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Blog YouTube Marketing: a Guide to Creating, Optimizing and Promoting Video Content

YouTube Marketing: a Guide to Creating, Optimizing and Promoting Video Content

UPDATE: You can now officially schedule and plan your YouTube videos with Planable. Try it for free!

Looking to get into the YouTube game but you don’t know where to start? Or looking for ways to skyrocket your YouTube channel to the next level? Whatever the case, don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Thumbnails, tags, playlists. Writing, narrating, editing. Then there’s that whole “getting views” business. Apparently, if you don’t get any views, nobody’s watching your videos. What a drag.

But enough with the jokes. I’m going to level with you – doing YouTube is not easy. It can be a grind. And that’s precisely why investing effort and resources into YouTube marketing is worth it, because many people either: a) give up after the realities of YouTube content creation hit them or b) don’t even make an attempt at it, because it’s so hard.

So, I’ll walk you through the basics of YouTube marketing first, and then we’ll work our way towards more advanced concepts. So fasten your seatbelts and get ready to learn everything under the Sun about YouTube marketing:

Is it too late to get started with Youtube Marketing?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: no, and here’s why:

  • As of 2021, YouTube has 2.3 billion monthly active users. To put that number into perspective, it takes about 31 years to count to a billion. 
  • It’s the second most popular search engine after Google. And you probably already know which company owns YouTube.
  • People watch over 1 billion hours of videos every day. You read that right. So basically, 31 years’ worth of funny cat videos and watermelon-eating tutorials are consumed each day.
  • 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That amounts to 4.380.000 hours of content each year. 
  • 62% of businesses use YouTube.
  • A dazzling 90% of people say they discover new brands or products via YouTube.

These numbers may seem discouraging, but think about it this way: what those numbers don’t reveal is the amount of quality content uploaded on YouTube.

Out of those 4-million hours of content dumped each year on the platform, realistically speaking, only a fraction amounts to high-quality, unique content. So no, it’s never too late to get into YouTube and make money from the platform.

What is Youtube Marketing?

YouTube marketing is the new strategy to get your brand or product noticed. Create and edit videos, upload them on YouTube and watch as they’re seen by more people than ever before!

Why is Youtube Marketing Important?

According to a video marketing statistics report, 71% of consumers picked YouTube as their favorite platform for watching videos, which makes it a great option for marketers. 

  • Little to no out-of-pocket expenses. Obviously, you’ll have expenses in the creation and marketing of your video content, but YouTube’s business program is free of charge. 
  • Additional revenue stream via Adsense. 
  • More options for your audience to consume your content. In short, your text-weary audience will be grateful for having the option to consume your content in video form. 
  • Better SEO rankings, especially if the video acts as a companion guide for your blog posts. What is known as a “natural backlink” – and Google really, really loves natural backlinks. One way to secure these are with a help of an SEO agency providing link building services.
  • It can lead to more eyeballs on your business/product, because as stated in the previous heading, that’s where most of the eyeballs are staring at today. Product demo videos are a great way to introduce new customers to your product and get them excited about it.

Youtube marketing is not all smooth sailing. Like any other long-term strategy, it has a few note-worthy disadvantages:

  • Growth can be slow.
  • No control over what related videos YouTube displays on the right side of your video, which can drive your potential audience to competitors.
  • Can lead to low conversion rates. Even if your videos are entertaining and well-produced, it still might not convince people to interact with your product or business. 

How Do You Do Youtube Marketing?

Let’s get into the specifics now. This section will cover the steps necessary to create a YouTube channel for business, as well as actionable advice on branding your channel and making it stand out.

Create a YouTube channel for business

youtube marketing brand account

There’s no Youtubing without a YouTube channel, so the first step is to actually create one. 

If you already have a YouTube Brand Account, skip to the next step.

After creating a Google Account (assuming you don’t have one), the next thing to cross off the list is setting up a YouTube Brand Account.

Before that try this username checker tool and find out if the YouTube channel name you’ve chosen is already in use. Also this tool makes it easy for you to try out different variations until you find the one that will grab people’s interest and properly represent your brand.

