YouTube Marketing: How to Promote a YouTube Channel in 2021

YouTube Marketing: How to Promote a YouTube Channel in 2021

Video marketing can do wonders for your company’s digital strategy, and refraining from having a YouTube channel can be a mistake. With the right YouTube channel advertising, you can boost your brand awareness, increase traffic numbers, and get more sales. This article covers all the advantages of video marketing for business, gives YouTube marketing tips, and shares secrets for effective promotion.

Video marketing is a set of techniques and activities aimed at incorporating video channels into the overall digital publishing strategy. As video content has become the most popular and convenient way for people to digest information, brand promotion specialists had to adapt to a new reality.

YouTube plays the most important role among other video hosting services in a company’s video marketing strategy. Rated #2 in the list of the most visited sites, only outranked by Google, YouTube gets the most traffic juice, and you can use it to your and your brand’s advantage. And the only way to go is to increase the priority of YouTube video marketing in your long-term business plan.

Develop a YouTube Marketing Strategy

Your video advertising campaign cannot exist apart from your overall internet marketing strategy. That’s why there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

Target Audience

YouTube marketing is an excellent way to advertise to an audience of over millions. You can target certain audiences and still reach them at a significantly lower cost than conventional advertising methods. YouTube audience varies in age, geography, interests, and many other parameters. Basically, your viewership should coincide with your general target audience – people who are interested in your product or service.

Budget

Estimate the budget you’re able to spend monthly on YouTube promotion. The total sum should include person-hours (videographer, content manager, and the host), equipment, and advertising.

Desired Results

Think of what you expect from your channel and how fast. Do you want to increase brand awareness, ramp up the incoming traffic on your site, or maybe both? Define the deadlines when you expect to reach a certain number of subscribers or views, earn a specific amount of money and think of how you’re going to achieve all of these.

Competition Research

YouTube marketing isn’t going anywhere, so you need to learn the latest ways your competitors use to promote their channels. The most important thing to remember is that you have to think outside the box. Consider everything your competitors do and think of ways to be more interesting, useful, and appealing to the same target audience. The more unique and different you are, the better chance of increasing viewership and user engagement you’ll have.

Set Up a YouTube Channel

Building your YouTube channel is easy – but how do you get started? Well, the key to YouTube marketing is to find your ideal audience and then optimize your YouTube channel to ensure the growth of that audience. To do that, you have to know how YouTube isn’t like other social media channels and how to make use of that to your benefit.

Signing Up

First things first, you need a YouTube account. But that’s easy – you can just use your Gmail address to set up the profile. Then, via the drop-out menu, click Create a channel. And here, you have a choice: to start a personal channel (using your Google account data) or name the channel after your company. The second option is preferable in order to let the audience know who you are.

Layout and Navigation

YouTube Studio has a handy channel dashboard when you can figure out the layout of your videos, make playlists, and manage other settings. A well-organized channel increases audience engagement and makes it easier for them to navigate through all of your videos.

Links

Another important thing on the preparation stage is to place links to your socials and website where it’s necessary. You should add them in the Aboutsection, under each video you post, and in the channel art.

Create Valuable Content

YouTube videos are relatively easy to create – provided you have a video camera. However, creating videos can be time-consuming, especially if you want to provide your audience with high-quality, interesting, and useful content. If you tick all the boxes, there’s a better chance people will  watch your video till the end.

Types of Video

Making sure that your promotion is highly relevant to the type of video you’re uploading will give you a much higher chance of success:

  • Product demos show off your product or service, demonstrate its benefits, and prove its value to your customers.

  • How-to guides teach your audience how to use your product, explain its features, and share life hacks.

  • Customer testimonials include real opinions from people that have purchased your product or have used your service. They tend to be a more credible source of information than an over-promotional video.

  • Behind-the-scenes content shows the story behind the making of the product, the daily life of your team, and insider exclusives.

  • Edutainment videos educate and entertain the audience at the same time. You can make such videos on a topic related to your product or service.

