Video marketing has been on an upward trend, making it an essential part of every brand’s marketing strategy. Today, the best platform for video is YouTube marketing. It is the biggest online video-sharing platform and has now become an ultimate video marketing tool. YouTube has been around longer than other social media platforms and has more than 5 million users worldwide. Users prefer videos over static posts, which has led marketers to imbed YouTube marketing into their marketing strategy. Here’s how you can get started with a simple yet essential marketing strategy to boost your channel and increase viewership and subscribers.
But before that, let’s start with the basics. In this blog, we will understand what YouTube marketing is, how you can set up a YouTube channel for your brand, a few tips to optimize your YouTube channel, how you can promote your channel on YouTube, and understanding how YouTube Analytics works.
Table of Contents
What is YouTube Marketing?
YouTube is an online video-sharing platform that marketers use to promote their products and services via videos. With billions of users, this platform has a vast audience base to cover and many marketing opportunities. But first, you need to set up a YouTube channel and optimize it before going ahead with your YouTube marketing strategy.
How to set up a YouTube channel?
Your YouTube channel is your brand’s face, which is why you need to have a well-organized channel. Setting up a YouTube channel is pretty simple. Once you’ve created a YouTube account using your Gmail account. Here’s how you can set up a YouTube channel in 8 easy steps. Read our blog for a step-by-step guide.
How to optimize your YouTube channel?
If you are looking to rank on YouTube and appear on the top of the search results, here are a few tips to optimize your channel on YouTube. Let’s look at the top 5 strategies that will help you optimize your YT channel.
- Optimize your channel description
- Add links to your YouTube channel.
- Choose a channel trailer.
- Create playlists
- Add your contact details.
You can read these tips in our in-depth blog and utilize them to optimize your YouTube channel for SEO.
How to promote your YouTube channel?
YouTube is all about the number of views you have on your videos and the number of subscribers on your channel. Many creators and brands new to the platform struggle to get views on their videos. To get more views on your videos and channel, you need to follow some promotional strategies.
Here are the top 10 ways to promote your YouTube channel:
- Optimize your video’s title and description
- Use long-tail keywords
- Customize your channel thumbnail
- Have a complete profile
- Create high-quality videos
- Audience engagement
- Host contests, giveaways, and Q&As
- Collaborate with fellow YouTubers
- Approach brands for collaborations
- Make sure to follow community guidelines
What is YouTube Analytics?
YouTube Analytics is a YouTube Studio tool that helps creators monitor their channel’s performance with up-to-date metrics and charts. This data enables you to understand what kind of videos are performing the best and how you can fix those that aren’t working with your audience.
YouTube has recently made many changes to the Analytics tool to make it easier for creators to access more data to help them grow their channel. Learn more about this new update and how you can use YouTube Analytics’ new comparison tool to your advantage
How to do YouTube Marketing – 11-step guide
Create a YouTube Business Channel
You want your business to be on YouTube; you’ve got to start with the basics. Create a Brand Account on Google. You can use your Gmail account on YouTube to create a channel that will be under your name. Having a brand account is better in the long run as your business starts growing. You can create and manage multiple channels while also allowing other users to log in simultaneously.
Understanding your YouTube target audience
Once you have a channel, depending on the type of content you upload and your creativity, it will undoubtedly attract different viewers. Some might praise you, some might criticize you for the better, but some are simply trolls who only engage in getting your attention. One needs to know how to identify between the three and use them to your channel’s benefit. To see the difference, you will have to read the comments carefully and maybe go through their social media profiles to understand their interests and modify your content to meet their needs. When a user relates with your content, they bring in more viewership and clicks, which increases your subscribership.
For instance, if your target audience is most interested in watching gaming videos, you can create a tutorial video of a new game that has been launched or a video showing how to get past a difficult level creatively in a particular game. YouTube now also lets you hold polls to understand what your audience prefers. You can do so by visiting the Community Tab. You can also go to analytics and view more details about your audience under the channel analytics.
Know your competition
The competition on YouTube is crazy, and you need to keep up with it using Competitive Analysis. How do you do that?
Identify competitors
You can start by picking out two to five competitors. If you’re unsure how to do that, try Google Ads’ free Keyword Planner to ascertain which companies rank high for keywords related to your content. Or see what channels appear in searches on YouTube for equivalent keywords. Observe their key metrics such as subscriber counts and viewership stats so that you can use them as a yardstick for your channel. Take a look at the titles and descriptions to determine what keywords they use. Read the comments on these videos to know what people are saying; maybe, their audience will overlap with yours.