If you’re confused about the difference between a standard YouTube channel and a Brand Account, don’t worry, you’re not the only one, because YouTube doesn’t do a stellar job of explaining it. 

The main difference is that with a Brand account, you have the option to change owners and managers, while a standard YouTube channel is always associated with a specific person and their email address

To create a YouTube brand account, follow these steps:

1. Click on your channel icon and select “my channel” from the dropdown menu.

youtube marketing brand account planable

2. Select “Use a custom name” to create a Brand account.

youtube marketing brand account planable

3. Add your channel name, accept the terms and conditions and tap on “create”. 

planable youtube marketing brand account

Now that you have a brand new… brand account, it’s time to add the bells and whistles. 

Branding

Strong, consistent branding can mean the difference between your channel standing out or it getting drowned in the sea of Call of Duty kill compilations.

Good channel branding is as much about meticulously studying your competition to see what they’re doing right, as it is about going with your gut and doubling down on what you think makes your brand stand out.

If you don’t know where to start, here are a few aspects that you could pay attention to:

  • Positioning. You need to figure out, in broad terms, what kind of content you’re going to produce. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’ll be stuck doing the same thing for an eternity. However, building a strong foundation will make branching out to other topics easier. 
  • Uniqueness. Is anyone else putting out the type of content you want to produce? If yes, can you do it better or put a spin on it? If not, why? Is it due to a lack of demand? Cost-effectiveness issues? 
  • Aesthetics. This includes channel art, logo, thumbnails, and even the look and feel of your videos. Of course, at the end of the day, the quality of your content will have the final say in the court of YouTube stardom. But until then, you need to make people click on your videos in the first place, and visuals are a great place to start.

General YouTube branding guidelines

Branding can be a tricky balancing act, and figuring it out requires a lot of trial and error. So here are a few general guidelines that you could use together with the questions listed above:

1. Choose a channel name

Choosing the right channel name has to be one of the most daunting things – after all, your channel name is associated with every single video you post. The key here is to choose a name that’s easily recognizable and marketable.

So basically, a name that rolls off the tongue and is transferable to other branding assets, be it merch, resources such as ebooks, and anything in between. Another thing to look out for is what I like to call “accidental portmanteaus” – so be careful when blending words together. 

And by the way – you can change it whenever you want, so don’t obsess so much over it.

2. Optimize your channel description

Your channel description should provide information about your channel, type of content you’re making and, ideally, your upload schedule.

Many YouTubers gloss over this part because, realistically speaking, only a tiny fraction of users will actually, physically go check out the description. However, the channel description is a very important ranking factor in search engines, so make sure the copy includes as many keywords as possible. 

3. Present what your channel is about through the art 

Channel art is extremely important because it’s probably the first thing users will see when visiting your channel.

There are many ways to go about this – you can either use a simple visual containing your channel name, or use the real estate to include CTAs and basic information about your channel, like what it’s about and/or your upload schedule. 

Whatever option you go for, the art needs to scale well across devices (laptop, mobile, TV, etc) – so make sure the image’s resolution is 2560 x 1440. You can also use a Youtube banner maker to create the branding for your channel with ease.

4. Optimize the channel URL

Only channels that have 100 subscribers are eligible for a custom URL. For simplicity’s sake, I recommend making the URL the same as the channel’s name.

5. Channel icon (logo) – the face of your channel

Now logos (or channel icons – they’re usually used interchangeably) are the unsung heroes of YouTube channel branding.

Just like the channel name, you should make sure that your logo is easily transferable to other branding materials and assets, such as thumbnails. It’s best to avoid any esoteric designs. If it’s a business account, obviously, the company’s logo is the perfect candidate.

If you’re a single entity, a professional head-and-shoulders shot should suffice. Just make sure your channel icon is consistent with your channel’s visual identity and that it’s 800 x 800, as per Google’s recommendation.

 

Create a roadmap of your first months on YouTube

An unwritten rule of YouTube is that you must always be prepared for everything to go horribly, horribly wrong. Some things you just have no control over, whether one of your videos is demonetized out of the blue or your editing software decides to crash after rendering 99% of a 2-hour long video 3 hours before upload time. 

