Fundamentals of Youtube Marketing: The Creator’s Go-To Guide

Youtube is one of the largest video sharing platforms with thousands of creators making content around news, beauty, technology, fashion, makeup, skincare, and more.

One brand that has never failed in wiring its Youtube strategy the right way is – Mac Cosmetics. A brand that sells one lipstick every second, has not failed in Youtube marketing mastery either.

Be it understanding the user needs on Youtube, or blending in technology like AR to make their macs sell like hotcakes, they’ve got it all right.

So, whatever niche you belong to, there’s no reason why you can’t be the Macs of the world.

Just like how Mac has got its fundamentals right and was able to be successful with Youtube marketing, you can too.

With this creator’s guide, you’ll be able to unearth marketing strategies to make your channel as successful.

What are you going to learn in this guide?

1. Understanding the ideal target audience

Now, understanding your audience does not necessarily mean you deep-dive into the demographic study and once you leave no stone unturned, you start your Youtube channel.

No. It does not work that way.

If you plan to choose a particular niche, be it an individual creator or a channel for the corporate, understanding the audience happens as you create content, interact with viewers, and then crunch the analytics data.

For starters, you’ll have to know answers to basic questions regarding your ideal target audience like these:

1. What interests or hobbies should my ideal audience have?
2. Which countries and geographic regions do they belong to?
3. Which age-group do they belong to?
4. Do they consume content on Youtube?

ThinkwithGoogle asked 12k people worldwide about what they watched in 24 hours. This shows the video types and duration that millennials prefer.

The revelations of the study were that the millennials were drawn towards short-form video clips and tutorials.

Such insights can help you understand your ideal target audience on a broad level and the kind of content you should be creating. This can be later perfected as you start posting content.

You’ll get deeper insights once you start creating content and begin to analyze the audience tab of Youtube analytics – which we will further explore in the following sections.

Once you have a basic idea of the target audience, you can move on to the creation and optimization of your channel and the content. 

2. Optimizing the channel and the videos 

Your channel and the profile is the first impression a visitor would have. The channel art, profile picture, bio, and description give reasons to a viewer to become a subscriber.

So, make sure that you make these creatives super-attractive and the description crisp, clear, and far from sloppy.

Channel art has to be carefully designed and the graphic elements have to be placed properly so that there are no cut-offs and the design looks good across devices. 

Youtube recommends dimensions – 2560 pixels wide by 1440 pixels tall for the channel art.

Next comes the visual appeal of your channel.

When the user navigates to the videos and playlists tab, they must be able to easily access the content. The video thumbnails must also have a consistent style and design so that your channel scores a hundred on the aesthetics test too.

Think of your video tab as a library of videos that the viewer would skim through. So, a video that piques their interest must be easily identifiable with distinct titles, background colors, and categorization.

Let’s now see how you can optimize your channel and video for better reach and performance.

Video title and description

Make video titles search-friendly and at least five words long. Compare the titles of your competitors who are already ranking for the term and make yours better and more clickable.

Youtube description allows a maximum of 5000 characters. So, make the best use of this space by including all the key details, affiliate links, and by making the opening line intriguing so that viewers click on the “show more” link and read further.

Here are some best practices:

• Don’t overstuff the keywords in your description
• Avoid using irrelevant words in your description;  it must read well
• Identify your primary keywords and feature them in your title and description
• Add translations and time stamps for different parts of your video
• Include a series of playlist links towards the end to make the interested viewers binge
• Encourage viewers to subscribe and engage with your videos
• Add links to other social channels like Instagram and Facebook and encourage viewers to follow
• Use less than 15 hashtags in a similar topic or the same topic as your video so that viewers can find you and navigate to your video while searching with the hashtag (hashtags are hyperlinked and will take users to that hashtag’s search results page to see related videos).

Video tags

According to Youtube,

“Tags are descriptive keywords you can add to your video to help viewers find your content. Your video’s title, thumbnail, and description are more important pieces of metadata for your video’s discovery. These main pieces of information help viewers to decide which videos to watch.

Tags can be useful if the content of your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in your video’s discovery”.

These are some best practices and tips to use video tags the right way.

Video tags should be a part of your videos so that they can contribute to rankings, visibility, and discoverability.

