How To Get Started On Your Youtube Marketing For 2023

Are you looking to start your own YouTube channel to increase your brand’s popularity with your target audiences?

Well, your line of thinking isn’t wrong. You’re on the right train of thought, in fact. Learning how to get started on your YouTube marketing is important for your business to earn some notoriety. Not only are videos capable of holding your audience’s attention for longer, YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world.

You just have one thing to consider though…

And that’s the fact that there are more than 50 million content creators on YouTube. They also constantly churn out scheduled content.

Your challenge lies there…

How do you attract a considerable fraction of YouTube’s 1.9 billion monthly active users?

While you’re mulling over that thought, here’s another challenge waiting in your path.

How do you effectively reach and engage your core audience? Keep in mind that people on YouTube don’t take too kindly to being served purely promotional content. They didn’t come to the platform to suffer through six to thirty-second ads before a video only to wind up watching another advertising video (your content).

Fortunately for you, you’re not alone in trying to figure out how to get started on your YouTube marketing. Every channel that starts from scratch is going through the same predicaments and challenges as you (with only slight differences in between).

The very idea of grabbing your target audience’s attention and managing to hold it for a long period of time is quite intimidating — especially when you pile on the thought of your competition at the very top. But as it is with all things, every challenge has a practical solution. And it’s perfectly doable.

Understanding Your Audience

Every marketing guide always begins with getting to know your audience. And rightly so…

Upon creating your brand account on YouTube, you are given access to quantitative insights on your channel and how your audience is behaving. This includes your average watch time, your watchers sorted by gender and country demographic, your view counts, the revenues you will eventually generate, and the rate of interaction going on across your videos.

Having a general idea of who your target audience is on YouTube is one thing. It’s another to know which country most of them generally come from.

•When are your videos being frequently viewed?
•Where’s your largest number of audience located?
•How old are your viewers?
•What gender does your viewer commonly identify as?

Tracking these types of analytics will help you adjust your strategy where you have had shortcomings and wrong presumptions before. And as a surprise, you may even find that your content is resonating with other types of audiences.

But what about qualitative data?You gather that valuable bit of information by reading through the comments section — especially if one of your videos is starting to gain a lot of attention. In reading your audience’s feedback, you can uncover vital information that will help you develop your YouTube channel for the better.

Take Notes From Your Favorite Youtubers

Besides experience being the best teacher, where else do you usually go to learn new things?

Why, from people who are notably experts at a particular thing, of course…

And who better to learn about marketing on YouTube than from the people who literally have YouTube as their main source of livelihood. There’s no doubt about your favorite YouTube influencers being great at what they do.

So, the next time you’re watching your favorite YouTubers, ask yourself what keeps you coming back for more of their content? Observe how they interact with their audience through the camera. Ask yourself what you like most about their channel, and about their personality — in general.

In paying attention to them, you can find out a bit of what they do that earns them their audience engagement. As you observe them, you’ll see why they get the views that they do and how they drive the numbers in their subscriber count.

Even if they’re not YouTubers from your specific niche, it’s still perfectly possible to take notes on their strategies that attract the engagement and the views.

But as valuable as input from other people are, it’s also important to note that you must eventually cultivate and develop your own trademark style as you go along.

Check Out Your Competition

Everyone wants to get ahead. Only people who refuse to develop and improve would choose to stay behind. But to pull ahead of other businesses in your niche around YouTube, some competitive analysis is absolutely necessary. Luckily for you, however, competitor information on YouTube can easily be accessed by looking at their respective channels.

Do your competitive analysis as you would do your own audience research. Take note of which of their videos get the least or the most views. You can watch some of these videos to see what kind of content gets your target audience going (and what doesn’t).

Take the extra mile and read some of the comments on competitors’ videos too. You never know, but maybe one of your target audience’s mentioned you somewhere there.

Creating Your Video

The main point of creating a YouTube channel aside from increasing your brand awareness is to, of course, create videos. Learning how to get started on your YouTube marketing won’t be complete without producing your own original content.

Creating videos that will have your target audience keep coming back for more is important if you want to keep up on the continuous engagement. Unfortunately, going viral isn’t always an option for you, but you can make the most of what you have to get the best results possible.

Deciding on video length

There is no strict formula to determining how long your videos should be to attract viewers and get them to come back for more. Each channel’s situation varies greatly. What works for others might not work for you.

Nevertheless, deciding on the length of your video — especially when you’re starting out is needed.

YouTube may be home to some of the most detailed and in-depth videos out there, certified studies have determined that most of the videos optimized for less than 5 minutes are the most successful.