The best way to protect yourself from these heart-attack-inducing scenarios is to create a roadmap of your first months on YouTube. Establish a schedule (weekly, biweekly, etc.) and produce multiple videos ahead of time. Why? For one, maintaining a steady backlog of videos is good practice in and of itself. Second, the first few months are crucial for gaining momentum on YouTube – and the only way to achieve that is through consistency. 

In short, every video produced and planned should have a backup ready to go live in case anything goes wrong. The backup video doesn’t have to be much – a shorter clip on a relevant topic should be enough. And if everything goes well, hey, you have extra videos to upload.

Optimizing YouTube videos for SEO

SEO is not the be-all, end-all of becoming popular on YouTube. There’s no magic formula, either. 

BUT: that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your due diligence. After all, we’re talking about YouTube marketing here.

“Below are the several pointers that you need to consider to optimize YouTube SEO for voice search:

Metadata

a) Rename Your Video File Using a Target Keyword

b) Insert Focus Keyword in the Video Title

c) Optimize Your Video Description and Provide Links

d) Use Relevant Tags

e) Optimize Content for Long-Tail Keywords and Queries

f) Optimize Closed Captions and Subtitles” says Chris Patel of Cognizant.

So here are a few YouTube SEO tips and best practices to get you started. 

1. Create a catchy thumbnail

There’s an old saying on YouTube: if you want to create a thumbnail that stands out, throw the graphic design book out the window. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use some graphic design tools

Okay, okay, you don’t actually need to engage in random acts of book defenestration (booknestration? I’m not good at portmanteaus). Nor should you entirely dismiss the finer art of graphic design. However, creating eye-catching thumbnails comes down to pushing the line of what constitutes as a visual faux pas without actually crossing it. 

Alright, hear me out. Take a look at this beast:

Now let’s do a crash course on why this thumbnail works:

  • The subject of the video, a.i. Myspace, is front and center. What’s interesting is that instead of copying the title of the video and slapping it onto the thumbnail, the copy supplements the video’s title: TITLE: THE INSANE RISE & FALL OF MYSPACE!; Thumbnail: WHAT KILLED MYSPACE?
  • It’s consistent with the topic of the video – the thumbnail contains the logos of several bands that got big through MySpace. This has a twofold effect. It answers a question (What bands got famous through MySpace?) right from the get-go. Second, it builds a rapport with the people who are fans of those bands (not a fan, just in case you were wondering – I’m more of a boom-bap kind of guy).
  • Thumbnails that show human faces are proven to rank better than those that don’t. Plus, it’s a scene kid. So, you know, topical. 
  • Simply put, it’s zany and colorful, and people are more likely to click on it.

“Make sure your thumbnails/titles are good. Titles should be relevant to your niche while being catchy and interesting. See what others are doing in your niche and use that for inspiration to take it in your own direction.

Thumbnails are really important. Think really hard about what types of thumbnails make you want to click and try to replicate that aesthetic and feeling.” says Tiffany Peral, Marketing Advisor at Phlanx.

I could go on, but I think you get it. Zany + colorful = more people clicking it. On that same note, it’s worth checking out a YouTube size guide just to be sure. Whatever the case, the line between zany/playful and obnoxious is very thin. But I’m sure you’ll be fine. Right?

2. Write a title that stands out

Here’s a fascinating knowledge nugget to share with people at parties. Are you ready? Here it goes: titles are what people first read when scrolling through the endless stream of video YouTube displays. I know, right? 

So you need to make sure that your title is not only representative of the topic the video addresses, but also catchy. 

And (very important): it needs to contain your main keyword. 

Let’s do a little exercise. Say you want to share your thoughts about the critically panned 1999 motion picture Wild Wild West, starring Will Smith and Selma Hayek. Your title should look something like this:

Wild Wild West Review

While the title is technically good (it contains the main keyword and it’s representative of the actual video) it doesn’t quite pop. So let’s spice it up a bit:

Wild Wild West Review: A Criminally Underrated Masterpiece of Turn of the Century Cinematography

While we’re at it, why not add your channel’s name as well:

Wild Wild West Review: A Criminally Underrated Masterpiece of Turn of the Century Cinematography | Channel Name

Or the year the video was produced: 

Wild Wild West 2021 Review: A Criminally Underrated Masterpiece of Turn of the Century Cinematography | Channel Name

You can apply this trick to literally any topic and niche, whether it’s tech, business, and so on and so forth. 