This is not a crucial step, but at the same time, it cannot be skipped either.

• Add tags that are relevant to your videos and with a good search volume
• Don’t overstuff the tags and refrain from using irrelevant ones just because they are popular
• Adding tags to your video description amounts to spamming; so avoid it

Call-to-action

Youtube gives a bunch of opportunities to add CTAs to your videos. Be it in the description, or the green screen “subscribe” effect on your videos, to ask for it verbally, and more.

But,  you must not overwhelm the visitors with multiple CTAs in a video. You can choose one or two based on your priorities at the moment.

For instance, if your channel is about productivity hacks, then at the end of your video you could probably say what videos you have planned next so that people can hit on the notifications. 

Or, if you want your videos to have a high level of engagement, ask the viewers a question and ask them to drop their answers in the comments. You can initiate a conversation between the viewers in the comments space.

You can also add other links like social media handle follow prompts, visiting your websites, and more in the description.

Branding the videos

There are a couple of things that you can do so that viewers who start interacting with your content, get familiarized, and convert into subscribers. Strong branding will help in making the viewers connect instantly, and sets the right vibe to stay subscribed.

Also, branding your videos will help you stand apart from the cluttered space and show your uniqueness.

How to brand your videos?

• Add a brand logo watermark to your videos
• Create a compelling intro to be used on all the videos you create. Try using digital avatars and unique font styles so that it resonates on the first instance
• Make the brand experience consistent with uniform thumbnail image style, font style, and brand colors
• Make the channel icon exciting so that you are able to significantly set yourself apart from other creators
• Clearly describe the key message of your channel in the channel description so that visitors have a solid reason why they must stick to you
• Make a channel trailer that gives visitors an overview of what to expect from the channel so that they are convinced to subscribe

Now that you know your ideal target audience and the tips and trick to keep your videos and channel optimized, let’s move on to the more crucial part – creating quality content.

3. Creating Quality Content

What’s quality content?

While that is a rhetorical question, the specifics of the answer could be highly-subjective.

But, a common answer would have this essence: Quality content is one that is helpful, entertaining, well crafted, and solution-driven.

Let’s now look at various elements of quality content on YouTube.

I. Video quality

Youtube does not define video quality as such, and it would adjust the quality of the video for the best viewing experience. This adjustment takes place based on certain criteria like:

1. Internet connection speed.
2. The video player, screen resolution  and the screen size. For instance, high-quality videos are usually better on larger screens.
3. The quality of the originally uploaded video (this plays a huge role in the viewing experience and the original quality cannot be superseded. This is why it is important to export high-quality videos and upload them on Youtube)

II. Video types

If your channel has the flexibility and if your audiences are open to experimentation you must mix things up and try to deliver unique content to your audience every time.

Here are some video types that you could try. However, these may vary according to different niches, goals, and channel priorities.

• Vlogs/DIMLs
• Routines
• Tutorials
• Demo videos
• Animated stories
• Fact/Stats based live-action videos
• How-to’s
• Reaction/Review videos
• Gaming videos
• Haul videos
• Skit/comedy
• Favorites
• Unboxing videos
• Educational videos
• Q & A videos
• Collection videos
• Prank videos
• Trends

III. Video editing

The most crucial part of the video-making process for Youtube is editing the videos. A well-edited video is one that is exciting to watch, has no unnecessary clips, is crisp, and is aesthetically pleasing.

Video editing requires a good tool of course, but also a lot of imagination, creativity, and willingness to spend time on the process.

Here are some quick tips for a well-edited video:

• Plan your clips in advance and shoot keeping the sequence in mind
• Write down the script for the voiceover and group them based on the scenes
• Plan out in detail about the texts to be displayed on screen, subtitles, and other end screen videos
• If the video spells out a fun and quirky vibe, go wild with the editing by adding stickers, animated texts, fun transitions, thought bubbles, and more!

4. Utilizing tools and resources

There are a ton of tools and resources that help you become better creators. Be it optimizing your content, editing your videos, staying consistent, or making the most attractive thumbnails – there’s a tool for everything.

Here’s a list of the perfect Youtube kit every creator needs.

