How Cogent Creatives helped Cigar & Spirits Magazine organically achieve 128,626 views on YouTube in a month with one video.

In order to achieve the desired result our strategy included researching competitors’ videos featuring Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, and compiling a list of the tags we found. From there, we analyzed and ranked the tags based off of their strength and chose the strongest one, “Ian Somerhalder,” as our target keyword. We then found residual tags (Ian Somerhalder interview, Paul Wesley Interview, Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley interview, Brother’s Bond Bourbon, Vampire Diaries, Vampire Diaries bloopers and Ian Somerhalder Jimmy Kimmel) we found acted as our supporting keywords that would further boost the video and have a chance of ranking. We strayed from attempting to rank on cigar and spirit related tags as those tags tend to represent an older and much more male dominated presence.

Additionally, we implemented an end card to the end of the video. YouTube allows users to use end cards as a means to establish a call to action at the end of your video. We chose to recommend a “Celebrity Interviews” playlist on Cigar & Spirits’ channel in an effort to retain engaged users, increase cumulative channel watch time and familiarize them with more of Cigar & Spirits’ content. In addition to this the end card also featured an option to subscribe to the channel.

Finally, we decided to publish the video ahead of the issue hitting newsstand. This was intended to create pre-emptive buzz around the issue. We wanted users to engage in social sharing and ultimately activate users to engage with the print content once available.