Let’s say you run a donut shop and want to advertise your business on YouTube. Obviously, you can’t review your own donut shop on your YouTube channel, that would be shady. What you could do here instead is target keywords relevant to your niche. So, you could go for keywords like “how to make donuts”; “how to make donuts with biscuits”; “how to make donuts without oven” and make branded videos around them:

How to make donuts without an oven: Easy as Cake! | Donutshopname

This is just a simple example. There are literally thousands of combinations you could try and experiment with. And if a title doesn’t work, you can always change it.

What’s beautiful about YouTube titles is that, because there’s a character limit, it encourages a sort of economy of language which, in turn, incentivizes people to get creative with their titles. And that’s exactly what you should do – mix creativity with clear targeting.

3. The description is your video’s visiting card

On a fundamental level, descriptions should, well, describe the content of your video – the subject, the main talking points, and all that jazz.

From an SEO perspective, there are several approaches you can take. The first rule of thumb is that your description should always (and I mean always) contain your main keyword. Think of the video description as a sort of meta description.

As for the other things your description should contain:

  • Timestamps. People are busy today and don’t like having their time wasted. Well, that’s a little harsh. See, YouTube has a problem of perception. Many people would gladly binge a 12 episode season of a show in a single day, but they’ll be more reticent when it comes to long-form YouTube content. Therefore, breaking your video in chapters will make it easier to digest. Plus, Google will crawl the timestamps and display them on the search engine. For example, if someone searches “how to make dough for my donuts”, Google will direct them and highlight that exact chapter from the video.
  • Hashtags. Pretty straightforward here – just don’t overuse them.
  • Transcript. Your transcript will likely be chock full of keywords, so including it in the description is a great way to give Google something extra to work with. 
  • Links to your social media and other resources. Did you mention an article in your video? Slap it in the description. Did you briefly mention a cool song or a book? Put that bad boy in the description. Are you sharing topical expertise? Link to your email opt-in landing page and connect with your audience via email marketing. It won’t necessarily give you an edge SEO-wise, but it’s good practice to cater to those people who want to go the extra mile and engage with your content.

BTW: always rename your video files to more descriptive titles because it can help with SEO. So no “take45thisisactuallythefinalversionomg.mp4” – rather “main-keyword-here.mp4”.

4. Tags, tags, tags

Here’s the thing about tags – nobody knows exactly how they work, and there’s no clear consensus in this regard, not even amongst the top dogs. This should come as no surprise, as tags are easily exploitable, and YouTube doesn’t want people gaming the system, for obvious reasons. 

What I can teach you is a cool trick I learned while pursuing my own YouTube adventure. You don’t need a keyword research tool to find the perfect tags – YouTube already offers a perfectly decent one in the form of the search bar. Simply type * before your targeted keyword and it’ll display the most searched terms related to that keyword. Something like this:

youtube marketing planable tags

In this here screenshot, you can see that I searched for “social media tools”. Simply add those keywords in the tag field and you’re good to go. 

You could also take inspiration from other videos by right-clicking on the page, selecting “view source”, hitting CTRL+F and searching for “keywords”. But you didn’t hear this from me.

5. Place your video in the right category

Even though this is a “one-click-and-you’re-done” type of thing, you’d be surprised how many creators gloss over it. 

So after you upload a video, make sure to choose a category under “Advanced settings”.  YouTube lets users place their videos in the following categories: Film & Animation, Autos & Vehicles, Music, Pets & Animals, Sports, Travel & Events, Gaming, People & Blogs, Comedy, Entertainment, News & Politics, How-to & Style, Educations, Science & Technology, and Nonprofits & Activism.

6. Don’t forget about cards and end screens

Cards and end screens are great ways to drive engagement up and direct viewers to your catalog of videos. 

Cards are the little annotations that pop up in the upper-right corner of the screen. You can add up to five cards per video – make sure to space them out equally so that viewers don’t get distracted. 

End screens allow you to extend your video length by 5-20 seconds. These are also great for directing viewers to other videos and channels, with the added benefit that they’re more CTA-friendly.