For creators who are new to the platform and are in the stages of experimentation for what works and what doesn’t, the jackpot length is 5 minutes or less (Comscore).

Later, as time passes and you acquire more followers, you can freely experiment with the length of your videos. See which type attracts your audience the most.

But for now, keep it simple and short. Add a healthy dose of information and entertainment, and you just might have the ideal recipe.

Livestream once in a while

Take a moment to consider video types like Facebook Live and Instagram Live. There’s also Twitch’s increasing popularity. We’re hinting at the significance of live video content (not just prerecorded ones).

Just as produced and planned videos have an effect on your chosen audience, live videos have a different appeal that’s just as attractive.

Live videos provide the essence of events happening in real time. It gives your target audience the chance to interact with you right as the moments happen. It’s like virtually bringing them with you wherever you are.

In addition, your viewers can even feel like you’re speaking directly with them. And in typical human nature fashion, of course interested people will chime in on the events that are happening.

There is a strong appeal in the added personalization that exists in live streaming. As a result, viewers are more compelled to stick around longer and engage far more than they should, too.

Livestream once in a while

Recent researches point to your target audience having an attention span of 8 seconds — shorter than a goldfish. And the only way to beat this notoriously shortened attention span is to understand your audience at a level that lets you produce interesting content in the first few seconds (preferably in less than 5 — to be real).

In fact, grabbing your audience’s attention is so important, YouTube itself has created a whole tutorial video all about it.

A quick rundown of the tips included in the video include:

● Opening your videos with teasers to encourage your audience’s curiosity.
● Appeal to your audience with your own trademark opening theme.
● Avoid dallying and engage people immediately with a thought-provoking question, or spouting what your video’s about immediately.
● Give people a quick rundown of what your video will tackle.

Invest in the right equipment

Video creation nowadays is as easy as fishing out your smartphone and start filming immediately. And while no one will deny our smartphones’ excellent video capturing qualities, there is still a need for you to invest in video production equipment other than your smartphone’s camera. It’s just not enough if you want to produce the best videos.

For starters, you need good audio recording equipment. Don’t simply rely on the built-in microphone in your camera or your smartphone. Videos that aren’t ‘a day in my life’ vlogs are going to need some excellent noise-cancelling cameras. Your audience needs to hear you loud and clear.

Second, you would also like a high-quality editing software. Simply speaking, linear editing isn’t going to work all that well for your YouTube videos. You need editing software capable of polishing sound quality, imposing your figure on a green screen, or maybe even a multi-layer layout. There’s so much to do in a high-quality editing software.

But sound and editing quality is just the beginning. And as you go along learning how to get started on your YouTube marketing, you’ll discover brilliant finds along the way.

Follow YouTube’s specifications

To get the most out of the beauty of YouTube video quality, start your marketing by tailoring your videos with the platform’s specifications.

● File formats: Either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4; but the latter is preferable
● Video resolution: HD where possible. 426×240 (240p), 640×360 (360p), 854×480 (480p), 1280×720 (720p), 1920×1080 (1080p), 2560×1440 (1440p), and 3840×2160 (2160p).
● Aspect ratio: 16:9 and 4:3
● Audio bitrates: 128 kbps or better
● Audio codec: AAC, MPEG Layer II, or Dolby AC-3
● Framerate: Native frame rates of videos are fine. Typically around 24, 25, 30, or sometimes 60 fps — if capable.
● File size: 128 GB max
● Video length: 12 hours max.

Implement YouTube SEO

Creating high-quality video content is useless if people are incapable of finding them. You need to do more than produce great videos. You need to prep them for YouTube search, as well.

There are some creators out there who never profess to be YouTube stars, but credit the success of their YouTube videos (that get 50,000 views or more) to the value of SEO. Keywords play a vital role here, and how you use them contributes success to your YouTube channel.

Research using YouTube’s autocomplete function

Any seasoned digital marketing practitioner knows how to do their keyword research, and where to get them quickly. Optimizing for YouTube and finding the right keywords shouldn’t be too tricky — or challenging.

The best keywords for YouTube videos consist of specific and long-tail keyphrases. And they show up in both YouTube and Google autocomplete. That way your opportunities for ranking increase in both places. You also get to generate more traffic. It’s a win-win.

Create titles with the right keyphrase included

Keep in mind that great titles include two things: a crafty and catchy headline and your main keyphrase.

