What is the Importance of a Youtube Marketing Strategy in 2022?

It’s easy to take for granted just how incredible YouTube is as a platform. Home to a staggering 2.3 billion users globally, YouTube is the second-most popular website on the internet, with an estimated two billion hours of video watched every single day.

When it comes to the world of digital marketing, these kinds of statistics mean your business is simply missing out on exceptional reach and sales if it doesn’t adopt a YouTube marketing strategy in 2022. 

Considering 90% of consumers want to see more video marketing from their favourite brands, developing an optimised YouTube channel for your business is essential for long-term success.

How to Develop a Winning YouTube Marketing Strategy

If you’ve ignored or underutilised your YouTube channel, there’s never a better time to resolve this issue than today. Fortunately, a variety of YouTube marketing tactics make it easy to catch up and surpass the competition. Check out these handy tips to level up your YouTube marketing strategy approach.

Create a YouTube Brand Account

Launch your channel with its best foot forward by using a YouTube Brand Account. This is a smart way to increase security as it allows multiple people to access the account without it being connected to your personal name or email address.

But that’s not all. YouTube Brand Accounts are also great for delegating responsibilities and restricting access where necessary. For example, an owner can edit business information, upload content, interact with comments and remove managers. 

However, a person with manager status can do the same tasks except for removing permissions. Importantly, Brand Accounts also grants access to YouTube’s top-notch analytics tab, so you can measure your content’s performance and enhance growth.

Get to Know Your Audience

Now that you have access to YouTube Analytics, it makes the process of getting to know your viewers so much easier. Rather than having to make broad estimates about their demographics, such as age, gender, location and interests, this data is instantly accessible. 

You can also track plenty of other important metrics, including watch time and audience retention. This latter data point is crucial because it shows where in the video users decided to leave. Using this information, you can pinpoint problematic trends that can be addressed in future content.

As you get to know your YouTube audience and how they interact with your videos, you can optimise your content plan to ensure you maximise subscribers, viewers, shares and more.

Watch Your Competition

Competitor research is a critical part of every digital marketing campaign. By reflecting on what content is being produced by your main rivals that share your target audience, you can attempt to outdo their approach. 

Once you’ve identified a selection of competitors generating success on YouTube, take a magnifying glass to their content. Think carefully about what kind of tone resonates with their viewers and the sort of content that seems to be especially popular. 

Do they produce product reviews, interviews or behind-the-scenes videos? Maybe you can do better. If you spot mistakes or see a negative trend mentioned in the comments, consider how you can supply a viable alternative that better serves consumer needs.

Seek Out High-Performance Content

Outside of your immediate rivals, it’s hugely important to understand what content is delivering success across YouTube as a whole.

While this will depend on your niche and its target market, keeping up with the latest trends ensures your videos don’t feel dated as soon as you upload them. 

Take a look at brands producing content you love on YouTube. While not everything will apply to the needs of your business, it might provide some sharp insight into what direction your content should go in.

Plus, it’s always great to see what popular YouTube channels are doing in terms of production quality, text overlays, thumbnails, titles and more.

Optimise Your Videos

It’s hard to find many successful YouTube channels for business that don’t carefully SEO each video they upload. As YouTube is essentially a giant video search engine, it relies on keywords to order the search results. 

Fortunately, this means brands that conduct detailed keyword research can reach their target audience effectively. So what parts of your video can you SEO? Come up with eye-catching and keyword-driven titles and descriptions to stand out from the crowd.

Adding the ideal tags and categories for your content will also have a big impact on your visibility. With effective YouTube optimisation, you can quickly attract the ideal viewers to your channel.

Enhance Your Channel

Alongside the optimisation of each video you upload, it’s also possible to enhance the rest of your channel to convince viewers that your content is worth watching. 

For instance, you should always write a compelling channel description that informs your audience why they should watch and subscribe.

You should also upload branded icons and banners to your channel to increase its appeal and ensure your videos are instantly recognisable to someone scrolling through the homepage. 

With cross-promotion key to getting a YouTube channel off the ground, adding social links to your channel’s page helps attract followers to your other platforms.

Follow an Upload Schedule

It’s difficult to establish trust with consumers if you hardly ever upload fresh content to your channel. This means it’s super important to create and stick to a regular upload schedule that drives traffic to your channel.

By committing your organisation to a schedule, it means you have a better chance of informing potential customers about your products and providing sharp insight into the personality of your business. This process grows loyalty and sets your brand up for a profitable future.

Whether you upload multiple short videos per week or a large-scale production every month, keeping your channel active ensures viewers know when to expect new content.

Launch YouTube Ads

Organically growing your channel is a rewarding process, but don’t be surprised if it takes a significant amount of time and energy to experience top-notch results. 

However, setting aside a budget for YouTube ads means you can skip the wait and push your content in front of engaged viewers without delay.

Just as Google Ads can be targeted at a precise customer base, YouTube ads and Instagram Ads benefit from the same features. This ensures that you can reach and convert your ideal audience with the right planning.