7. Create playlists to make your videos more visible

Playlists have two major advantages. First, they allow you to sort your videos by theme and topic. What’s more, playlists are a handy tool for encouraging viewers to continue watching similar content. This removes the pressure from you as a creator to put everything in one video.
Let’s say you’re talking about stock investing. Instead of making an insanely long tutorial, you can cut them up into approachable videos so that people can start from wherever they want to.

Second, playlists show up separately in search results. So creating playlists isn’t just for show – it can actually boost your channel in search engines.

Bonus Tip: Go the extra mile

After all this hard work, you need to understand everything about your competitors around the globe. Country barriers can be a hurdle, but for marketers, a VPN is a great tool to consider. Although VPNs are famous for their security and privacy, with it, you can also access several different servers and can use a restricted website from anywhere. Using a VPN is useful for both personal and professional interests, depending on what you want to use it for: most people just use a VPN to protect their browsing activity from prying eyes.

Key Metrics

YouTube analytics is an entirely different beast that, if we’re perfectly honest, deserves an article of its own. Not because they’re hard to grasp, but because YouTube doesn’t do a great job of explaining them. And that’s a problem because, after all, you can’t really do YouTube marketing without analytics.

So let’s go through a few important metrics that you should follow as a YouTube newcomer:

1. Watch time and audience retention 

These are 2 key ranking factors. Watch time is the total number of hours (previously it was minutes) your audience has spent viewing your content as a whole, or a single video. On a basic level, this helps you determine which pieces of content your audience enjoys watching instead of clicking away.

Now, since the big algorithm overhaul of 2015, watch time has been one of the most important ranking factors. Why? Because it’s in YouTube’s best interest that people spend as much time with their eyes glued to their platform as possible. The more they stay, the more ads they can be served which, obviously, translates into higher income. So, what happens here is that the higher your watchtime, the more likely your videos are to rank higher in search results and appear in people’s feeds. 

YouTube introduced this system to give small creators a chance to compete with the old timers, whose content was pushed by the algorithm simply by virtue of having amassed a large following over the years. Whether or not this was a good decision is a debate for another time, but it is what it is.

Audience retention, or a video’s average percentage viewed, is simply the average percentage of a video your audience watches per view. This is another major ranking factor that you should definitely watch out for. 

Sure, at the end of the day, you can’t really influence how much of your video someone wants to watch, but there are things you can do in this sense – experimenting with the structure of your video or making shorter intros. Or you can do what people that are more knowledgeable about movies than me call reverse chronology  – aka starting your video with a snippet from later in the video. It builds expectation and it gives people something to work towards.

2. Traffic sources 

Find out where people are discovering your videos. Traffic sources is exactly what the name suggests – it reports how viewers are finding your content online. This metric offers valuable insight into how people are reaching your content, and you can build your YouTube strategy around this.

For instance, you can see if people are finding your content via YouTube search, so naturally, a good approach would be to optimize tags and descriptions. If they’re coming from Twitter or any other social platform, you can double down on promoting your content in those places.

Video creation best practices

One of the biggest hurdles newcomers face is the video creation process itself. The reality is that you’re working 10 to 20 hours on something that is consumed in mere minutes, and I’m the last to sugarcoat it. 

However, the more you work toward putting together a tight and consistent workflow, the more enjoyable the creation process gets. So here are a few tips that will help you get started.

1. The script is the soul of your video

For some videos – say, vlogs – you won’t even need a script to begin with. But here’s the thing – the more “freeform” the video’s structure is, the more planning it will need. I know that sounds like a paradox, but trust me when I say that not even the greatest orators humanity has seen were capable of holding an entirely coherent 3-hour long speech without at least having written down a couple of ideas prior to taking the stage. I’ll bet my entire monthly wage that even Cicero himself had his assistant carve a few bullet points into a stone slab before holding a speech (ok, I’m not).

Where was I? Oh right, scripts:

  • Break down your script into headings, just like an article. But don’t write it like an article – use short sentences and connector words to make the script flow more naturally.
  • Write down blockings and directions, as it will make the editing process easier. Plus, hunting through tens of hours of footage for that one perfect one-second clip can be frustrating.
  • Write as much as possible and then cut, cut, cut. Not every funny anecdote and tangent will be relevant to the video, and they can break the flow.

