With the continuous growth of content creators on YouTube, which is over 50 million right now, you need to be strategic about your marketing goals on the platform to ensure your content stands out.

One thing to have at the back of your mind when marketing on YouTube in 2019 is that most YouTube viewers find it appalling. So you need to draft your marketing plan in a subtle way that will increase your brand’s awareness but not lose the viewers too.

You might think it’s unachievable to reach and engage with your audience without them guessing you are onto something else. But with this guide, you’ll get a detailed explanation of how to market on YouTube in 2019 through some easy steps:

Create a YouTube channel

To start marketing on YouTube, start by creating a YouTube channel for business. Here, you are not creating a regular Google account but a brand account where two or three people can have access to the account and run it simultaneously because you might be able to handle everything on your own.

Learn statistics

Before you begin marketing to your audience, you’ll want to learn about your audience, and you can do this by checking the YouTube analytics, which is only available to those with the business account. Through the analytics, you can get an insight into your audience, such as their demographics, watch time, view counts, interaction rate, and revenue generated. The demographics analytics especially will give you an idea of the age group of your viewers, gender, location, and time setting. Through the analytics, you can confirm if you are targeting the right people or you need some restrategizing.

Know your competitors

You need to know what your competitors are offering their audience and how to improve on it to give your audience the best. To do this, you need to check out their channel, watch their videos, take note of those that got more likes, read the comments of the viewers and subscribers to know what they liked or didn’t like. With this information, you can tell what your target audience loves to watch and create like contents. You should also read the video descriptions and note the keywords they use and see if using them will boost your SEO rankings on recommended videos and search pages.

Keep learning

Don’t concentrate on creating videos for your audience; also, try to watch the videos others make to learn from them. When watching videos, you’ll come across a few you like, if you see those videos, ask yourself what you want about them. An excellent way to start is by watching videos from your top favorite channels to see the extra touch they have in their videos and strategize how to replicate them in yours. They don’t have to be in the same niche as yours before you can learn some techniques from them, you only need to be observant to see their strategies and try them out.

Optimize your videos

Optimizing every video you create and post on YouTube to rank on search pages is advisable to get more views and subscribers to your channel.

To optimize your videos for search, you need to use the right keywords in your video title and description. When thinking of the title for your video, ensure it is related to the content of the video. You should also ensure it’s not a long title so that everything fits in the search pages. Aim for at most, 60 characters.

The next step is ensuring your video description contains the necessary keywords and hashtags too. It should also include links to social media accounts, websites, and other platforms you want your audience to connect with you. The recommended character for a YouTube video description is 5000 characters, but you can always write less. 

You can also add up to 15 hashtags to increase the visibility of your video. Use only those that are relevant to the video posted. Ensure you don’t use more than 15 if you don’t want YouTube ignoring your video. When writing the description, start with the relevant keywords before continuing with the rest of the narrative.

Another way to optimize your video is to get a customized thumbnail to help your content stand out. If you use the regular freeze frames YouTube has to offer, viewers may not be able to differentiate yours from the others.

Include CTAs

Don’t forget all your viewers to action by asking them to subscribe to your channel at the end of the video. You can also ask them to like and share your videos. There is nothing wrong with using the simple line, “like, share, and subscribe” at the end of every video.

You can also use other subtle CTAs such as cards, watermarks, bumper ads, during the videos to promote your page. The cards can direct viewers to your website, landing pages, or other web pages you wish for your viewers to visit. It could even lead them to other videos you’ve created.

The bumper ads and watermarks are ads you can use to get more subscribers and promote your page. The bumper ads is a video ad that can appear at the beginning or end of a video and lasts for only six seconds while the watermarks are subscribe- buttons you can design to attract more subscriber to your channel.

Other types of YouTube ads you can use are the overlay ads, sponsored cards, displayed ads, skippable, and unskippable video ads. When using ads, ensure that you create your contents in a way that viewers do not have to feel they are watching an ad.

Use influencers

If you have the budget, you might want to work with influencers, especially if you have products to showcase. YouTube users will trust the opinion of influencers over what your brand has to say, so using them isn’t a bad idea. Only make sure you get people relevant to your brand’s niche with an already existing audience similar to that of your target.

Monitor constantly

You want to check that you are doing everything right on your channel and that your efforts are paying. So what you should never forget to do is use the YouTube analytics to check relevant metrics such as subscribers count, demographics, traffic sources, device reports, and playback locations.