How To Promote Your YouTube Channel?

Are you still having second thoughts about starting a YouTube channel or adding video marketing to your foray? To help steer you in the right direction, let us understand the rising popularity of YouTube, especially video content consumption. According to popular studies, YouTube is now bigger than all the other social media platforms. It has over 2 billion user logins each month and has its maximum user base in the US, where 73% of adults and 81% of those between 15 – 25 years of age use it. But the platform is not just limited to the US, as even in other countries, it has a considerable market share. In India, 93% of video watchers are watching YouTube.

And this is not just for a particular audience, as even businesses are now prioritizing their content to be more video-centric. YouTube can be a great extension to your digital marketing outreach and can be used for building a connection with your target audience by creating content that adds value. While advertisements and promotions are one way to go about it, creating video content that engages and educates the audience is the most popular. Not only does it create brand value, but the audience is more likely to trust your skills and business expertise.

So, if you are wondering how to promote your YouTube channel, here are some simple tricks to grow and optimize your presence on YouTube:

Step 1: Start With The Basics

As you can gauge from the high engagement, getting your target audience to view and click on your content is not easy. YouTube users are estimated to watch an average of one billion hours of video content every day, and about 500 hours of video content is uploaded every minute. To make sure you are optimized, start with the basics and scale up by doing the following:

Understand Your Audience And Create Videos That Add Value

For any social media initiative, the end result is good only if your blog posts or videos add value to the audience. So when you are creating a YouTube video strategy, look into the kind of audience you wish to tap into. It would help if you had segments like: 

• Demographics
• Target location
• Key challenges that your audience is facing
• Industry (if relevant)
• Keywords they are searching for

While you could go in-depth and create target personas for each of your user profiles, having a basic understanding of your audience is the essential first step for your YouTube video promotion. You can start with a digital marketing course to know more understanding of the target audience.

Complete Your YouTube Profile

Many YouTubers often focus too much on content creation and promotion, missing one of the most vital steps. Completing the YouTube profile is highly effective as it boosts your SEO and helps in YouTube promotion. To start off, make sure you fill out all the fields and make them attractive. Some tips for creating an awesome YouTube profile are:

• Optimizing YouTube channel description: Although CTAs to get new subscribers are great, many users will come to check out your profile before they start following you. Make sure your profile is attractive and relevant, while also including the right keywords to optimize for SEO and appeal to your target audience.
• Including all the contact details: If you are using YouTube to generate leads or gain engagement for your website, it is important to provide all the contact details. Include an email, website, and other contact details in the relevant fields.
• Using a theme and writing style: Similar to creating branding, make sure your YouTube profile stands out by leveraging a theme and writing style that showcases your identity or brand (you can create a brand style guide for this). Use profile picture, PowerPoint backgrounds, and cover that is visually appealing. It should be specifically designed for YouTube, and leverage the options like color palette, and layouts to your benefit.

Create A Schedule And Regularly Publish Content

Once you begin publishing content, it is ideally suggested that you create a timeline. This way, your audience knows when you post videos, and you have a schedule as well. According to research, Sunday is the best time to post videos, between 8 am to 5 pm. However, it would be best if you also looked at your metrics and based this on your target audience’s location. 

Start Understanding The Basics Of Video Editing And Optimization

If you truly want to know how to promote your Youtube channel, creating professional-quality videos is highly recommended. Your YouTube videos will get noticed only if it is highly engaging and presented in a way that it appeals to the target audience. While it can be overwhelming, begin by:

• Using a flip screen camera or smartphone to shoot your videos
• Understand how lighting, image composition, and other aspects of photography play a key part in your video creation
• Creating a script and using it for each video to make it sound authoritative but also natural
• Editing the unwanted part and keeping only the vital elements. Again, make this natural and do not make cuts that make the audience feel disconnected

There are several tools online, including YouTube video editors, to help you create professional-looking videos that enhance quality, add text, and background music, and do a lot more to develop highly-optimized video content. Here you can also find some video editing effects.

Step 2: Publish & Optimize Your YouTube Videos

Over time, your videos and YouTube presence will only get better. Do not hurry to do it all in one go; start small but do not forget the vital elements to optimize and grow. Here are a few must-do steps that will teach you how to grow your YouTube channel:

Optimize Your SEO

Video marketing is growing popular, and Google has taken notice of this too. So videos on YouTube are prioritized when searching for any term. And what’s great is that the audience is looking for it too, as proven by the fact that YouTube was the second most popular search term in 2018. So when adding video descriptions, do focus on using the right keywords. 

