Are you a content creator who wants to gain worldwide fame on the YouTube platform? In this case, you will need a strong marketing strategy of YouTube – after all, winning the favor of millions of subscribers is quite tricky. For example, according to the Social Blade web resource, only 67 channels have over 50 million subscribers. Do you want to compete with them? Then, this article is a must-read for you.

What Is YouTube Marketing?

To get the most out of your marketing strategy for YouTube, you need to develop a plan to attract and retain an audience through the following methods:

  • SEO, which is aimed at increasing the visibility of your content in the YouTube search engine by choosing the right keywords, metadata, descriptions, and tags;
  • Setting up Google Ads to promote your brand through paid campaigns;
  • Collaborating with other bloggers or brands to share audiences;
  • Growing your subscriber and comment number to get social proof;
  • Content marketing consists of regularly producing videos targeted to your audience's interests (taking into account feedback on your previous content).

Why Is YouTube Marketing Important?

Why is it not enough to just make quality content? In a highly competitive environment, even the most attractive and exciting content can get lost without a proper YouTube digital marketing strategy. As YouTube uses algorithms that depend on factors such as engagement, keywords, and traffic, well-thought-out marketing will help you attract attention to your videos and promote them higher in search results.

YouTube Marketing Strategies and Tips

Consider the best YouTube marketing practices that will bring you closer to getting the coveted button.

Brand your YouTube channel

Your channel should visually reflect your personality and the niche for which you create content. To do this, you will need to develop a unified style for thumbnails, your channel icon, and other visual elements that will distinguish your channel and your videos from millions of others.

Learn more about your YouTube audience

The correct goal setting for your YouTube activity is to create content not for yourself but for your audience. This means that you should better understand the interests and pain points of your potential viewers. You can do this through direct surveys, appropriate YouTube marketing tools (like Sprout Social), and analyzing the content of your competitors.

Use SEO best practices to refine your YouTube videos

Using the right keywords in your titles, descriptions, and tags helps increase your content’s visibility in search results within the platform. Overall, this process isn’t as complicated as SEO for a website. However, you’ll still have to find relevant keywords – this can be done either with the help of third-party SEO tools for YouTube (such as Google’s Keyword Planner) or by “spying” on possible options from your competitors.

Optimize your YouTube content

Content optimization consists of “tailoring” its topic to the interests of your viewers and structuring it (creating playlists, podcasts, etc.). In particular, your videos should be adapted to the audience using eye-catching thumbnails, attractive titles, and powerful calls to action.

Keep an eye on your competition

Above, we have already briefly mentioned how important it is to monitor your competitors' activities. From them, you can gain valuable insights into what your audience likes and which content formats gain the most views, reactions, and impressions.

Engage with your audience

Many bloggers whose names have become legendary used audience interaction tools to their fullest extent for their YouTube channel marketing strategy: they responded to comments, asked for reactions to create new exciting videos, organized different giveaways, and so on. In general, this is something you definitely shouldn’t neglect either.

Start using YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts, or simply videos up to 60 seconds long, are a relatively new but trendy content format on YouTube. It is guided by approximately the same principles of promotion as TikTok, but, unlike the latter, you can use it to bring your audience to your full-length videos – just cut the most exciting moments from them, and the result will not keep you waiting. By the way, you can find out more details about the YouTube Short algorithm.

Empower your YouTube videos to get subscribers

Remember to ask your audience to leave reactions under your videos and subscribe to your channel. It’s just a few extra seconds in your timeline, but the benefits will be undeniable.

Cross-promote your YouTube videos

Also, remember to reference existing videos in your new videos—this way, you will be able to add views to content that is a year or more old and, thus, improve your channel's statistics. 

Implement YouTube Ads to grow traffic

Launching paid advertising as a part of your YouTube social media marketing strategy helps to attract a new audience and increase the number of views if your organic methods are exhausted. The main thing is to understand what audience to target. Otherwise, you risk spending a significant budget on implementing this method and getting only a tiny return (maybe, instead, it’s better to order the services of a YouTube marketing company you can trust).

Make lives on YouTube

Live streams allow your audience to see you without editing or other production tricks. That's why they often get much more views than regular content. However, you don't even have to spend your time on it – for example, with Gyre, you can upload a playlist of pre-recorded content and stream it 24/7.

Use influencer marketing on YouTube

If your YouTube marketing budget allows you or you know bloggers interested in collaborating with you on a complimentary basis (for example, to exchange audiences) – don’t miss out on this opportunity. Just one such collaboration can bring you thousands of new subscribers.

Check your performance with YouTube Analytics

To get the best results from YouTube strategy for brands time after time and be able to adjust when needed, you have to regularly check key audience engagement metrics for your content in your YouTube Analytics profile. 

YouTube Marketing Best Practices

To make sure that the above YouTube advertising best practices are practical, let's finally look at a few successful cases of their application within a YouTube content marketing strategy:

  • MrBeast (319 million subscribers) is a YouTube blogger with the most subscribers and views worldwide. We dare to assume that in addition to his charisma and creativity, simple challenges with passers-by, to whom he gave money, and creating content according to the latest trends were able to add additional efficiency to marketing for his YouTube channel.
  • Dude Perfect (60.4 million subscribers) is a channel dedicated to everything related to sports. Its key difference from competitors is the abundance of humor and many collaborations with famous brands and athletes. Also note that to attract different audiences, these guys often do unusual tricks and contests, which brings them an average of 10 million views per video. 
  • PewDiePie (111 million subscribers) is a channel founded by Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, a gamer who initially uploaded recordings of his gameplay. He generously flavored each of his videos with humor and maintained active interaction with the audience. The latter technique helped him adjust his content format over time, and now, the channel mainly features entertaining and humorous videos.

Also, this blogger often uses memes and implements trends to expand his reach.

That's all! If you still have knowledge gaps for a successful marketing strategy for YouTube channel, need more ideas on what to do with your channel (the general information about YouTube optimization can be found here), or also want to promote your profile on other social platforms, check out our other articles, for example, this one about what changes Instagram faced in 2024 and how this affected streaming.