It’s a well-known fact that YouTube is the second most popular website in the world. Almost every potential customer will be spending their time on this platform, making YouTube marketing an unavoidable part of digital marketing.
YouTube is an effective tool to attract new customers and engage with existing ones. And the best part is that almost every business, irrespective of its size or industry, can leverage this video-sharing platform to attract, convert, and retain customers.
Since people of almost every age group are active on YouTube, most marketers see this social media platform as a priority in their video marketing strategy. Another great advantage of YouTube marketing is that it’s measurable. You can easily track key performance indicators like click-through rate, watch time, views, and social shares.
If you’re new to YouTube marketing, things might feel a little overwhelming. To make things approachable and at the same time, to bring structure to your efforts, we have compiled a guide that will help you navigate through YouTube marketing in 2022.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is the most important and first step of YouTube marketing. Research and note down what type of individuals you wish to reach in terms of demographics such as gender, age, education, and location. Understanding such details will help you determine the type of content that will resonate with your audience the most.
Knowing your audience will also help you understand what they are currently watching. This will in turn help you learn whether your target audience consumes content created by your competitors, and if so, what they like and dislike about the competitor’s content. This will help you craft your content strategy accordingly.
Analyze Your Competitors
The easiest and fastest way to grow your audience on YouTube is by analyzing your competitors and checking what they are doing right on the platform. Check their average views per video, subscriber count, and frequency of posting. Now you have a rough idea of what success looks like for your business on YouTube.
Check and list down the type of topics they are covering on YouTube as well. Also, check the comments of each video and see what the audience is talking about. The comment section of your competitors’ videos can also act as a gold mine of content ideas.
Analyzing your competitors’ videos is also helpful to understand the tone they use in their videos. Likewise, check out the videos of your favorite YouTube channels and list down the top reasons why you love them. These channels don’t have to be related to your industry. The key is to find what works to amaze the viewers.
Be Consistent With Uploading Your Videos
Consistency is crucial to winning the YouTube marketing game. But, of course, that doesn’t mean you have to upload every other day. The key is to be frequent enough that your audience won’t forget you and not too frequent that your audience will start feeling suffocated.
If you feel you have a low budget that won’t allow you to frequently upload new content, don’t worry. The best thing about YouTube marketing is that you can excel in it if you have a smartphone and a book full of engaging content ideas.
Since most smartphones are capable of recording in high definition, you don’t always have to rent recording equipment. Likewise, you can use an online YouTube video editor tool and significantly reduce the costs associated with video production.
Optimize Your Videos
You probably have heard about optimization a lot. Just like you guessed, it’s about using the right keywords in your video’s title, description, and tags. But it’s not just about using keywords. There are many other ways you can optimize your videos for better traffic and engagement.
Using timestamps is one of the best ways to increase your video’s engagement. This allows viewers to easily navigate through your videos and skip the parts they aren’t interested in. Along with including the right keywords in the description, it must be detailed and should rightly describe what the video is about.
You can also use the description section to include website links, links to the products or services you mentioned in your video, and links to your other social media profiles. Another effective way to optimize your video is to create engaging video thumbnails. But always make sure they don’t mislead the viewer as the YouTube algorithm doesn’t show any mercy to click baits.
Including a call to action is also a part of optimizing your video. The worst thing you can do is leave the viewers clueless about what to do next after watching an impressive video of yours. You should also utilize your video’s end screen to offer additional content to viewers.
Try Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing might be the oldest trick in the book, but it still works. Influencers have already done the hard work of growing their fan base and you can take their help to quickly grow your followers. If you have a lower budget, you can always reach out to nano influencers. They might have a smaller follower base, but the loyalty is usually higher.
Analyze Your Efforts and Tweak Your Strategy
Since YouTube marketing is easily measurable, you can analyze what works for your brand and what doesn’t. Video views, comments, likes, subscribers, and shares are some of the key performance metrics to analyze.
Analyzing these metrics will help you figure out the type of content your users like the most. This information is useful to tailor your future content and your overall YouTube marketing strategy.
In Conclusion
Being one of the top most popular websites in the world, YouTube is a social media platform that can help you connect with your potential customers and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.
Although there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to winning the YouTube game, you can achieve a lot by being consistent, relatable, and engaging. More importantly, listen to your audience. Interact with them in the comments section and ask them what they would like to see on your channel.