As a simple SEO guide for YouTube, start by: 

• Identifying the best keywords for your videos using Google Ad Keyword Planner or other SEO tools
• Look at competitor videos to see how they are promoting their channels. Which are the most used keywords that they use?
• Rank each keyword using the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.
• Make sure you are including these where relevant.
• Use popular search terms to help define what your video is about. For e.g., if your videos talk about solving a particular problem, consider using ‘How To’, ‘Guide’, or ‘Tutorial’ to get a higher ranking.
• Search, test, and optimize. Do this on your own to see if your videos show up when you use the particular keyword and keep testing to get the best results.

Use Concise But Engaging Titles 

The best way to know how to promote your YouTube channel is to think like your audience. Do a simple test to try this out. Search for a particular keyword and identify which links you are clicking out of the many options. Understand what made you do it and write it down. You’ll quickly notice that the title and the keywords used in it had a huge role to play.

A strong title can help you grab attention and get a higher clickthrough rate. Focus on creating titles optimized for SEO (your keyword research is essential here) and try to capture a particular emotion, question, or impactful terminology. Also, make sure you comply with YouTube guidelines, as titles above 60 characters may get cut off.

Customize Your Thumbnails To Be Eye-Catching 

The second element that stands out most along with your title is the thumbnail. Instead of relying on a screen grab from your video, we suggest creating a custom thumbnail that highlights what your video is about. You can use online image creation tools to help you out here and have thumbnails that include: 

1. A caption (make sure this is not the same as your title or description)
2. Eye-catching image or a collage

The new YouTube update also auto-plays your video without the audio if the user hovers over it. So, in addition to the thumbnail, create a great intro for all your videos. You can use the YouTube Intro Maker here to create amazing thumbnails and add a unique intro to your video.

Use Powerful Descriptions To Add Value To Your Video 

Wondering how your target audience will find you? While getting more subscribers is the best option to ensure your audience never misses out on your videos, the YouTube algorithm is also an important determinant. Over 70% of what YouTube users see is determined by the recommendation algorithm. If your content is not optimized correctly, your video may never show up in your target audience’s recommendations. 

The best way to do this is by having a powerful description that is appealing to the users and includes the right keywords that will get noticed by the algorithm. But make sure you do not go overboard with this or have too many irrelevant keywords as YouTube’s metadata guidelines focus on two key aspects:

1. Honesty
2. Quality over quantity

Include tags and categories in your tags section, and for the description, focus on content that appeals to the user. Youtube users are more likely to click on thumbnails that appeal to them, and if they are blurry, out of focus, or not visually appealing, you are risking lower clickthrough rates.

To help you write great descriptions, follow: 

• The 5000-character limit, but also do not write too much content. Keep it concise and meaningful.
• Add relevant content like time stamps if your video is broken up into several topics, relevant playlists, and disclaimers (copyright information if that is relevant)
• If you are mentioning any tools or products, having a link in the description is highly recommended. This helps your audience to easily access them while you can use affiliate marketing to your advantage if promoting third-party products.

Do you know? you can utilize modern AI tools like Jasper to create compelling Youtube titles, scripts, and descriptions.

Add Call To Action For Your Videos

Another element that plays a vital role in optimizing your video is a call to action (CTA). With decreased attention spans, an audience that has watched your video till the end is likely the one you should be focusing on the most. So, use CTAs as a means to further engage with prospects.

The CTA helps the viewer to know more and further engage with your content. If you have a video series, think about including them in the CTA at the end of your video or take them to your website if it is relevant. A professional-looking CTA can help your audience stay engaged and suggest the next step for them, which could even be something simple like liking, subscribing, or sharing your video.

Step 3: Build Engagement & Go Beyond

Now that you have started publishing your content, wondering how to get more views on YouTube? To promote YouTube videos and advertise on YouTube channels, you need to make sure you don’t just invest in ads and promotions, but also make sure you are making the right moves. From content quality to building the right engagement, it all plays a key role in your YouTube Promotion. Here are a few steps to increase your reach and grow your channel:

Cross-Promote Your Videos

Are your videos set on a particular theme or part of a series of videos? As marketing experts will recommend, your video length plays a role in the clickthrough rate, as the audience span decreases. The best way to promote your content is to break it up into shorter videos, ideally around 4-minutes long. Then, create playlists on your channel to be promoted through your description or CTA.

