Ignite Your YouTube Strategy: 8 Insights to Grow Your YouTube Channel

Yesterday at our Little Dot HQ we hosted our final YouTube breakfast event of the year, ‘Ignite Your YouTube Strategy’. Along with a tasty breakfast spread, we shared our insider tips, knowledge and data from our 10+ years of managing over 700 YouTube channels, to take attendees’ YouTube game to the next level.

The lineup included our Managing Director for Entertainment, James Loveridge; Managing Director for Sport, Robbie Spargo; CCO, Holly Graham; and Insights Manager, Michael Deller. Each of them covered a specialist topic from Key Principles of YouTube Strategy, to the pillars that make a great content strategy to monetising your YouTube channel, and, finally, to using data to shape best practice. 

If you missed out on the event this time, don’t worry! Here are our top 8 takeaways to feed into your YouTube strategy:

1. YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google, so giving the platform as many data points as possible with keywords, tags and metadata for SEO is super important. Plus, its integration with Google means you can enhance the discoverability of branded content if you’re one of the rights holders.  
   
   
2. YouTube is the No.1 platform for TV streaming in the US, beating Netflix! This means your audience is more likely to be watching your content in a TV setting, so focus on creating “lean back entertainment” as a key part of your YouTube content strategy.
   
   
3. There are plenty of revenue streams on YouTube. From good old ad revenue to channel memberships, brand partnerships and branded content, if you can, diversifying those streams is key, but if you’re just starting out, make sure you’ve got the monetisation tag switched ON.
   
   
4. A comprehensive YouTube content strategy can be broken down into 5 parts: Archive Content, Clips, Original, Live and Shorts. Archive content is your secret weapon; you can repurpose it in relation to what’s trending to maximise your budget, whilst Originals will help you to differentiate your channel, but it goes without saying they’re more costly to produce.
   
   
5. If you’re a social media manager, engagement is probably the metric you lean towards the most to evidence if your content is working across multiple platforms. But, when it comes to YouTube, it’s important to also consider viewer watch time to understand how your content is performing and what resonates with your audience.
   
   
6. The relationship between YouTube and Shorts is slowly changing - but right now, we know that shorts drive higher comment and subscriber rates so they are great to grow your channel quickly, although they have little opportunities for monetisation.
   
   
7. ‘2025 is the year I’m declaring a war on the 5-10 minute video’ - Graham Swallow, Head of Data, Tech and Product. Gone are the days when YouTube best practice was posting cat videos under 10 minutes long. Now anything under 8 minutes is hard to monetise, and our data shows that videos over 120 minutes generate 16x more revenue on average! 
   
   
8. And finally, make sure to sweat the small stuff! It may come as a bit of a shock, but some of the most important factors that impact viewer retention and watch time are the minor details, like ensuring there’s consistent brightness in a video, fast cuts so the frame is frequently changing, and including actual human faces on screen.

If these takeaways haven’t quenched your thirst for knowledge on YouTube, look out for our next YouTube breakfast event 👀. Or, head over to our YouTube Knowledge Hub for a deeper dive into our YouTube insights.