YouTube Promotion Strategy: Best Advice

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Video content is becoming more and more popular and drives quality, targeted traffic. Both large and small companies have channels, but they have to fight not only with direct competitors for visitors.

Vloggers and bloggers, educational channels, and entertainment media also fight for the attention of the audience. The simplest video can be shot just with a smartphone camera and now there are millions of videos on YouTube.

Promoting videos on YouTube is not an easy task. To solve it, you need to make a strategy and stick to it.

Understand your target audience

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Videos are watched, subscribed to, liked, commented on, clicked on, and bought not by some abstract YouTube users, but by specific real people. Of course they are all different, but they can be combined by certain parameters: gender, age, geography, interests, etc. The result will be one or more portraits of the target audience.

Even if we are talking about promotion from scratch, you need to have a good understanding of the potential, future subscriber/viewer. Everything depends on this information – from the format and presentation to the choice of bloggers and targeting for video advertising.

Quality content

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According to YouTube’s official statement, users watch hundreds of millions of videos every day. The main requirement of users for content is the quality of the content. At the same time, the content is much more important than the level of shooting: people will watch only interesting videos.

Popular content formats: interviews, guides, instructions, reviews, storytelling, entertainment content, including creative advertising.

If you want to get to the top, you need to make a great video. A great video should be interesting, engaging, and useful, then it will increase the number of regular YouTube subscribers.

It’s also important not to forget about metrics and analyze:

  • session time

Session Time shows how long users spend on YouTube after watching your video. It’s also a ranking factor that increases the amount of time users spend on YouTube. In other words, YouTube encourages video channels that keep their audience on their resources.

Create playlists, they keep users on your channel, respectively the session time figures are higher. Give your playlists attractive names and include keywords, then they will rank your channel better.

  • viewing time

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The number one factor in YouTube is average views duration. If your video helps retain the user, then it ranks better. To see how long your videos are keeping viewers, go to Analytics – Overview.

Audience retention is one of the most important ranking factors. It’s the percentage of views of your video. The impact of the first 15 seconds is huge. YouTube recommends that you focus on this time frame. In that time frame, you have to get your audience hooked.

  • engagement

YouTube doesn’t want users to passively watch your videos. How many likes, comments, additions your video to the playlist were made – all of this makes a huge difference. The more of these activities done, the more positive signals there are for ranking.

To increase engagement, you can buy real YouTube views, likes and comments.

Video optimization

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Proper video optimization is one of the keys to its popularity. Look at this useful tips:

  • In Title you should use a keyword and a call to view – all this increases CTR (clickability). In the initial output of YouTube, the first 40 characters are displayed. So if your title is long enough the viewer will probably only see the shortened part of it.
  • Write more than 200 words in the description, it will help YouTube understand your video more deeply and rank it for long keywords.
  • For tags download the vidIQ extension for Google Chrome, then it will suggest tags as a clue.

Choose promotion methods and KPIs

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SEO optimization is important but usually not enough for successful promotion especially if the channel is young. At this point, you need to determine:

  • Options for promoting your YouTube channel: video ads, integration from bloggers, seeding (on social networks and thematic platforms), giveaways.
  • More appropriate advertising formats, types of integration, video placement platforms, calls to action, ways to engage and retain your audience.
  • The budget that can be allocated for promotion, paid tools, additional specialists.
  • Key performance indicators (KPI): for example, the optimal cost per viewer, subscriber, viewer/subscriber/client. As well as when and how to track these KPIs, and what to do if the desired result is not there.

The result should be a media plan.

It’s important to understand that promoting a channel, especially from scratch, is quite a long way. Have patience and give yourself time to grow. Remember that comprehensive promotion is the key to success.