2. The structure is the backbone of your video

The video’s structure will be more or less dependent on your script. There’s not much to say here other than the fact that experimentation is key. But as a general rule, a video should have (ideally) the following structure:

  • Intro. This is where you introduce yourself, the channel, and quickly go through the main talking points. This is what is called “a hook”, but I personally don’t like the term because it implies that you have to “trick” your audience into believing the video is worth watching. But that’s just me.
  • The “body” of the video. Basically the video. A basic structure for this part would be problem -> solution -> proving that the solution works. Of course, this depends on the type of video you’re making. If you’re making a movie review, your video should follow the structure of a typical essay.
  • Conclusion. This is where you’ll summarize your talking points and tie a neat little bow on the video, followed by a CTA to like, subscribe, and comment.

3. The audio is the music to your users’ ears

Audio quality can make or break a channel. Many YouTube users are “passive viewers” in that very few of them will actually, actively watch videos – most likely, they’ll let them play in the background while folding laundry or working. 

Before you give up, don’t worry – you don’t need a $1000 studio microphone. Sure, it’s nice to have, but it’s not necessary. A basic $50 (or less) microphone with a pop-filter is more than enough, at least at this stage. 

As for the echo and other background noises, you can use Audacity to remove them. It’s free and it doesn’t require any fiddling. If that still isn’t enough, just throw a blanket on yourself while recording (I definitely did not do that).

4. Editing is the cherry on the cake 

When it comes to editing, I follow one simple principle: show and tell. Remember when I said that you should write down blockings and directions? This is the reason. The idea here is to back up everything you say visually. 

But hey, didn’t I just say that most people will listen to your video instead of watching it? Well, yes. Which is why people who do watch videos will feel all the more satisfied when they’ll see that you went the extra mile for them.

“Vlogs often take less time to edit than music videos, comedy sketches, or educational tutorials, for example. However, if there’s 14 hours of vlog footage to sift through, it’s not going to be a quick project. If there’s not a clear storyline in the vlog footage, it will also take longer to edit.

Good editors will piece together a story from the footage, but this requires time and creativity — not just to come up with a story, but often to come up with ways to manipulate the footage to fill gaps in the storyline.” says Sarah Ingle.

As for rhythm and flow, the general consensus is that clips should be no longer than 8 seconds before cutting. Again, this depends on the flow you are going for. Plus, it’s the kind of thing that requires a lot of practice and trial and error. 

 

YouTube marketing best practices – how to promote your YouTube channel and grow it

Now here comes the fun part: planning content and growing your channel. The bad news is that the “literature” in this field is as nebulous as one might expect. There is no tried and true way to grow your channel – what worked for one channel might prove disastrous for another. That’s why you’ll probably see a lot of fluff pieces regarding how to market YouTube videos with advice ranging from “generic” to outright bad. 

But if there’s one thing that all YouTubers agree on when it comes to channel growth, that would be the fact that consistency is key. For that, you’ll need to use YouTube marketing tools.

1. Plan and Schedule your content with Planable

…using Planable, of course! I know I made this joke thousands of times, but again, you’re on our turf – what did you expect? 

In case you’ve never heard of Planable, it is a social media collaboration platform that allows teams and clients to collaborate and share feedback on their social media content. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First thing first – you need consistent content that’s well planned out, reviewed, and scheduled. And guess what, Planable has you covered. 

How? In several ways, actually:

  • A shared workspace where teams and clients can create and leave feedback on content.
  • An intuitive, “what you see is what you get” interface that is easy to use and process.
  • Multiple view modes (grid, list, calendar, feed) that allow users to get a birds-eye view of their campaigns and view their content exactly as it would appear on people’s feeds. 
  • Multiple-approval workflows so that no piece of content escapes the confines of… you know. Virtual room?

How can you schedule Youtube videos with Planable?