Google displays the first 50 or 60 so characters in search results. Don’t stray any further from that range. And if you want to be extra smart in appearing on Google’s search results, you can add the word ‘video’ to the beginning of your title. People type in the word ‘video’ when they’re looking for videos on Google.

In addition, try to avoid awful clickbaiting as much as possible. Or if you do decide to make use of clickbait, still remember to exceed people’s expectations in terms of valuable content.

Write descriptions with keywords, and include relevant links

Include every piece of relevant information in your video’s description box…

This includes a brief description about your video with the keywords in it. Experts also advise the use of timestamps on your description, so viewers can jump to sections of your video that they’re most eager to see. (Not everybody has the time to sit through the whole thing, although it’s every video maker’s dream).

And when it comes to adding the links, make sure to cite your external references, or the sources of any stock videos you put into the mix.

Proper video tagging

Don’t make the mistake of overlooking the tags.

Yes, YouTube considers user engagement. But implementing the use of tags gets your video a good chance of ranking on universal results — not just local ones.

Believe it or not, there is a scientific approach to grouping YouTube tags. It’s a detailed study, but they are classified as follows:

• Generic tag and video content relation: A general tag of sorts. There is no subject-specific knowledge needed to make a proper distinction. (e.g. a video about growing bamboo trees tagged as just ‘bamboo’ or ‘tree’.

•Specific tag and video content relation: The tag identifies what the video is about. Existing knowledge or familiarity with the subject is necessary to make the connection. (Think proper nouns; names, events, locations, specific venues).

• Relevant tags that cater to a minority: These tags are geared towards a specific group of people. They are refined tags (e.g. an episode number of a series of YouTube videos), or self-referencing tags (e.g. my bamboo tree).

• Irrelevant tags: These may just be attention-grabbing tags or misspelled words. Sometimes, they get thrown in unknowingly.

There is no restriction to the number of tags that you can include, but it is important to include many relevant ones. They are crucial for your rankings. Focus on the process of implementing “educated” tagging.

You do this by:

● Making use of YouTube’s autocomplete function
● Including your brand-specific tags

Customizing your thumbnails

It’s easy to upload a video and choose the most appropriate freeze-frame that YouTube picks out for you. But if you want true success in getting started with your YouTube marketing, experts strongly recommend creating your own custom thumbnails.

Give your viewers a bigger reason to watch your content.

Ask for engagement

“Ask and you shall receive.”

It works in YouTube marketing too. As your video comes to a close, or before it even starts, let your viewers know what you want them to do. And along with asking them for a subscription, a like, or a comment — even a share, pair your requests with a solemn and honest promise to consistently provide them with “videos like this.”

Even as you watch your favorite YouTubers, how often do you hear them say things like:

● “Subscribe to the channel, if you haven’t already, for more content just like this.”
● “Hit that like button, subscribe, and tell me your thoughts in the comments section.”
● “Share this video with your friends so they know, and I’ll see you guys in the next video.”
● “Check out all the links I mentioned in the description below.”
● “Tell me your guys’ thoughts on etc etc.”

The reason behind this is to let your viewers know that you care about their opinions, and that you’re just another person in the sea of human beings. You want conversation and sharing; not just popularity among your target audience.

Schedule Your Videos And Be Consistent

Upon your creation of well-optimized videos, it would be the perfect time to begin rotating them…

Think about it like this.

YouTube, for its 1.9 billion monthly active users, is treated as a giant television network. It’s not far-fetched to say that it even has surpassed TV’s popularity among this generation. Many of your subscribers treat your YouTube channel exactly like a television channel. Our point? Run it like one!

Schedule your programs. A perfect example is how some YouTubers segment the content they produce five days of the week. Monday is storytelling time. Tuesdays are DIY days. Wednesday involves them collaborating with other YouTubers. Thursday is for weird facts. Fridays are dedicated to mukbangs.

And the sweet spot you should hit other than scheduled content is committing to fulfill that schedule. Consistency is the key to encourage your viewers’ trust.

Abide by the rule of not making promises you can’t fulfill…

If you know you can’t keep up with a daily upload schedule, you can always produce videos once or twice a week. And let your viewers know through consistency is that there are two days of the week where they should expect your videos to come out.

YouTube Channel Optimization

Let’s get one thing straight here…

There’s YouTube video optimization, and there’s YouTube channel optimization.

A viewer’s consistent experience across your channel may help you get more views, more attention, and more subscribers — in the long run.

It goes without saying that people aren’t very appreciative of incomplete YouTube profile information. A blank space for your channel banner won’t win you any favors either. And an empty profile photo is not going to get you the YouTube marketing success you dream.