Content Calendar

One of the important things in YouTube marketing is sticking to a schedule. When your post videos regularly, your audience gets used to watching them, and it can even become a part of their daily/weekly/monthly routine. Depending on the industry, you can upload videos two or three times a week, or even every day. Make sure you vary your content so that your viewers don’t get bored and overwhelmed with the non-stopping new videos.

Filming

This part may take a whole different article, so here are the essential video shooting tips:

  • Take care of the lighting – well-lit videos look more professional.

  • Make sure you have clear sound and use a high-quality microphone to record it.

  • Prepare a script before you film the video.

  • Get ready to invest in a better camera.

  • Pick an experienced person to be the presenter as they have more chances to hook the audience.

Editing

Video editing can become a struggling point for many marketing specialists. It may take a lot of time and effort to conquer the steep learning curve of professional software. Fortunately, it’s 2021, and you can already do the editing part even online. When you have your footage ready, you can use such tools as Fastreel, Lumen5, Magisto, or other editors of this sort to stitch your videos together, add captions and effects. And this won’t even require being a professional and spending a fortune on software.

Make Your Channel Visible

You must be patient and take the time to learn how to properly build up your YouTube channel to maximize its potential as an advertising tool. YouTube is different from other forms of advertising, but if you have enough knowledge and experience, you should be able to make the most out of your new online outlet.

Search Engine Optimization

You may be surprised, but YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Basically, all the rules of SEO that apply to Google work for YouTube too, but there are a lot of extra things you need to keep in mind.

Keyword Research

The most important thing you need to do to make your videos rank higher is to use keywords. You can find them via internal YouTube search, in Google Analytics, in Ahrefs, or any other tool for keyword research. Other ways to get the appropriate keywords include investigating your competitors’ keywords and phrases or looking through Google video search results.

Keyword Placement

There are several places that absolutely require to have keywords for your videos to rank higher:

  • Use the “juiciest” keyword in the video title

  • Fill video descriptions with relevant keywords, and make sure to include the most important ones above the fold

  • Say the keywords in your video – they should be used naturally in your speech

  • Add tags that will help YouTube categorize your videos

Thumbnails

A thumbnail should make people want to click on your video – it’s its one and only purpose. It should be attractive, and ideally, coincide with your branding style. It works great for making a good first impression on new viewers and helping your followers single out your videos on the spot as they open their Subscription tab.

Cards and End Screens

The best way to make your audience watch another video of yours is to interlink all of your content. You can add links to relevant videos in cards or end screens. This will increase your number of views and overall watch time.

Transcript

As you optimize your YouTube channel to boost viewership, the importance of being clear and concise when communicating with your audience should not be underestimated. A transcript and subtitles work great for this purpose – they make it possible to watch your video without sound or in different languages.

Comments

YouTube makes it very easy to upload videos and allows viewers to comment on videos and interact with others. In addition to reaching a diverse audience, comments can help build relationships with current customers and gain their trust. This ultimately leads to more views and, eventually, massive success.

Promotion

Finally, it’s important to consider a variety of different strategies to promote your YouTube channel:

  • Cross-promote your videos and channel on other social media: announce new videos on Twitter, upload teasers to Instagram and make posts on Facebook.

  • Create a blog-old on your site and embed relevant videos from your YouTube channel.

  • Collaborate with successful influencers in your niche or even your competitors to create better content.

  • Live stream important events: product launches, unboxing, contests, and more.

  • YouTube has become one of the biggest platforms for advertisers, which means you need to learn how you can effectively reach your target audience and get them to support your business.

Wrapping Up

YouTube has become an extremely popular tool for marketing videos. Although it does require time and effort, it is a great way to get the message out to a diverse audience and gain the trust of your audience. With so many users posting videos daily, it’s also a great way to get your message out quickly. YouTube marketing videos are a great way to drive more traffic to your website or landing page and increase sales conversions.

Written on . Posted in YouTube Strategy & Tips.

Leo Zhavoronkov

Leo is an influencer marketing enthusiast and marketing copywriter at HypeAuditor. When she’s not searching for the perfect music and filters for her Instagram Stories, she can usually be found keeping up with the latest gaming and tech influencers on Twitch and YouTube – or drinking a latte macchiato.