1. Sign up to Planable. It’s simple, fast and free.

sign up planable

2. Configure your company and workflow.

3. Add your account. Click on “Add Pages,” go to YouTube and log in with your account.

What does all this have to do with YouTube? As of today, we have officially launched Planable’s YouTube integration. So now, you can schedule videos on YouTube with this solution.

Don’t believe me? Go try it out for yourself!

Make your YouTube adventure easier – with Planable

Scheduling YouTube videos natively can be tricky, especially if you’re the kind of content creator who does so in bulk. Don’t worry – Planable’s YouTube integration helps you streamline that whole process. But I guess you’re here for the specifics.

To adequately demonstrate just how much of the grunt work Planable will take off your back, let’s pretend you’re about to post a video, but for some reason you let me do it and take screenshots. Anyway: 

youtube marketing planable

This is what you’ll see after connecting your YouTube channel and choosing “feed view”. Looks awfully similar to your standard YouTube channel, right? Well, yeah, because that’s Planable’s MO – offering pixel perfect previews of your content before posting it. 

Now let’s post some videos. 

To get started, hit either “create your first post” or “Compose”…

youtube marketing planable

… and this bad boy will pop up. At this stage, you can do two things: write down a title for a video, and upload a video either from your device or from our sleek media library. For simplicity’s sake, let’s upload a video from the media library.

youtube marketing planable

This is where the magic happens. As you can see, I’ve taken the liberty to add a title, and spice things up with an emoji (that’s the video description, by the way).

Now that we’ve added a video, chose a title and wrote the description, it’s time to upload a thumbnail. To do that, simply hover your mouse over the video and click on “Edit video thumbnail”.

youtube marketing planable

To choose a thumbnail, simply click on “Add a custom thumbnail”.

youtube marketing planable

With that out of the way, let’s delve into the features that will be the true time-savers. And the ones that are necessary to make your video, you know, get traction on YouTube. 

Let’s click on “Advanced Settings” and see what happens.

youtube marketing planable

Welcome to the HQ of your YouTube empire. Let’s take a look at each of those features:

1. Category. Allows you to include your videos in the right category. As discussed previously, this step is very important, and when you’re uploading videos en masse, mistakes are bound to happen.

youtube marketing planable

2. Playlist – pretty self explanatory. It allows you to add videos to playlists. Again, this is the kind of thing that, when done wholesale, the potential for making mistakes is big.

planable youtube marketing playlist

 

3. Standard YouTube license & Made For Kids. The former is for choosing the licence (Standard YouTube license and Creative Commons) for your video. The latter is for marking whether the video is Made for Kids or not.

4. Tags. Now we’re getting to the fun stuff. Ask any YouTuber what part of their job they’d rather do without, and I guarantee most of them will say “Tags”. To add tags, simply click on its namesake button and start typing. Something like this:

planable youtube marketing tags

Now simply hit “schedule” and let Planable do the rest.

planable youtube marketing integration

 

After hitting “Schedule”, your precious video will pop up in Planable’s sleek calendar. Wait, something’s not right here. Give me a second…

planable youtube marketing schedule youtube videos

There we go. Much better. Almost forgot you can schedule multiple YouTube videos ahead of time with Planable. 

planable youtube marketing schedule youtube videos

Planable’s YouTube integration is now available to the public. Give it a spin and tell us what you think! It’s free, by the way.

2. Target communities relevant to your niche (but not in the way you’d think)

Targeting communities should be a vital part of your YouTube marketing strategy. 

However, it’s not as simple as just dumping your link wherever you feel like. Most communities are very promotion-adverse, and for good reason. It would be like going into a stranger’s house and putting your feet on their table.

Plus – and this is key – plugging your link might bring an influx of traffic, but all those views are for nothing if they translate into a 1:23 average watch time for a 20-minute video. 

So what can you do here? The best way to promote your videos in communities is to not promote them. If you join a community (even if it’s in the same niche) with the express purpose of plugging your videos, then you shouldn’t be doing it at all. 

Instead, try to become a part of these communities and then promote your videos there. People are more receptive to self-promotion if it comes from a creator that they know and have bonded with over time – aka members who are active in those communities and are not there just out of self-interest.

Network as much as possible with other creators

You can buy the best microphone; have great thumbnails; painstakingly SEO-optimize your videos. And even with all that work, your channel might not gain any momentum.

