How To Plan YouTube Digital Marketing Strategy
With over 1.3 billion subscribers, 300 hours of video content being uploaded every minute, and almost 5 billion videos watched every single day – your channel can feel like a drop in the ocean on YouTube!
This fact-check could be demotivating; however, it shouldn’t stop your zeal from pushing your channel forward.
With so many viewers on YouTube and so many video contents being watched daily, there is enough space for good YouTube channels like yours to succeed.
What’s important is to have a comprehensive YouTube digital marketing strategy for your channel.
It will help you to get found by your target audience and assist you in gaining maximum exposure.
What Do We Mean by Strategy?
Many creators are under the misconception that organic traffic comes to your channel with ‘just’ good quality content. This is how your videos get shared, and how you can get more YouTube subscribers and popularity.
That is far from the truth. This is luck. However, many YouTube creators confuse it as hard work and end up losing hope when this doesn’t reap results.
On the other hand, some creators tend to promote their YouTube Channel mindlessly by opting for cheap tactics and getting surprised when it yields next to no results.
A good YouTube digital marketing strategy comprises of attracting organic traffic by creating awareness of your channel and your work on various social media platforms while making your content YouTube Algorithm friendly.
Even well-established YouTube creators invest in digital marketing strategies for growth. In fact, many creators consider their strategy as a contributing factor to their success.
So, let’s head further to understand how to create a successful YouTube digital marketing strategy for your channel.
Keep YouTube algorithm happy
No amount of YouTube promotion will help if your channel and videos don’t meet the criteria of the YouTube algorithm for organic ranking. Your first step on how to do YouTube marketing is to make sure you not only meet all the necessary criteria of the YouTube algorithm, but you should also remain up to date with the new changes in the algorithm.
Here’s what you need to do to optimize your channel and videos.
Tips for Your Channel
- Complete your YouTube bio by stating your channel name, about description, your target country, any associated websites, and links to your social media profiles.
- There is a section called “Channel Keywords” in your account information. You can use Google AdWords keyword planner to check for popular keywords based on your niche and add them here.
- For the channel’s homepage, add a high-quality custom banner and create an intro video that plays whenever someone visits your channel.
Tips for Your Videos
For every video you post, make sure it has a captivating title and descriptions with all the necessary keywords included. Also, make sure to optimize tags effectively.
Your video title should be attractive enough to click and at the same time, gives the viewer the idea of what to expect in a video. The description should have a brief of the video, important links or information based on the content in the video, and links to your social media profiles.
YouTube algorithm ranks videos with HD definition higher, as it wants to provide viewers with the quality viewing experience. So, make sure to invest in high-quality audio and video equipment’s.
The thumbnail for your videos is highly essential. Make sure to go for a highly optimized picture as a thumbnail that also gives an insight to your video.
YouTube annotations are a great way to increase your rankings. Add necessary annotations in the video wherever possible.
Adding subtitles to your video can help your video gain unprecedented exposure. Also, adding subtitles makes your video crawlable to the YouTube Algorithm.
Furthermore, a good number of likes, shares, and subscriber count also helps in better video rankings.
Nevertheless, the best YouTube promotion strategy comprises of utilizing all the social media platforms out there and guiding the traffic from there to your YouTube channel.
Here are few ideas:
1. Post Some Content Exclusive to Each Platform
You can use Instagram to post your photos and keep your followers updated with what’s going on in your life. You can use Twitter to express your views on various topics. You can use Facebook to share behind the scene footage. Make your every profile worth following.
2. Interact with Your Audience Through Various Platforms
You can retweet tweets from your followers. You can follow back your followers on Instagram. You can tag people on Facebook on your posts. There are many ways of interacting with your followers. Just remember that using social media platforms to indulge in direct promotion won’t work. You need to be sensible and engaging in your approach.
3. Join Platforms That Can Help in The Promotion of Your Channel
If you have an educational channel, you can join Quora and answer questions that are relevant to your channel and post link to your channel in each of your answers. If you have a crafts channel, joining Pinterest can really help. For vloggers, if they start blogging too, they can expand their audience further.
4. Create Engagement on YouTube
With a plethora of videos out there on one topic, you need to have a high retention rate on each video; otherwise, people will simply go to some other video. The way out is to create engagement on YouTube.
You can do this through:
Viewer Engagement
Make the time of your viewers count on your channel. Create a playlist of your videos, add links to similar videos at the end of each video, and ask your viewers to like, share, and subscribe to keep viewing interesting content.
Interactive Engagement
Create QA videos every now and then, go live to converse with your subscribers. You can also be consistent in replying to the comments on videos.
Promotional engagement
You can run contests, giveaway, etc. This will not only enhance your engagement with your subscribers on the channel but will also help in increasing your YouTube subscribers.
####Pro tip
You can also take custom requests of your viewers and create/modify the content accordingly. This is one of the best ways to create a great image among your viewers.
5. Creating Video Snippets and Memes
With so many people online most of the time, attaining overnight online success has become more common than ever. Many creators have become popular due to their memes or short snippets from their videos getting trending.
It’s challenging to get people to watch your videos unless they are genuinely interested. With the attention span of humans going down to eight seconds, it’s difficult to get them engaged in videos of 3 to 5 minutes or more.
One of the best YouTube promotion strategies is to create compelling short videos snippets and memes from your YouTube channel. These are quick to watch, catches the attention easily, and are shared faster compared to long videos. It’s a must to add this in your YouTube digital marketing strategy.
Extra Tips
We hope the tips above will help you create a successful YouTube digital marketing strategy for your channel. Since you have made this far, we have some additional tips that could help you with your strategy.
- Schedule: Even a great strategy can end up showing no results if you do not follow it with consistency. Have a plan for posting videos, uploading content on various platforms, for commenting, etc.
- Analyze: You need to analyze the results of your strategy. There are various analytical tools on YouTube and otherwise - that can help you calculate your performance.
- Keep up to date: There are always new trends, new social media platforms, and latest updates to YouTube algorithm. Make sure you stay updated to incorporate the changes in your strategy.
- Observe Feedback: As a creator, you tend to experiment every now and then. Introducing new concepts, collaborating with other creators, promoting brands, etc. Make sure to keenly observe the feedback for all this from your subscribers and proceed accordingly.
- Make ‘Quality First’ Your Motto: Do you remember the misconception we talked about in the very beginning? Many YouTube creators think that organic traffic comes from ‘just’ quality content. Yes, a great YouTube digital marketing strategy is a must. However, it will fail you if your content is not of quality.
Hence, the only way to beat the fierce competition on YouTube is to make sure that you prioritize quality before anything else.
Creating quality content will call for more time and energy but the results you will reap from it will be worth everything.
YouTube Digital Marketing Strategy: Final Thoughts
Nevertheless, working simultaneously on creating high-quality content and digital marketing strategy for your YouTube channel can be really tough.
However, you can always invest in a social media company that will help you design a strategy that incorporates your short and long-term goals and then execute it effectively.
Karen is a senior technical writer and copywriter here at GrowFollowing. Her area of expertize are social media apps and new media.