Sort your videos into organized playlists

It’s pesky when you have to search through a YouTube channel’s video section for a set of videos you’re looking to watch. If you can feel annoyed at disorganized channels, then rest assured that your target audience won’t appreciate a cluttered channel either.

You can avoid that issue by organizing your videos into playlists. Save your viewers from the trouble of loading older video content just to find what they’re looking for. At some point, when they get tired of searching, they may just give up and move on.

Complete your YouTube profile

In addition to organized videos, another easy place to start with your channel optimization is your profile. Fill out all of the relevant details which includes:

● Having a keyword rich About section
● A customized channel banner image (2MB max; 2560×1440 px), and a profile photo
● Location and contact information (for confirming legitimacy)
● Links to your official website as well as your social media profiles.

Don’t overlook the featured channels list too. This is meant for giving your subscribers easy access to other YouTube creators that have similar content as yours.

Although it may seem like free advertising for your competitors, keep in mind that YouTube is a community. And networking with different channels can open up new doors of friendship opportunities for you.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, but when you form genuine relationships with other creators, you can look at the strong possibility of a collaboration video happening very soon.

Doing Collaborations

When people talk about doing collaborations, you have two general options: do it with people in a similar niche or by reaching out to micro influencers.

The former gives you the opportunity to form friendships with other creators who have similar interests. Meaningful conversations and insights can come out of these collaborations; perhaps even brand new ideas for business and other whatnot.

On the other hand, success in doing the latter will also help you form a genuine relationship while marketing to another huge set of target audiences. Plus, when you do influencer marketing right, you may even see a considerable boost in your sales and ROI. And moreover, in a partnership like this, it’s more beneficial to hand over the reins to your chosen influencer.

Let them talk about your brand, and give honest feedback…

Everybody wins anyhow.

Track Your Progress & Adapt Accordingly

As your channel thrives and as you consistently and actively build it up, you also have to monitor its progress regularly. Don’t just lean back on your chair, fold your arms across your chest, and declare your work done when you find yourself earning a couple thousand views and a decent amount of subscribers.

There’s always room for improvement…

In fact, when you’re at the point of your own personal YouTube fame, that’s where the tougher challenges start to come in.

Now, you have to constantly produce content that will keep your followers interested. You also have to keep raising the bar when we talk about production quality.

This need requires consistent monitoring, and a constant process of understanding your audience again and again.

As you check back with your YouTube Analytics for every new video you post, check on:

● Significant changes in your subscriber count, video views, as well as likes and dislikes
● The majority of your viewers’ feedback
● New and changing audiences
● Your source of video traffic and video playback
● The kinds of devices being used to view your content

In doing this, you will find plenty of ideas and opportunities to keep you churning more valuable video content.

Track Your Progress & Adapt Accordingly

These years mark the constant success of video content leading the way in the content marketing landscape. And as of the moment, YouTube remains as the leading platform for sharing all manner of video content; from vlogs to music videos to educational ones or even short films. The fact that it’s a free platform for content creation doesn’t hurt either.

In fact, these reasons are why its billions of users continue to patronize it.

Moreover, learning how to get started on your YouTube marketing lets you cater to an audience that hails from every corner of the globe.

If that’s not enough reason to jump in on the internet’s largest bandwagon, then I don’t know what is.

It’s true that competition is fierce in the area of content creation, but that shouldn’t stop you from reaching out and snatching your full potential. In fact, you’re reading this blog because that’s exactly what you want to do (learning how to get started on your YouTube marketing, that is).

So, to acquire a successful YouTube marketing in the future, you need to:

● Understand your audience wholly
● Learn from your favorite YouTubers
● Do some competitor espionage
● Create videos that fit your audience’s preferences
● Do your fair share of YouTube SEO
● Have a consistent uploading schedule to build trust
● Optimize your YouTube channel
● Be open to having collaborations with other creators and influencers
● Track your progress regularly

YouTube is only set to get bigger. It’s never too late. Start your video creation and grow your own community for sharing and learning.

Al Gomez is a digital marketing consultant. He is the President of Dlinkers, and he specializes in SEO, PPC & Web Development since 2008. Al has over 10 years’ client Digital Marketing experience and has helped businesses such as Dr. Berg, Patexia, Panel Wall Art, the Ritz Carlton, and countless others use the web to drive online visibility and generate leads. He has even started, developed, and managed an ecommerce website — Unlideals.com and an SEO website, alseoperth.com.

Al Gomez