Last updated on June 15th, 2024
How long before an event should you post tent-pole videos on YouTube? How can brands make use of tent-pole programming?
HOSTS:
- Dane Golden: VidAction.tv | LinkedIn
- Tim Schmoyer: VideoCreators
Tip #1: Post Videos About Tent-pole Events in Advance
Tim Schmoyer says that YouTube tent-pole programming is when you focus your videos around events in your industry, niche or market, or events in society as a whole. Right now we’re coming up on Halloween, then Thanksgiving and Christmas. Holidays are natural tent-pole events.
Tim says you can use Google Trends to discover which topics are trending for different times of the year in your industry and you should program your channel to capitalize on those trends by making videos about those topics before they really start trending so that when people start searching for content around that topic, your videos will come up.
Tim says he looks at Google Trends to find out when topics peak every year. For instance “hot dogs” trend every July (around Independence Day). So don’t post about hot dogs in December – instead post in the middle of June, about 2-3 weeks ahead. Valentines Day is Feb. 14, so if you have jewelry for that day you want to talk about, post that a few weeks ahead. You want to first get views from your subscribers and the watch time will rank well when it’s indexed in the YouTube search engine for those search terms. Then when people start searching, it’s already ready to go. For Christmas-related content, you might want to do your video two months in advance. More info: Tent-pole programming from the YouTube Creator’s Playbook.
Tip #2: How Can Brands Make Use of Tent-pole Programming?
The CEO from Dane’s company, Octoly, wrote a recent article on ReelSEO about how cosmetics brands are missing the YouTube boat on Halloween. Of course, no cosmetics brand goes out and says: Let’s get people to use our makeup to dress up like a lizard. But it’s just these kinds of things that YouTubers think of that brands do not. As Tim pointed out in his video, YouTube found that Halloween makeup tutorials account for 57% of all seasonal makeup videos. YouTube called Halloween “the biggest makeup event of the year” and yet for the most part, brands are ignoring the season. However one brand, L’Oreal, did create a very good curated playlist of their fans’ Halloween videos.
But depending on your brand’s category, there are many kinds of events that could be made into tent-poles. If you’re into video games, maybe you could do a whole series in anticipation of E3 events, or the League of Legends Championship that just finished up (it was a live e-sports event). Or make your own event – anything can be a tent-pole event if you can get people excited about it.
YouTube talks a lot about their Hero, Hub, and Hygiene programming methodology where Hero is usually the big-budget tent-pole videos. But as Dane talked about last week, you can curate the best of event-based videos from your fans into topical playlists on your own brand’s channel. This process really fits into the “Hub” category of videos in that it enables brands to bring fresh content to their channels and celebrate the passions of their fans while keeping them coming back to the channel for more. All at a very low cost.
Low cost is key. I want to emphasize that brands do not have to have huge budgets and make everything look like a TV commercial to make it work on YouTube. YouTube isn’t about expensive production, it’s about having a conversation with your community. And what’s a better topic to talk about than a big upcoming event?
Lastly, brands can better target any tent-pole video ads on YouTube by putting their videos on specific event-based videos when possible. Targeted placements can dramatically increase your conversion rates.