Things to Know About Marketing on YouTube

Social media is a vital part of your online presence and marketing strategy—so much so that social signals count in search engine rankings.

Measuring social engagement is a way to value online content. If you see a blog post accruing a lot of likes, shares, and comments, for example, the page is going to seem valuable and compelling simply because other readers are indicating it is. 

Social media marketing is overwhelming, despite its value, which is why so many businesses opt to outsource it to a social media marketing company. 

One of the things you have to consider is where you’re going to spend most of your time and energy because your audience isn’t necessarily going to be on every platform, and not every platform is going to give you a good ROI. 

YouTube is one platform that nearly every business should be thinking about, though. More than 75% of Americans who are 15 and older are on YouTube.

There are more than two billion users active each month, which means it’s the world’s most popular website, only behind Google. 

The following are six things to know about YouTube marketing, specifically geared toward newbies on the platform (at least from a marketing standpoint). 

1. An Overview of YouTube Marketing

YouTube marketing just means that you’re promoting your brand, products, or services on the platform. 

There are a few primary ways marketers use the platform. 

You can create your own original videos. YouTube is a video hosting platform, first and foremost, so you’ll need to make sure you’re creating videos that are high-quality if you want to do well here. 

You can work with influencers as part of your YouTube marketing, building credibility and a sense of authority in your niche. 

The third way you might integrate YouTube into your marketing strategy is through paid ads. Around 70% of consumers say they’ve purchased something after seeing it on YouTube. 

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, but its ranking gets very competitive. 

2. The Importance of Marketing on YouTube

Consumers love videos—that’s a core reality that makes YouTube a beneficial place to put your attention in terms of marketing.

People are twice as likely to share a video compared to other types of content. People on YouTube watch more than one billion hours of video a day. 

You can potentially reach a large and very active base of users, and you can also leverage an international audience if that’s relevant to your brand. The platform is available in 80 languages and more than 100 countries. 

A lot of Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs now include video carousels, and about 94% of those videos are pulled from YouTube. 

If you do keyword research on not just Google but also YouTube, you can match search intent, and you can rank higher on both.

YouTube is a highly trusted platform for people who want to discover products and services and make buying decisions, so it’s a good place to go to build credibility and generally increase your brand awareness. 

You can even make extra revenue through YouTube if you’re eligible for the YouTube partner program. You can monetize your videos, making money based on your views and engagement. 

3. Creating a Channel

The first step in YouTube marketing is creating a channel that is like your home. You’ll publish your videos here on your channel, view your analytics, respond to comments, and more. 

While creating a channel is your starting point, you have to make sure you’re branding it well for consistency and awareness. 

The elements of a channel that you can customize for branding include your banner image, channel description, social links, profile picture, and channel trailer, and you can customize your URL. 

You want to make sure your thumbnails, descriptions, and titles are all branded too. 

4. Know Your Audience

Once you’ve created a channel, you need to start figuring out who exactly you’re going to be making videos for.

Not all of your customers are going to watch videos on YouTube, so you can’t assume your current marketing audience will be the same. 

You’ll want to look more in-depth at who your targeted audience on this particular platform will be. 

There are a lot of ways to identify your audience. You can use market research from your current social media, you can do competitive analysis, and you can also just explore what people are consuming that relates to your niche. 

One of the best ways for identification of your audience is by looking at other channels that you think could be similar. 

Details to look for include how they engage with their audience, the type of videos they publish, what their posting schedule is typically like and what their thumbnails look like. 

5. Creating Content

You should base your video content on trending keywords, pain points you’ve identified for your audience, and social listening. You should use good-quality equipment and focus on editing and post-production because you want your videos to look extremely professional. 

Don’t be afraid to experiment with styles of content, either. 

For example, YouTube Shorts is a new feature that’s leveraging the power of short-form video. These videos don’t have to be professionally made, and they’re great for quick viewing and mobile engagement. 

6. Optimize Your Videos

Finally, when you create content on YouTube, if no one can find it, it’s not going to have value as part of your marketing strategy.

YouTube SEO is incredibly important because you’re otherwise going to be stuck amongst the many other videos. 

You want to do keyword research before you ever make a video because this will help you identify topics and angles. 

Once you create videos, you want to optimize your titles and descriptions, naturally using your primary and secondary keywords. 

You can also optimize your thumbnails. Look at some of the top videos and see what they do in terms of thumbnails that you can replicate. 

Tags are another way to optimize videos. You can add relevant words and phrases to tell not only YouTube but your viewers what your video’s about.