How YouTubers Can Improve Their Marketing Strategies in 2021

Everything is changing, especially the digital marketing strategies. Why? Because marketers constantly investigate new areas, introduce and try new techniques and approaches, and, what is even more significant, new channels and platforms for advertising appear.

Like it or not, you have to adjust to changes if you want to stay popular, get revenue and achieve success in what you are doing. It especially touches upon creators who share their content on YouTube.

2020 with its lockdown affected both video creation and consumption, and that resulted in new rules in video marketing.  

2021 will differ by new ways of YouTube video presentation and promotion techniques, so today we will mention the most effective methods to make your content rank better and be noticed by a wider audience.

Cross-promotion

When YouTubers and marketing experts talk about cross-promotion they mean two ways this can go – sharing YouTube content on other platforms and collaborating with other creators and business owners for mutually beneficial promotion. Let’s take a closer look at these situations.

Collaboration

There are creators who publish content related to yours or business owners whose audience may like what you are doing (and vice versa) so that they could do you a favor in the form of promoting your channel in exchange for promotion from your side.

There is nothing to lose but both of you can win and attract new viewers. You can also benefit from collaboration with brands by means of sponsorships.

But it is not necessary to promote certain services or brands by making full-blown promotional videos – you can just place the link to the content you like/want to promote in your video description to provide your channel viewers with additional relevant content and help them learn more about a certain topic. Such promotion looks pretty natural and does not look like intrusive advertising.

Involving other platforms

You may stay a successful YouTuber and still be active on other social networks. Even more, you may become more successful on YouTube if you will stay active on other platforms. What you need to know is how to use this or that source to raise your channel’s popularity. Let’s review the most famous platforms.

1. TikTok

The types of videos you post on TikTok are quite different from what YouTube audiences prefer to watch. Short entertaining or even educational clips are cool but they won’t do for the audience of your YouTube channel. So, TikTok requires another approach and another content creation but it will bring lots of benefits. People may start following you because they like the personality, the style, the unique image you possess.

This will help you in case you want to generate more attention to your channel. Viewers stay on YouTube because of the content while TikTok helps you prove yourself and lead new audiences to your YouTube videos. Well, at least you can post teasers of your videos and mention your YouTube channel link asking your followers to check it out.

2. Instagram 

This social network can boost your popularity significantly. And when people like your Instagram they would be likely to follow you on YouTube. The first thing to do is NOT to duplicate the content even though the IGTV function allows you to publish full videos just like you do it on YouTube. What you should publish are teasers promoting the full version of the content with a link to YouTube.

You may do it in an ordinary Instagram post or in stories with the Swipe option encouraging users to click and follow the link.

 3. Facebook

Just like Instagram, Facebook is an excellent tool for promoting your YouTube videos and inviting new viewers to your channel. But this is not as obvious as it sounds. If you just publish a video with a link to your channel you will hardly persuade users to visit your YouTube page. Instead of it you better publish a kind of a teaser – a promotional clip up to 60 seconds in length to grab the attention and make your viewers watch more but on your YouTube page. In such a way you are giving a sneak peek and you can do it in the best traditions of all movie trailers. Moreover, you save your viewers’ time and let them follow the link and watch your content on purpose which may increase the watch time and raise the level of engagement.

4. CTV/OTT

According to the eMarketer report, YouTube was the most viewed video platform on CTV and the greatest source of CTV advertising as well. During the pandemic, people switched from their mobile phones to TV screens and started watching videos on demand over the top much more than before – in 2020 the watch time has increased by 22%. 

Quarantine appeared to be a golden opportunity for YouTubers not only to benefit from increased watch time but in terms of content creation as well. Cooking at home, meditations, DIYs, work-from-home tips and other vlogging ideas, home organization and related topics have become especially trendy, and the field for creating content became enormous.

The number of uploaded videos has increased correspondingly. All these changes influenced advertising as well making marketers invest in it even more because YouTube has the biggest video library including exclusive user-generated content, a wide range of categories, so audience targeting is quite flexible and always works well. Moreover, it is easy not only to reach the right viewers’ with the proper content but to measure the effect as well.

SEO Optimization

Search Engine Optimization never gets old. It’s still a free and easy way of promoting YouTube videos in 2021. Billions of searches take place on YouTube monthly, so if you want your videos to be found properly you must provide your channel with good metadata:

keywords: define your topic, research the YouTube suggestions to see the proposed options, use YouTube SEO tools to find the right target keywords that your audience may use

titles: use relevant keywords in your video titles for them to be not only catchy but properly optimized as well (try to fit in 66 characters as YouTube cuts the titles in search results)

description: add an informative description filled with keywords

tags: they are easily read by YouTube's algorithm, so make sure they are relevant and relate to your brand/product/channel.

What can also improve your video rankings are closed captions or subtitles. They will also be helpful for people who can’t hear or just watch videos with the sound off, so you will both do good to others and earn extra credits and loyalty to your channel. In order to create closed captions/subtitles, you can do it on YouTube or upload the readymade transcript file.

Auto subscription link

YouTube introduced the option of adding an auto-subscribe link and has made it easier for you to gain new subscribers and for the viewers to subscribe to your channel with no surplus efforts. You can add this link to your video descriptions, social media accounts, insert it into emails, or place it on your website. All you need to do is to add a special modifier to your channel URL. Here is the instruction:

get the URL on your YouTube channel page and copy itadd ?sub_confirmation=1 to the end of the URL

That’s it! By clicking the modified link viewers will be automatically subscribed to your channel. However, this trick currently works only on the desktop.

Community tab

You can join YouTube communities to promote your content but in order to unlock this option, there should be 1000+ subscribers on your channel. Upon unlocking the community tab you can interact with the audience by different types of media – images, GIFs, polls, videos to engage more viewers to check out and like your content. But do not overuse this feature in order not to be too obsessive while trying to win the users’ attention.

Using Google Trends for YouTube video marketing

Google Trends option is a significantly useful tool for better YouTube video optimization and content strategy management. When you need to do research to find out which queries are popular or draw some inspiration for the trending content, just visit Google Trends, and type in any keyword that interests you. In order to do it properly, select “YouTube Search” in the drop-down menu, enter the keyword, and filter the results by different criteria, check related topics, and get an understanding of how others search for videos on YouTube. This tool will help you achieve better results in terms of the organic search as well as give new ideas about the content.

Takeaways

With the fast-moving development of new video platforms and modern marketing opportunities provided by social networks, YouTube still stays on top and boosts its potential for more effective content promotion. In order to make the most out of these opportunities, you need to stay abreast of the innovations in YouTube strategies and instruments and implement them in accordance with your target audience’s preferences and content specificity. Implementing the tips mentioned above you will take your YouTube channel to a new level of marketing and will be able to benefit from the up-to-date tools and techniques to widen your audience, retain more loyal viewers and make your content even catchier and more engaging.

Also published on: https://vlogbox.com/how-youtubers-change-their-marketing-strategies-in-2021/