Digital Marketing Social Media Marketing

Organise a contest to increase views for your YouTube video

by Tabata Vossen

Posted on March 4, 2016

Updated on November 24, 2017

We talked about the benefits of including contests in your marketing strategies. Obviously, this isn’t a new concept, but it does help to meet various marketing objectives, such as viral spread and data collection.

Another useful advantage of a contest can be to boost the number of views for a YouTube or Dailymotion video. More views will help you generate more income via your advertising revenues, as well as enhancing the reputation of your product or brand, raising awareness regarding a project or cause, showcasing your new features, etc.

So, how should you go about it? Good news! The strategy is quite simple, with just a few steps needed to start increasing your views.

1. Attract participants

Organise a quiz-type contest with an attractive prize for your target audience, in order to bring in as many participants as possible (but be careful about contest pros).

2. Make your video indispensable

Make sure the questions in your quiz are based on the video, so participants have to watch the video. You can also use the video format to illustrate your questions and tailor your content. For example, you can propose different videos depending on participants’ scores. You can also promote several video clips by creating quizzes where each question relates to a different video.

3. Promote sharing

Give strong incentives to encourage virality. Give the chance to win extra points by sharing your contest on social media for example.

Boost views on a video that is not uploaded on any video hosting site? It’s possible!

You want to increase the number of views on a video that has only been published on Facebook or Instagram? No worries, this article applies to you too! The only difference is, you are going to have to embed your video from those social media. In both cases, you just have to open the video and spot the three dots on the right side. Simply click on those and select “Embed”, you will get the piece of code you will need.

Still not 100% convinced?

Do you remember the Crazy run contest organised by Media Markt Belgium? More than 15,000 people entered the contest! But above all, the video teaser used in the campaign got more than 700,000 views in a few days!