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YouTube Marketing – Your Ultimate Guide for 2022

Follow Venture's step-by-step guide to produce a winning YouTube marketing strategy and take your YouTube game to new heights in 2022!

It is impossible to find someone that doesn’t watch YouTube today. 75% of Americans 15 and older are on YouTube and the platform has 2 billion monthly active users. These numbers make YouTube the second most popular website today, next to Google. With YouTube being such a powerhouse of a platform, it makes sense that brands and businesses would want to harness it’s remarkable reach. That is where YouTube marketing comes in.

Much like traditional SEO, however, to reach your goals and target your ideal audience there are various steps that you must take to optimize both your channel and your individual videos.

Placing your video on YouTube and waiting for views is not a strategy. In this guide we will break down all the steps necessary to ensure that you are optimizing your content for your specific business goals.

Understand YouTube Basics

Many people approach YouTube as if it is an extension of television. Sure, it is another way to distribute video content… but it is so much more! You have to understand that it is also the second largest search engine on the planet. Algorithms operate the entire backend of YouTube’s infrastructure. As such, you have the ability to delve deep into what your audience is searching for and is already watching. And then, you can craft custom content that your audience will delightedly consume.

Learn About Your Audience

Before you begin to even think about picking up a camera, you must first understand the audience you are aiming to target with your YouTube marketing. Create an in-depth buyer personae that details the type of audience you are trying to reach. What type of content do they want to consume? Are they the type of audience that is willing to sit and watch a long piece of content? Or, are they the type that wants shorter content broken-up into different videos?

One thing that is important to know about YouTube is that, unlike other platforms, there isn’t a huge dropoff between age demographics.

Both young and old use YouTube to fulfill their needs. As such, the onus is on you, the marketer to provide content that your audience wants to watch.

Study Your Competition

Since it is such a large and prolific platform, you are never alone when it comes to YouTube marketing. You can always check out what your competitors are doing and perform a competitive analysis.

When studying your competition, check and see how they handle the following:

subscriber count

average views per video

how often they post videos

what their viewers say in the comments

the types of topics they post

video content quality

the types of video content they produce

Once you have answered these questions, you can begin to focus on how you can craft your YouTube marketing strategy to be better than the competition.

For instance:

what video topics are your competition not covering?

can you approach your videos in a different way?

are you able to produce your videos with better production quality?

can you go into deeper detail or elaborate more on their more popular videos?

You likely won’t surpass your competition overnight. But, by using their channel as a foundation from which to grow, you can get a running start and gain a benchmark from which to measure your ongoing success.

Learn From Your Favorite Channels

The great thing about YouTube marketing is that you can also learn from the channels that are outside your niche.

Simply spending some time visiting popular channels and seeing what works will provide invaluable lessons for you and your brand.

Here is a list of a few channels that we love and why they are great.

AHREFS

This is the best channel for “how-to” content that we have ever seen. SEO can be a monster of a topic to cover. AHREFS does an amazing job of breaking down topics into manageable videos.

YETI

Yeti Coolers knows how to meld storytelling with brand. You can spend hours getting lost in all the cool documentaries that they have on their channel.

The videos give a true sense of what Yeti is as a brand.

Headspace

Want to know how to perfectly use YouTube as an extension of your product offering? Look no further than Headspace. From meditation mini-sessions to expert Q&A’s, Headspace’s channel shows how YouTube can be a unique destination for a brand to direct its audience.

Keyword Research

Just like with regular SEO you need to research the phrases that people will use to find your video. You can definitely use premium tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. Free tools such as the Google Keyword Planner work just as well, also.

Another great tool is to use the YouTube search bar. Simply plug your topic into the search bar and see what YouTube generates. These are actual things that people have searched for in the past. This can give you some great new ideas for potential keywords.

Optimize Your Videos

Once you have produced your video content and uploaded it to your channel you may think that you have completed your work.

Yet, you must remember that YouTube is a search engine above all else. You can optimize your video content so that your ideal audience can find it and share it.

Use Your Keywords

Remember all that in-depth keyword research that we did to figure out our video’s topic? Now we get to use that information to inform the YouTube search engine what our video is all about. Ideally, we have chosen one main keyword and two more keywords that we will use for optimization. There are several places where you will want to make sure you place your keyword in an organic fashion.

Video Title

This is one of the most important places to define what your video’s key topic is all about. Make sure that you use a clear and action-oriented title. Also, make sure that you use your main keyword in your title; ideally within the first half.

Video Description

The video description is where you get more real estate to explain what your video is about. You can be much more conversational and let your brand personality shine through. You should also introduce your sub-keywords alongside your primary keyword. Make sure that you place your primary keyword within the first three sentences.

Video Tags

YouTube tags (aka video tags) are words and phrases that allow you to give YouTube context about your video. This is great because it is another way for YouTube and Google to learn more about what you are producing. Like everything else SEO, there are best practices involved with getting the best results.

YouTube will always focus the majority of its attention on the first few tags. As such, your first tag should always be a word-for-word duplicate of your primary keyword. From there, you can branch out to other keywords, but your first is always reserved for your primary.

Use Timestamps

Have you ever read a great business book and wanted to go back to reference a piece of material? Obviously, you went to the table of contents or the index to help you find the specific information. Timestamps are no different. Youtube timestamps allow you to organize and describe the content within your video so that your audience can skip to the parts that they most want to see. Additionally, this allows you to explain to the YouTube algorithm exactly what your video content is about.

I am sure that you have seen keyword snippets that include video results within the SERPs of a traditional Google search. Often, this result is from the pulled timestamp information.

Timestamps can not only supply a great deal of convenience to your audience but an added bit of SEO juice to your YouTube marketing as well.

Upload and Post-Upload

Now that you have completed your video it is time to upload.

Publish Your Content

You can either upload your video directly to your YouTube Studio for immediate publishing, or schedule it for release later.

Regardless of when you choose distribute your content, there are a few things to keep in mind:

How often are you able to post content? You want to make sure that you are able to release consistently. Therefore, pick a schedule that works for you. Daily, weekly, monthly. Choose something that is reasonable and stick with it.

Release your content at a time that you think your audience is most likely to watch your videos. If your audience is most likely to watch your videos on the weekend, then don’t publish your content on a Monday am.

Optimize Your Content

Along with ensuring that you optimize your videos for success, it is imperative that you optimize your overall channel for success, too.

As a first step, make sure that your header and channel art reflect your branding and brand guidelines.

From an organizational standpoint, it is also very important to make sure that your content is easy to find. YouTube allows you organize your videos into playlists by topic. By doing this you will ensure that visitors to your channel will be able to quickly find the video they want.

Additionally, you have the ability to create a “hero” video that will sit at the top of your channel and auto-play whenever someone visits your page. You can make this video your most popular video. However, we recommend that you create a custom “trailer” video that broadly explains your channel and the type of content that you create.

As a best-practice, be sure to do the following across all your videos:

Add closed-captioning to all of your videos. Not only does this promote accessibility within your content, but it also is another opportunity to share your content’s metadata with YouTube.

Ask your subscribers to comment, like, and subscribe.

Have a clear call to action for all of your videos.

Add a custom end-frame to all of your videos. Include buttons that can direct your viewers to other related videos.

At Venture we specialize in helping brands with optimizing their YouTube Marketing strategies. We would love the opportunity to work with you as you get geared up for 2022. Give us a call today for a consultation!

Venture has been selected among the Top Denver Video Production Companies by DesignRush