Top 5 YouTube Marketing Strategies

YouTube has grown to become a popular place to market your products and services. With theaverage viewing session lasting 40 minutesor more, you need to make sure that YouTube is included in your marketing strategy. Today, we are going to share the top five YouTube marketing tips to get you well on your way to marketing with this super popular video platform.

Create engaging content

When shooting and editing video, it can be easy to cut corners and not put everything into making an engaging video. You ask, what is “engaging content” on YouTube? According to the dictionary, to be engaged means “occupy, attract, or involve”. So in YouTube video, this means to build a video that is attractive or brings involvement to your viewers. This could be an attention-grabbing intro, a giveaway in the middle of the video, or even an unexpected stunt or surprise to grab the viewer’s attention. If you don’t think you have engaging content, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Does my video have energy?
2. Who is my audience and does the main topic connect with them?
3. Does my video tell my audience in the first 10-15 seconds why they should stay and watch?

Grow your fans

One of the top ways to grow your YouTube fans is interacting with your audience. When you receive a comment on your video, respond and engage with your viewers, which lets your fans know that you care. When fans get a response, there is a higher chance that they will engage with your other videos as well as share your content with their friends and family.

Another common method of growing your fan base is promoting your video and YouTube channel through other social media networks. Whenever you have a new video, share it to social media. You can also encourage your fans and subscribers to like and follow you on social media, allowing for a greater reach.

The last method of growing your fans is by having and cultivating a passion for your topic or specific field. If you are creating videos, but don’t really care about the topic, this will come across to your viewers. Having passion and love for the specific topic of your YouTube content will allow you to be knowledgeable and bring an energy unlike any other to your videos. This will also serve to bring more engagement with your viewers.

Study your analytics

Unfortunately, many YouTube artists are only looking at one metric for their videos: view count. This is an important metric and it can be helpful, but it isn’t going to help you fully learn about your audience and grow your channel. AsTim Schmoyer from VideoCreatorsshares, the “audience retention graph on YouTube [is going to] show you exactly when people are abandoning your video, what’s causing them to leave, and truncate the amount of watch time you might have otherwise been earning from that viewer.” Your analytics aren’t just boring numbers and data, but a preview of what your audience is thinking and what they are seeking. Use the audience retention tool to see when viewers stop watching your video. It may be that your video’s intro is too long, or maybe when you say a certain word, you lose viewers.

Design attention-grabbing thumbnails

Just because the video is created and uploaded to YouTube doesn’t mean that it’ll get clicked. One very important step to uploading your video is designing an attention-grabbing thumbnail. Instead of trying to explain specific thumbnails, let’s take a look at a few from popular YouTube videos.

Each of these thumbnails have been created to grab audience attention and are designed around the highlights of the video. These thumbnails have the viewer asking questions before they even click or watch the video.

The first thumbnail asks the question, what is growing? Can I grow my channel?

The second thumbnail is asking, did something explode? Why are they wearing sunglasses? Is that a laser?

The third thumbnail brings the question, why are there so many different people taking photos? Did something happen to the wedding cake?

The fourth thumbnail brings excitement and the begs question, ‘what happens when you hit a huge ball with a jeep?’

Take time to design attention-grabbing thumbnails so your viewers are intrigued and asking questions about your video, just from the thumbnail. This will cause them to click and watch your video.

Ask viewers to subscribe

On the most popular YouTube videos, what do they always do at the end of the video? They ask you to subscribe. This allows subscribers to be notified when a new video is posted. Take an additional 10-20 seconds at the end of each of your videos to ask viewers to subscribe to your channel. This not only reminds your viewers to come back, but also brings a human connection that may feel very real. Sometimes YouTubers will show a wide angle of their studio showing the main camera and lights during the last 20-30 seconds as it brings that open and unscripted feel.