Use SWOT Analysis
Many businesses do a SWOT Analysis to test their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to identify where their competitors stand. In YouTube marketing, you can use this same strategy to understand your competitors and know what works and doesn’t work for your channel.
Learn and adopt
If you’re on YouTube, you must have a favorite brand, channel, or YouTuber. You can go through their channel and videos that are trending to know what you can do with your videos. Most viral or trending videos always have something about them that users like the most or stand out of the crowd. Once you identify that unique thing, even if the video is different from your brand, you can always learn and adopt a few tricks from those videos. For instance, things such as what effects do they use? What tags do they use? What does the description look like? What’s the length of the video? Create a YouTube Content Strategy.
Optimize your YouTube videos
What is YouTube, if not a video search engine? Video optimization is essential if you want them to appear on the search engine results page’s first page. You can start with adding a strong title that will attract more viewers and show up on YouTube’s algorithm. Put relevant long-tail keywords to make it catchy. Check what kind of keywords will help you rank higher on SERP or use tools like the Keyword Tool that help you dig deeper and find keywords that go with your video content.
Do not use keywords that have nothing to do with the video; it will only get your ranking down. Always use less than 60 words in your title so that it doesn’t get cut off when appearing in the suggested videos list. Remember to stay away from bad grammar, too much punctuation, and vulgar words. People click on what they see, so your thumbnail has to stand out. Creating a unique and attractive thumbnail will get you higher clicks on your video.
Your video description needs to have relevant details about the content you upload. If it is a tutorial video, you could mention a short description about the tutorial, split the timeline for users to know from which minute the next topic is covered in the video if someone wants to skip to the next part. Include hashtags, cards that expand when clicked on – CTA’s that take them to your website or playlist, ends screens, bumper ads, and watermarks so that no one can copy your content. Most importantly, remind users to like, subscribe and share your videos across their social media platforms.
Create a schedule for your upload
Imagine having a channel without a proper posting schedule. If you want your brand to be noticed and remembered, time and time again, you need to appear on the notification bar of your subscribers as much as possible. There are many tools, YouTube Buddy being one of them, where you can schedule posts that need to be uploaded at a particular time. It is sometimes tricky remembering to do so given your busy schedule.
Optimize your YouTube channel
Make it easier for people to seek out and follow you on YouTube by optimizing your channel. Start with completing your YouTube profile. Add finishing touches to your YouTube profile. Give a keyword-rich summary of what people can expect from your channel when they hit the subscribe button through your channel description. Include links to your website, and social media handles too.
Upload a high-resolution channel icon where people can know what your brand logo looks like. Use the banner space to welcome viewers to your channel. This area may be an excellent place to market your channel schedule or an upcoming launch or service through channel art. You can also add other featured channels to your profile, directing people to your other channels or channels that might pique the user’s interests. This way, you can also open yourself to the opportunity of collaborating with other channels in the future by featuring them on your page.
Try YouTube Advertising
Once you have set up your channel and you have a decent number of subscribers and audience, it’s time to reach out to those who don’t know about you yet through advertising, and the world of YouTube advertising knows no bounds. There are so many ways you can reach out to users and make your channel known. One way to do that is by going viral organically.
Tools like Veefly help in such cases. Investing in advertising in the right way will only profit your channel by bringing in more clicks and viewership. Regarding YouTube Ads, people would rather watch online ads than TV ads. There are many types of YouTube ads, such as Skippable in-stream ads, Non-skippable in-stream ads, Video discovery ads, and Non-video ads such as overlays and banners. You can choose from this range a type that suits your channel’s tone and the type of ad you want to run.
Collaborate with influencers
One of the simplest ways to showcase your brand and reach a broader audience on YouTube is by working with an influencer. According to Google, 60% of YouTube subscribers are more likely to follow shopping advice from their favorite YouTuber over their favorite TV movie personality as they are more relatable. With the proper partnership, creators can transfer that reliability and trust to your brand. When it involves these partnerships, let the influencer do the talking. The more controlling you will try to be, the more fake the outcome will be. The words coming out of an influencer’s mouth must be natural and out of their own genuine experience.
Observe and Adapt
With your YouTube channel up and running, it’s time to start measuring your success and failures. Getting YouTube marketing right involves testing and experimenting, succeeding and failing. Not everything will work, and that’s okay as long as you learn from it. Use YouTube Analytics to watch the growth of your channel and track the performance of your videos. Once you publish a new video, keep an eye out for significant subscriber count changes, new or changing audience demographics, and traffic sources. What you discover should modify your YouTube marketing strategy moving forward. Don’t undervalue qualitative metrics, too. Read the comments to find out precisely what people believe about your video. Visit the Community tab often to ascertain what people are talking about.
