The Ultimate Guide to YouTube Marketing in 2021

YouTube is a video-sharing website where user can upload their video for free. Since its creation in 2005 it is growing as a great platform for entertainment and its videos are watched by billions every month.

There are about 100 hours of videos uploaded on YouTube every minute. You can find all sorts of videos on YouTube these videos are user-generated content and not created by any TV network or movie studios. Everything is available on YouTube today, people don't like reading content rather than watching.

YouTube is today the second most visited website after Google in the world. It has more than 2 billion users and these users are frequently watching YouTube videos. Its consumers are increasing day by day spending more time watching videos online. If you are looking for marketing, then YouTube is a perfect channel for the same. For YouTube marketing, you don't have to spend thousands of dollars in advertising rather than create your own channel with quality content and people will definitely come to watch them. Thus, you are building your brand as well as getting customer acquisition through YouTube.

This might sound intimidating, but with the right approach, it is doable. After you have finished these 10-step guide to YouTube Marketing you will have a good grasp of how to get things started. We'll be focusing on three key areas:

• Creating and optimizing your YouTube channel.
• Understanding your audience (your competitors) using data.
• Advertising on YouTube through YouTube ads and influencer marketing.

Now, let's jump in!

10-step YouTube marketing strategy

Step 1. Create a YouTube channel for business

Create your YouTube channel using your Google account, without a channel you cannot upload videos on YouTube. For creating your own channel, you just must Sign into YouTube and click on your profile picture and click create your channel. Fill in the details as asked and need to confirm to create a channel. You can either make a channel with your business name or your personal or different name.

Step 2. Learn about your audience

When you create a YouTube channel for the business you get access to the Analytics tab, which contains details of the stats related to your channel. You can check your audience behavior here like views counts, average watch time, revenue generated, interaction rate of videos. The Analytics contain important data related to your subscriber.

• Monitor your audience Watch Time and Demographics analytics to find:
• Where are your videos being viewed and at which time?
• What age viewers are interested in your videos?
• What gender viewers are interested in and mostly identify as?

Tracking your audience is a win-win situation as you will get the idea of the right audience you are working and reaching for. You can develop your content strategy according to the type of audience reach. You will also find the demographics where your product resonates, and this value will be crucial for your entire marketing team.

You can easily gain qualitative information about your audience - the whys and how's about your visitors will help you in managing the comments for your videos better. Commenting and replying to them is an important part of your marketing strategy, both on and off YouTube. Post questions and create a poll to gain a deeper understanding of how your audience thinks.

Step 3. Research your competitors

When you want visitors to visit your channel don't forget there are other hungry competitors who are trying to woo your customers. To be on top of building up your business, you need time and energy to keep tabs on your competition. You need to monitor your competitors on regular basis and know their behaviors so that you can plan your own strategies so that you keep your customers and win (not steal) customers away from competitors.

Competitive analysis is essential if you want to pull ahead of other businesses in your niche on YouTube. You can find a lot of information and potential opportunities on your competitor's channel. Browse their channel and note which videos they are getting the most and least views. Watch their videos and get a sense of what kind of content the viewers like to watch and use the information in making your own content strategy.

Read the competing video's description to see the keyword they are using in their YouTube search optimization. Include similar keywords to boost your ranking in YouTube search pages. Also, read the comments of your competing videos, and see if you find any potential customers there.

Secondly, analyze the tags and other meta-tags used by them which helped gain them popularity. Keep yourself in sync with the competition and keep yourself abreast with the latest videos of your rivals to bring out better and modified content on the same theme.

Step 4. Learn from your favorite channels

While watching YouTube videos you need to learn basic things about videos: Why this video is liked? What makes me come back again and again to this channel? What is the key content in the video?

Paying attention to simple things can help you in making videos that will hold the subscribers in a long run. Even if those videos are not according to your business needs you can grab the basic strategies to increase your viewers count.

YouTube may be a wild bazaar where you can find any type of content, but certain ones can enlighten you as much as they entertain. There are hundreds of YouTube channels, and they can teach you about how to make videos on any subject.

Getting tips and techniques from some of the top YouTubers will effectively help you in making a good and interesting video. Your video might appeal both to people who are interested in your process, and people who are interested in the subject of your project.

Step 5. Optimize your videos for SEO to get views

Just like you need content to be optimized for search engines same is with videos, you need to take care of some facts so that your YouTube video SEO is perfect and gains a lot of traction. YouTube video SEO can have many benefits from increased watched time, broader brand awareness, and more sales and leads. Combine your SEO and video strategy to promote your videos in a simple way

Select a right title

Now that you have shot your video you need some SEO work done to it with an appealing title containing relevant keywords. It is very tricky to make an interesting title that includes exact keywords matching common search terms. It is recommended to make a title up to 60 characters or fewer as the maximum number of characters a search pages view is 70 characters rest are cut off in search pages.

Make an interesting thumbnail

Thumbnails of a video can help you a lot in gaining people's attention when they look at YouTube search results. A strong thumbnail can lead to having a higher watch time in your video and affects your ranking on YouTube. It is always better to make your own custom thumbnail as it will help your content stand out and gain the user's attention.

