A good and successful marketing plan for YouTube business beginners.
Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular website in the world? Not just that, but it’s also the second most popular search engine – topped only by Google. This means that the platform presents a huge potential for reach for your business. So by following a strict and well-made marketing plan, you can take advantage of this powerful platform and build your brand.
Everybody is aware of Youtube these days, with a whopping 2.3 Billion people users worldwide as of 2021. This staggering number indicates its internationally growing popularity, but why is this the case? It is easy to use and has high reach. Consider how often you see videos pop up in your Timeline on Facebook, or in your Twitter feed. Whether it’s endless beauty tutorials, product reviews, gaming channels, unboxing videos, talk show segments, artist performances or even random cat videos— YouTube has it all. It’s one of the best ways to communicate to a wide audience, whether you’re promoting programs, products, services, a brand, or educational information, and so on, YouTube is your medium!
The following will be a guide on how to thoroughly use and maximize the efficiency of your channel on YouTube by following a marketing plan. It is not difficult and it may take time, but it is worth it for the marketing opportunities it provides. Without further ado, let’s get started!
1- Needless to Say, Create a YouTube Business Account
There are two ways to go about doing this:
1- First option, you can create a YouTube channel with your regular Google account, but if you do, only you can access it and the account will be under your name and depending on your settings, may connect viewers to your personal email address.
Not everyone wants to do that, so there is another option.
2- Creating a Brand account . This will allow multiple authorized users to log in simultaneously. This is a good option to keep available as your business grows. With a Brand Account, you can also open and manage multiple YouTube channels, as well, depending on your needs.
However, it is also important to keep in mind some technical things like setting up a proper channel name, a proper and informative description, icon (can be your company logo), URL, links to all your other social media accounts. The more professional and well made it is, the more credibility it gives you and your brand. Video descriptions are especially important since search engines look at your description when determining how to rank your profile, so including the relevant keywords in the description can make a big difference. Skip to Step number for that.
2- Set Specific Goals & Objectives
The first actual part of the marketing plan before you hastily start uploading, take a moment to think about what you exactly want to achieve and over what period of time.
1- Are you looking for clicks and traffic? If so, how many are you looking for and over how many months? 500 or 1,000 views as a start?
2- Are you more focused on a high subscriber number? If so, how many would you set as a start? 50 or 100? Some channels don’t even reach 100 even after months and maybe years.
Use the SMART model to help you put together good objectives. This stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help make sure that your objectives are specific, have a deadline, and are do-able.It is important to stay positive and not give up even if you don’t reach the goals set. There are always changes that you can make.
3- Get You Some Inspiration!
Image Pinterest
If you are new to YouTube, which if you are checking this guide then you definitely are, then you might not have it all figured out yet or have the ultimate understanding of creating great, attractive and engaging content. This is where you might want to check out other channels of the same concept as yours, or in other words, your competition!
Take note of the techniques and formats that hold your attention. What keeps you coming back to these channels? How do the most popular channels drive views, subscriptions, and engagement? What is your competition doing that you can implement in your videos and content? What are they investing in?
You may even want to check out other channels that have nothing to do with your business or industry. They can still be a source of information and development. Are all of their videos high-production, or are they shot more casually? How long are they usually? Are there special effects or text overlays?
There are no rules, so do not stress!
You may want to implement your own ideas that you’ve come up with and experiment. It may work or it may not, but it’s all about experimenting and finding out your channel’s, brand’s, tone of voice.
4- Create a Standout Thumbnail & Title
Even before titles, thumbnails are the first thing people see. Ninety percent of the best performing videos on YouTube have one thing in common when it comes to thumbnails: They’re custom. Another advantage is that you can ensure the image and title work in tandem. If your video is a thumbnail or how-to, show the end result or a before and after thumbnail. This will immediately let people know if it’s what they’re looking for or not, if how the final result is made is worth watching or not.
It goes without saying, but you definitely want to be careful choosing clickbait as your title or thumbnail. What is a clickbait? It is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content. It is misleading since often the information or thumbnail provided is used out of context or not even included or talked about.
On YouTube, it is unfortunately very popular in order to get views. However, the channels can get reported, after that YouTube will take action if it decides your claim is correct. Here are a few examples of clickbait you want to avoid.
How to create a good thumbnail? There are a few options.
1- Canva: the beloved graphic design platform, which is free to use and offers paid subscriptions like Canva Pro. You can create attractive video thumbnails from scratch or by tweaking various already made designs. There are other similar platforms such as pixelied.
2- Visme: which is also a perfect helper for making a beautiful YouTube graphic thumbnail. It is easy-to-customize and offers you lots of templates to choose from. Moreover, you can add your own visuals and fonts and export your thumbnail as a JPEG or PNG image.
3- BeeCut: This is one of the most popular video makers that you may use. It includes several editing functions to use such as cropping, trimming, zooming, add filters, text, and a lot more. Aside from that, this video editor can be used on your iOS devices. Follow this step by step guide to know more.