You can also provide video thumbnails at the end of the video which appeals to the audience, and they can click on the next video on the list.

Engage With Your Fans And Host Contests Or Giveaways

If you want to know additional ways how to promote your YouTube channel, start by understanding and engaging your audience. If your audience is leaving comments, make sure you acknowledge and respond to them. And don’t just stop there, think of considering what they want. 

Ask questions during your video to help understand audience sentiments and work on them. The audience will love it if you take recommendations, and acknowledge them in your videos. And what’s more, you can use promotions or giveaways to further boost engagement and delight your audience. 

While running contests, be careful as a lot of audiences hate contests that are only using deceiving means to generate likes and higher subscriptions. Instead, make sure the content generates excitement and the giveaway is only an additional boost, not the main reason for participation. 

Live Streaming Is The New Biggie

Events, webinars, product launches, or interviews/panel discussions are huge on YouTube, but going live is what gives them the much-needed boost. The live event generally gets much higher views than a normal video and is a great way to connect with your target audience in a live environment. There are plenty of tips and tricks for streaming that would help to engage the audience and provide them with a great stream. You can even take Q&As or make them interactive to make it all the more exciting.

For online events, make sure you are:

1. Promoting the live event on all your platforms.
2. Give enough time for your audience to manage their schedule. Don’t just abruptly announce a live event.
3. Providing adequate information for the event. We suggest promoting it through your own videos to generate excitement gradually.

Promote On All Your Social Channels And Website

While you are discovering various ways how to promote your YouTube channel, are your followers on other platforms or users landing on your website aware of your YouTube channel? If not, you are missing out on the best promotion option which is completely under your control. You can promote your YouTube channel very subtly by:

1. Adding a link in your email signature and including YouTube video links in your email campaigns to better explain a particular product or service
2. Promoting YouTube videos on social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or other platforms
3. Embed videos on your website wherever relevant, as this helps boost your web page’s SEO ranking and promotes your YouTube video too.

A post on the social media platform means mass exposure. You don’t want to post the wrong content there. At times you might need the opinion from a different perspective before making the final post on any social media platform. Share even the huge HD files with anyone using tools like MASV before your work touches the mass.

Collaborate With Other Brands And Influencers

Every other channel on YouTube is not your competition, even if you are targetting the same audience group. YouTube is full of influencers and experts who are using the channel to promote their expertise, and you can collaborate with them to create effective online engagement. YouTube collaborations help build credibility as it gets noticed by the users who are subscribed to the other accounts you work with. And the best part is that these new viewers will discover and subscribe to your channel too.

So work on collaborations by reaching out to influencers and brands who have similar goals. However, make sure you do this in a way that is mutually beneficial and discuss all the terms and conditions beforehand. 

Explore A YouTube Ad Campaign To Boost Your Presence

Once you have a strong presence and your content-generating organic engagement, it is time to explore the YouTube ad campaign. YouTube ad campaigns have their own set of rules and a step-by-step to help you figure out how to promote your YouTube channel using it. It is highly effective as YouTube will showcase its ads only to the particular demographic or audience that fits your target behavior, patterns, or description. 

So make sure you give it a thorough thought and leverage YouTube ads to your advantage. You can pick from a variety of options like: 

• Display Ads: Showcased on the righthand sidebar for desktop users
• Skippable / Non-skippable Ads: The ads that are shown before a YouTube video plays
• Overlays: These semi-transparent ads are displayed at the bottom of a video for desktop users
• Sponsored cards: These cards are displayed to your target group within the YouTube video, and are clickable

And while you are promoting your videos, do not forget to also promote your channel, as this will help you get a higher ranking. 

The Bottom Line 

Youtube video marketing is a great way to enhance your online presence and engage with your target audience to be more effective and efficient. Brands should focus on creating value and building a long-term impression, rather than being too sales-oriented. So use these tips to your advantage and if you have more to add to our guide on how to promote your YouTube channel, do let us know in the comments below!