YouTube Marketing – A Beginners Guide

Starting a successful YouTube channel can be both a daunting and tiresome task. Here are some of our top tips to market your channel and build new audiences.

In a socially competitive market where online platforms battle for contention, YouTube proves to be the clear winner for creators despite a surge in competition.

The rise of TikTok has given birth to a new format for new creators to follow, where videos are short and one viral video can determine a person’s popularity on that platform through a surge in views and followers. Despite this increase, YouTube maintains and illustrates its value with TikTok only paying £0.03 per thousand views as opposed to £3 per thousand views on YouTube.

These statistics indicate that YouTube ventures prove to be more profitable as viewers on the platform are more valuable due to a need for creators to put more time and effort into their videos through creativity and storytelling.

As a platform, YouTube is clearly the most profitable avenue to create and produce on, but how can you start a successful channel?

Starting a successful YouTube Channel

Finding a niche

When attracting new subscribers and viewers to your channel, it is important that they immediately understand what type of content your channel makes. This allows an audience to know exactly what to expect from you. Posting random topical videos does not serve as a strong basis for developing a consistent audience!

When finding a niche it is important to understand and research their popularity as some niches can be more profitable than others. Upon reviewing a range of profitable niches for 2021, Medium found that money-related content serves to be the most profitable, such as affiliate marketing, e-commerce and real estate. This is closely followed by gaming, fashion/beauty and cooking. These niches find success by selling a certain lifestyle to viewers that they can attain. From this opportunity is opened up to make passive income as playbooks and coaching can be advertised to achieve the same as the creator.

From an ad revenue standpoint, consistent niches are easier for advertisers to understand how to pay you, what category you belong to and what type of ads to put in your videos. With ad revenue being a key source of YouTube income, your niche must be appropriate in order for advertisers to want to be associated with your videos and for their ads to make sense. For example, making content promoting the use of drugs will not entice advertisers to be featured on your channel!

What if I can’t find a niche?

Can’t think of a niche just yet? That’s okay. Think about what you have to offer by the platform by thinking about who you want your target audience to be in order to cater content for them. A key example of this is that if you want to educate a young audience in some way, start thinking about what videos they would like to see.

Content based around motivation, life hacks, comedic skits and job tips would be ideal to attract young viewers who are struggling to adjust to a career. Catered topics will eventually help you find your niche so don’t worry!

Creating searchable content

Once your target audience and niche are pinned down you need to think about what they would be searching for to find your content. This can be achieved by a simple search on YouTube and Google within your niche to understand what type of headlines are used to draw viewers into their videos.

It is important to note that you should not copy content similar to your channel. The key is to understand what each channel does well in your niche and combine them together with your own touch to create the perfect video.

But wait. There’s one more key element to creating content. Consistent uploads are key but the type of videos you upload should be focused on attracting immediate and long-term growth to your channel. There are two types of YouTube videos you should be uploading every week. Topical and Evergreen.

Topical videos refer to making content on current trends or breaking news. These videos are best to do through researching current trends and what’s popular on YouTube. These videos can be making a popular recipe or trying out a certain trend. Note that these videos will only bring quick growth spikes to your channel as trends are constantly changing so you will need something else.

Evergreen videos refer to content that can be watched all year round e.g. a reaction video or playing a game. It is important to make evergreen videos for your niche so that an audience will become familiar with your content making your channel accumulate steady growth.

Top Tip: It is important to make both types of videos to ensure immediate and steady growth on your channel, resulting in revenue to accumulate throughout the month, instead of relying on topical videos for quick fame. Our suggestion is to post one topical video and two evergreen videos a week, this will help your channel gain traction whilst attracting viewers over time.

 Once you have a great video ready to upload, it is important to then optimise fully to maximise your channel's growth.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the quantity and quality of website traffic from search engines. Ultimately doing this ensures your YouTube videos will show up when searched for - crucial in gaining a following.

Specifically, keywords in your video titles, video descriptions and video tags will help the YouTube algorithm understand what type of content you make and push the video out to a new audience.

Let's play a game...

Below are two YouTube videos that are in the same niche. Which do you think is better optimised?

Video 1:

Video 2:

As seen, both videos seem enticing due to the colour choice chosen, but there are key differences as to why the first video was more successful (admittedly having been posted earlier).

1. Video 1 is clearly optimised better due to its use of keywords such as: Grow, Fast and Followers, which entice an audience to watch their video. This is key in order to ensure that the YouTube algorithm recognises what your video is about in order to push out your video to the right audience, if you fail to do so then your viewership will suffer!
2. Although both titles are good, Video 1 uses the same keywords to correspond with their title to ensure what the video is about. Colourful and engaging emojis are also used to encourage people to click on the video as audiences are more likely to watch videos that they find interesting and enticing.
3. Video 1 makes it clear to the audience on what platform is going to be talked about in the thumbnail. Although this is mentioned in the title of both videos it is important to note that YouTube will not display your full title so make it short and full of topical words. Video 2 makes it hard for the audience to understand what social media platform will be talked about as it does not display a logo. Remember people respond better to pictures than words!

It is also important to note that your video must be of the same topic and include answers and content from your video title and thumbnail otherwise this will heavily affect your watch time and overall channel engagement. People do not want to feel click baited or let down! Furthermore, adding captions to your videos contributes to your video ranking well through search and SEO. Overall keeping your videos and titles on topic will help push your videos in YouTube search.

The Future

There is no denying it, the market for YouTube has witnessed an astronomical growth powered by both rising audiences and advertisers. Although popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok seem great places to invest, YouTube remains the key platform for creator growth with a collective billion daily views on the platform.

Following the above steps to help build and monetise your channel, YouTube can help your content be found quickly and engaged with thoroughly. With consistency and patience, the right audience will find you!

If you’d like to discuss YouTube or any other digital marketing avenue, we at Key Business Marketing can help. Get in touch with us via the contact form below or call us on 02037 282 848.