This is where YouTube collabs come to the rescue. YouTube collabs are an extremely effective channel-growth tactic because they can bring two relatively isolated audiences together. It can be as simple as a shoutout, a cameo, or an outright appearance. Whatever approach you choose, YouTube collabs are great for business and you should definitely take advantage of them.

YouTube marketing for various niches 

Over the last 10 years, YouTube has become a great tool for people from all walks of life to promote their projects and businesses. 

Whether you’re a striving artist, a small business owner, an aspiring writer or an artsy graphic designer, YouTube is a great platform to launch your career due to its reach and visual-centric design. Again, strategies may depend from field to field, so here are three broad examples:

1. YouTube marketing for real estate

The real estate industry was one of the first fields to jump on the YouTube bandwagon. And for good reason – after all, what better way to showcase luxurious condos than with, you know, those moving images we call videos? Blog posts? Don’t make me laugh. 

You can also add a YouTube QR code to fliers and print advertisements to give virtual tours. But apart from outright advertising, their services, real estate firms can do so much more with YouTube: educate consumers. A real estate-centric YouTube channel lends itself to quite a wide variety of content, from market updates, how-to videos, listing videos, neighborhood videos and so on and so forth.

Some of these videos don’t even have to expressly promote their business, as the simple act of just informing and educating consumers about the (most often) nebulous field of real estate can do wonders for their brand trustworthiness. For instance, a how-to video teaching soon-to-be first time homeowners how to secure a home loan or what red flags to look out for before buying a home. In conclusion, if you want to promote your real estate business, your YouTube content creation strategy should include a variety of types of content.

2. YouTube marketing for small businesses

Gone are the days when small businesses had to resort to neighborhood posters and word-of-mouth to advertise their shops. Now, they can harvest the power of social media – and especially YouTube – to advertise their services creating video ad campaigns

When it comes to YouTube marketing, small businesses should go for a twofold approach – sales-driven videos, and content-driven videos. The general consensus is that for every sales-driven video, you should have two content-driven videos. 

For example, if you own, say, a plumbing business, for every video promoting your services, you should have two content-driven videos. Preferably how-to videos teaching people how to repair their bathroom fixtures, and not the unfairness of Mario being the only fictional plumber dominating pop culture. Or you could also do that, but on a second channel, I don’t know.

 

3. YouTube marketing for musicians

Do you know how Lil Nas X became famous? SEO. And by being an outright marketing genius.

See, in the past, record labels served the roles of gatekeepers, in that record labels had more or less the final say in who was worthy of their far-reaching marketing machine and who was sent back to play dive bars.

Now, musicians have plenty of ways to promote their music. In fact, a lot of current bands that get a lot of radio play today (like Arctic Monkeys) got their first break through the internet. But that was the blog era – now, musicians have YouTube at their disposal. 

Again, there are multiple ways to go about this. Music is different from other types of content in the sense that you can’t just write one song in an afternoon and upload it in the same day – I mean, you can, but it will probably be bad. 

So the best approach here is to repurpose the music you do have. For one, you don’t need a sleekly filmed and produced music video for every song – posting an official audio version works just as well. Secondly, SEO optimizing videos is just as important for musicians, so targeting the appropriate keywords and optimizing video descriptions by adding lyrics and keywords is a great way to start.

Thirdly and lastly – it’s crucial to create content other than just music videos. Or music, really. Jam sessions, music lessons, step-by-step guides of how a certain piece of music was created, tour videos, snapshots of a regular day in your life as a musician – these are just a few content ideas that you can go for to raise awareness towards your music.

Conclusion

And that wraps up the guide on YouTube marketing. While YouTube influencers might make it seem flawless, YouTube is actually a lot of work. YouTube channels, and especially YouTube marketing efforts, have a lot of moving parts, so consistency and putting a lot of effort into creating a tight workflow are key to succeeding. 

Marco Giuliani

Marco Giuliani

Content marketer and aspiring YouTuber, in no particular order. Expertise in content writing, social media copywriting, and neo-noir graphic novels. Used to run a music webzine in the 2 seconds in the early 2010s when blogs were hot. I tweet very badly on Twitter.

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