stand on their own. Instead, they rely on the most important strategy, which is to produce YouTube videos that solve your audience’s problems and give them what they want, whether it’s education or entertainment.
Then, remain consistent with all you do. If you can do that, you’d have maintained a reliable YouTube marketing strategy for the present time and in the future.