5- Upload Consistently & Commit
It is important to upload on a schedule. While you’re setting up a YouTube marketing strategy for your business, consider how often you can realistically commit to posting new content and make sure you can stick to it. Once you determine how often you can post, you should also consider when you release your videos. Follow the schedule in the image above provided by Oberlo to maximize the number of views and enhance your chances.
Make sure to also promote new videos to your audience on other social media platforms, so that even those who haven’t subscribed to the channel can still get the word.
6- SEO for YouTube
As briefly mentioned before, writing video descriptions is extremely important. Providing the right information in your video’s description ensures that it is properly indexed by YouTube and appears when people are searching for videos like yours. Here is a detailed guide.
1- Do some keyword research: you can use AdWords or our Free Keyword Tool to do some quick keyword research and pinpoint some good terms people are searching for. Include the most important information and keywords in the beginning of your title.
2- Meta tags: which are another way to get your keywords into your video, and make it more searchable. You would want to search for popular videos in your industry and see what meta tags they use. Do not overdo it with the keywords, just focus on the words that are most critical.
3- Dedicate the first few lines of your description to provide a brief summary of your video topic and then use the relevant keywords. Though they need to be used coherently and in a natural way so as not to sound spammy.
4- YouTube shows about 300 characters, which make up about 3 lines. After that comes the “Show more” button in descriptions to view the full written text. This is where you should add more context for your video. For example, if you feature several products or other services, courses, etc, provide links to them.
5- You may even want to consider including a video transcript, depending on the length of the video. Video transcripts can greatly improve your SEO because your video is usually full of keywords.
5- Add links to your website and social channels as well. A very useful tip is to create a “table of contents” with timestamps, if your video is long, so viewers can jump to sections and not fast forward aimlessly.
6- Add Captions to your videos. This will allow your videos to reach non-native speakers, people with hearing impairments, etc. YouTube offers automatic captions, but the captions are not reliable most of the time, however, you can still use them and edit afterwards. It’s certain that you’ll find errors.
7- Clickable CTA
Cards, end screens, and watermarks are clickable CTAs you can add to your YouTube videos. These elements help your videos drive actions and keep people on your channel. So what are they exactly?
1- End screens: Up to four clickable frames that appear in the last 5-20 seconds. Use them to promote related content, your website, subscriptions. End screens allow you to choose from four different elements depending on your goal.
2- Cards: Small, transparent CTAs that expand when clicked. Up to five can be used per video to direct viewers to your website, fundraiser, playlist, and more.
3- Watermarks: Custom subscribe buttons visible only to non-subscribers. To add them to your videos, follow this guide.
Other than CTA buttons, you can also call on viewers to “like, share, and subscribe”. Alot, if not most, YouTubers already do that at the end of their videos, even those with millions of subscribers.
8- Management and Engagement
Areas that should definitely be focused on are engagement, which is a big part of YouTube especially for newbies starting out, and management, which can make your life much easier. It’s crucial to take the time to not only respond to any comments you get, but also to drive engagement in other ways.
If you’re unable to handle all the comments on your videos, which can happen as your channel grows, a good and time-efficient way to manage your account would be to automate the management and scheduling process. One great tool for YouTube, that was originally only a social media management tool, is AgoraPulse.
With the new YouTube management features, you’ll be able to:
- Manage comments from all your videos in one place. You can respond to comments, hide and review them, and even add tags to enable better organization.
- Create keyword searches to find YouTube videos that you’d want to know about and engage with. Useful for discovering user generated videos around your brand or product.
- Other useful management features include a social CRM tool to help keep track of your subscribers and connections.
Automated scheduling tools allow you to upload and schedule your YouTube videos in advance using Swat, or Hootsuite. There are dozens of others to be used, so it all comes down to what is easiest and most comfortable as well as affordable. This is also important as it will save you time so you can get ahead and plan more for the upcoming weeks.
9- Advertising your Channel
YouTube advertising is a way of advertising your video content on YouTube or in search results so you can maximize your audience, if you’re willing to spend. This could be your video playing before a user views another’s video or showing up in YouTube search results for people to watch in full. There are several types of YouTube Ads and they are the following:
- TrueView ads
- Non-skippable instream ads
- Bumper instream ads
- Sponsored card ads
- Overlay ads
- Display ads.
The most popular and safest option is TrueView Ads, why? Mostly they’re low-risk because you’re only charged when viewers opt to watch your entire ad, view it for at least 30 seconds, or interact with the ad in some way, which is cost-effective. Check out this detailed guide from YouTube for more information.
10- Implement, Analyze, Improve, Patience
When starting on YouTube, you need to understand that you will not see results in a few days or weeks. It could take months, sometimes even years to even see major results. Implementing different methods and techniques, then analyzing the results will help you understand what to change or improve. Varying content type, creating attractive thumbnails, carefully choosing keywords, wisely investing in advertising, updating regularly, engaging with users, are all connected and contribute evenly to a successful channel.
Hopefully, this detailed guide has provided a great base for a great start. You can always learn more about some of the topics mentioned like SEO, Content marketing, or even about our courses to enhance your knowledge so you can be better equipped!
Good luck and happy uploading!