1. Animaker: With Animaker, you can create studio-quality live-action, animated, and hybrid videos for your Youtube channel. You can also create unique intros by turning yourself into a digital avatar. You can check out Animaker if you are looking to create and edit different types of videos.

2. Keywords Everywhere: This is a great tool that can be added as a chrome extension that gives you insights into search volume, trend insights, tags suggestions, and a lot more.

3. Hootsuite: With Youtube creator’s studio, you can schedule your videos, but a tool like Hootsuite will help you schedule the promotion of your Youtube videos on other social channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Cross-promotion should be an important strategy of your Youtube marketing.

4. Picmaker: The most attractive and compelling thumbnails get clicked and there’s no second thought to that. With Picmaker you can create attractive thumbnails for your videos.

5. Tubebuddy: Tubebuddy is an advanced Youtube channel management tool that helps take care of activities end-to-end including Youtube best practices recommendations, do A/B testing, promote videos, and a lot more.

While the creation of quality content and optimizing them is important, what gives you the reach and opens up the possibilities of achieving more views and engagement is a good promotion strategy. Let’s now look at some ways to promote your videos.

5. Promoting Youtube videos

Optimizing your videos and getting them to rank in the first few spots of the search results itself is a great way to amplify your reach. But, there are certain promotion strategies that can help you go beyond.

 Let’s look at them now.

I. End screen and cards

Add related and similar videos in the cards or on the end screen. This will help in promoting your videos and get the audiences to stick to your channel longer.

II. Other social channels

You can cross-promote on different social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Post stories with a link in bio or swipe up CTAs to redirect audiences to your Youtube channel. You can even create posts or stories that have a countdown to the video going live.

III. Partnering with another Youtuber

Partnering with established content creators can help you get some traction and buzz for your channel too! Just be mindful about how you pitch to them. Make your approach less spammy, more mutually beneficial, and make the approach to the right person (consider subscribers, niche, and popularity).

IV.  Outreach to publications

Reaching out to websites and publications that publish blog posts and articles about the topics that align with the topics that you cover can help you amplify your reach. All you have to do is to make a list of the websites that are relevant to your niche and start reaching out to them to add your video as a part of their content.

V. Youtube ads

People are shifting from television to Youtube to watch content.

Also, YouTube delivers a better ROI than TV.

The Snickers ad on Youtube is a popular case study cited by Google that reached 20M users drove 2X ROI compared to TV ads.

The key findings of the experiment were:

• YouTube ads drove in-store sales
• Investing in a higher frequency of YouTube ads per viewer meant an increase in ROI

“This test highlights the importance of YouTube as a medium as part of our overall media strategy. YouTube clearly has a role to play in our ongoing media plans in addition to TV”

– Marc Zander, UK/Global Media Director for Mars Chocolate

“Everyone from Fortune 500 companies, education providers and dynamic little start-ups work with social media agencies to get results” – Voymedia

Now, Youtube video ads could be in-stream video ads that skippable and not-skippable or video discovery ads that help you increase the visibility of your offerings to the potential target.

You can ideally reach a large group of audience who are within your target segment through Youtube ads and Snickers’ success is good proof of that.

Now that the promotions are in place, we have to see whether things are working or not. If they are working then we can look at ways to make them even better. But, if they are not, we have to look at what has to be tweaked. 

So, how do we get these insights?

The answer is Analytics.

6. Monitoring, analyzing, and weighing metrics

The Youtube studio helps you track and measure the analytics of your video performance. Here you can track watch time, views, and subscribers on the overview tab.

You can also track the reach and understand metrics like impressions, traffic source types, top search terms, and more. Marketers can also analyze the engagement (top videos, playlists, top cards, and end screens).

The best part of analytics is how you can understand your audience in a detailed manner. The data about countries, subtitle usage, age, gender, and other videos watched by them – gives you an in-depth understanding of their behavior and expectations which would further help you streamline your content.

Final thoughts

Youtube is the go-to for everything ranging from making a bow tie to understanding the application of astrophysics.

Unlike textual forms of content, videos are easier to consume, actionable, and make understanding simpler with visuals. 

So, if you have already started your Youtube journey or about to explore the platform, this guide can help you apply some effective marketing strategies to scale your channel up to the next level.

If you want to add your favorite Youtube marketing strategy, feel free to drop a comment!