Video description need to be taken care of

One of the key factors for YouTube SEO is making sure you have a solid, optimized video description. Make sure that you are using the important keywords in the first couple of sentences of your description. You can use keyword tools such as Google Trends and the Google Ads Keyword Planner to identify popular keywords and use them or their synonyms in your description to gain maximum traffic from the search.

Add hashtags to your video description

Hashtags (#) are now used across all social media which helps users to find the content easily. So, make sure you use the needed hashtags in your video description which will help users to find your video easily when they search for a specific hashtag. Pick a few hyper-relevant hashtags related to that niche of your video. If you add a hashtag in the video title, hashtags from descriptions won't get displayed about the video title.

Add subtitles and closed captions

The final tip for success on YouTube search is adding subtitles and closed captions which will help viewers who can't understand your language, or who can't hear the audio. Both subtitles and closed-caption files contain the text of what is said in the video, like a transcript.

Ask viewers to subscribe

One of the easiest ways to gain subscribers is by asking them to subscribe. This is the reason almost every YouTuber ends their video with a verbal call to "Like, share, and subscribe". It works and that too with zero effort. YouTubers can also use their end screen to promote videos, playlists, merchandise, and external websites.

Step 6. Upload and schedule your videos

Now that you have created your well-optimized video it's time to upload and schedule them. Your first step should be to look at your video marketing strategy and consider what stage in your sales funnel you’re trying to improve. Now decide on when and where to post your videos depending on the marketing plan you’re working to improve. Scheduling videos will help with the planning of a social media content calendar. It’s a nice technique to make sure you don’t forget to share the quality content you’ve created—on a regular basis.

Be professional and share content on a regular schedule. If you have promised your subscriber a new video every Saturday then you have to commit to that, or you will risk losing their trust. You can upload and schedule your YouTube videos in advance from the Creator studio, or with a tool like Hootsuite, which allows you to cross-promote your video releases with posts on other social channels all from the same dashboard.

Step 7. Optimize your channel to attract followers

After you have optimized your video now you will need to optimize your channel itself. By providing a consistent experience across your channel, you will be able to bring in more views, and more importantly, convert those views into regular subscribers.

Ways to optimize your channel

Optimization of your channel is important to get a lot more traffic, and ultimately, more YouTube subscribers. By providing a consistent experience across your channel, you will be able to bring in more views and more importantly, convert those views into your regular subscribers.

Fill out your YouTube profile

The easy and best place to start optimizing is filling as many relevant details on your profile as possible, that includes:

• A keyword-rich bio
• An eye-catching banner images
• Links to your website and social media profiles
• Location and contact information.

You can also list a Featured channel to your YouTube profile. The featured channel will give your subscribers easy access to other resources they might be interested in.
This might sound like giving free advertising to your competitors, but you can get actual benefits from doing so. By providing cross-channel promotion or other collaboration will help you in networking with different channels. When you make friends on YouTube, everybody wins!

Organize your videos into playlists

Organize your YouTube videos into a playlist, which will auto play until the playlist ends, keeping your viewers on your channel for longer and increasing the average watch time statistic.

Curate your playlist effectively and make sure there is a logical progression of ideas from one video to the next. Also, try to persuade other YouTubers to add your videos to their playlist. The relevant keyword is a must in your playlist titles to boost your YouTube SEO!

Translate your videos in different languages

You can expand your reach on YouTube by adding subtitles to your videos. To do this you just need to turn on community contributions for videos.

• Click on your account name and navigate to the creator studio.
• In the menu to the left click Translation & Transcription > Community Contribution.
• Click Turn on for all videos to enable community contribution.

Make your videos accessible to a global audience by automatically translating them. You can grow your YouTube channel by translating your videos and opening content for an international audience. The subtitling features help your viewers understand the content much better.

Step 8. Try YouTube advertising

Your videos in your channel are not the only place people could see your videos, if you got funds, you can pay for YouTube advertising. There are 6 types of YouTube ads where you can advertise.

1. Skippable In-Stream Video Ads
2. Non-Skippable In-Stream Video Ads
3. Bumper Ads
4. Discovery Ads
5. Non-Video Ads
6. Sponsored cards

With YouTube advertising, the key is to produce relevant, engaging content that makes viewers forget that they are watching an ad. This means you have to keep things short, entertaining, and hyper-targeted.

Step 9. Try working with an influencer

One of the best ways to showcase your product on YouTube is by working with an influencer. If done the right way, it will give your brand the exposure it needs. By using YouTube influencers, you’ll build affinity with subscribers who maintain a strong level of loyalty to that influencer. Reaching out to influencers can be tough. It seems like you’re a needle in a haystack of people.

Influencers give a campaign the organic push it needs. Tapping into an influencer turned-in audience can result in huge returns and can allow you to grow your interest and develop an audience for your business.

Step 10. Analyze and adapt

Now you have your YouTube Channel and you're publishing content regularly and making partnerships with influencers and other creators in your field. But you are not done yet you need to constantly monitor your channel to help it grow.

• Significant changes in subscriber's count
• New or changing audience demographic
• Video playback locations and traffic sources
• Device report (mobile, desktop, smart TVs, etc).

The best way to learn what your audience thinks of your video and channel is by reading comments regularly. You might even find concrete suggestions about which video you should make next!