Alongside several advertising formats, including skippable in-stream ads, video discovery ads and non-video ads, deliver engaged viewers to your channel and achieve your objectives.

Develop Influencer Partnerships

Like every social media channel, there are bound to be influencers on YouTube that have established massive audiences that overlap with your own business goals. 

By developing a fruitful partnership with the right YouTube creator, you can convince their like-minded viewers to pay attention to your products and services.

In fact, 49% of consumers consider influencer recommendations, so hitting the mark with one of these campaigns is great for sales. However, just because there are creators with over 100 million subscribers doesn’t mean you need to partner with these people.

By working with a micro-influencer – typically a channel with less than 10,000 subscribers – that has a genuinely dedicated audience, you can achieve the same kind of success for a low cost.

Measure Your Success

You can’t benefit from a YouTube marketing strategy without measuring the success of your approach. As the YouTube Analytics platform provides a remarkable amount of insight into how your content is performing, this can highlight trends that enhance your growth. 

Alternatively, a dip in your metrics following the release of a new video or series provides a clear signal that your audience has rejected this style of content. 

After you publish a new video, improve your brand’s YouTube marketing strategy by paying close attention to how your subscriber count changes. Plus, consider whether you’ve attracted different demographics and traffic sources than usual.

Boost the Reach of Your Videos

Once you’ve implemented the previous tips into your company’s YouTube marketing strategy, numerous tactics will help your videos achieve the kind of views they deserve. From investing in superior audio-visual equipment to showcasing your personality, make the most of these ideas for growing your YouTube channel for business.

Improve Your Production Quality

The beauty of YouTube – and social media marketing in general – is that audiences don’t expect the world when it comes to production quality. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore this aspect of your content entirely.

For example, it’s possible to record your videos using a camera on a high-end smartphone. But you’ll want to consider investing in a tripod, some basic lighting and audio recording gear to ensure your videos hit the minimum standards.

While audiences in some niches like tech, fashion and travel are more sensitive to low fidelity content, most businesses don’t need to spend thousands to get their videos up to scratch.

Ask Viewers to Subscribe

If you’re looking to grow your channel’s views, it’s always a good idea to ask your audience to subscribe during the video. 

You shouldn’t beg for their loyalty. But a quick mention at the beginning or end of the video will encourage people to click the subscribe button with more regularity.

This simple tip reminds people that the small action of subscribing to your channel has a significant impact on your brand’s success. 

With this in mind, generating subscribers proves that people care about your content and see genuine value in what you’re doing.

Share on Social Media

Producing high-quality content for your company’s YouTube channel takes plenty of effort. Make sure you get the biggest bang for your buck by sharing this content on your other social media channels.

This process helps your brand convince your existing audience to watch your YouTube content and subscribe to your channel. But you’ll also benefit from increased brand awareness as likes, comments, shares and the clever use of hashtags help attract even more people.

If you’re producing long-form videos, break this content down into shorter pieces and share it on a separate YouTube clips channel. This encourages users who don’t have the attention span to sit through your entire video to still engage.

Create YouTube Playlists

YouTube playlists have proven to be incredible for keeping your most dedicated audience engaged with your channel. By separating different kinds of content into playlists, these videos are automatically played through when users click on one. 

If your brand creates how-to guides about power tools, you might decide to organise your content into beginner, intermediate and expert advice. This way, different segments within your target market can quickly find all the content relevant to their needs.

As playlists help potential customers get to know your brand, navigate your channel and increase your view count, there are numerous reasons why this YouTube marketing tactic boosts your reach.

Produce Better Thumbnails

Thumbnails are one of the most critical elements of a highly optimised YouTube channel. If your thumbnails are dull or misleading, you can’t expect viewers to click on your videos or subscribe to see more.

So how can you design awesome thumbnails? One major consideration is making the video title and thumbnail image work in perfect unison so that you capture attention and generate expectation. 

Focus on developing an instantly recognisable design language that helps your thumbnails stand out. This way, viewers presented with dozens of videos on their YouTube homepage will instantly identify your videos.

Interact with Your Community

The goal behind many aspects of digital marketing is to encourage consumers to get to know your brand. 

If customers feel like they understand who they’re purchasing from, this can lead to greater trust and loyalty. In turn, you can benefit from more repeat buyers that tell their friends and family about your services.

YouTube is the perfect platform to interact directly with your community. Try to reply to comments so consumers notice how you’re willing to engage, plus develop content ideas around this relationship.

For example, create Q&A videos where you reply to questions asked on your social media channels or take customers behind the scenes into your manufacturing process.

Chat with the Experts

There’s no doubt that an effective YouTube marketing strategy delivers unimaginable returns. By addressing consumer concerns, developing trust and optimising content, your channel will go from strength to strength.

However, achieving sustained growth on YouTube requires extensive time, money and effort. Rather than struggling through this process alone, partner with the experts at First Page Australia so you can focus on the rest of your operation.

As we plan and execute exceptional campaigns for businesses like yours every day, we know what it takes to design a winning strategy that skyrockets your growth. Get in touch to make your brand’s YouTube channel a success.