When you’re exploring social media platforms and marketing channel options, YouTube may not be at the top of your list. It’s frequently overlooked, but if you are strategic and use it appropriately, it can be an excellent platform for marketing.

There are pre-made dashboard templates for YouTube that let you quickly and easily see how your performing on the site, which simplifies things even further. You can determine your return on investment and track your progress over time as you grow your audience and become more familiar with using YouTube as a marketing and advertising vehicle.

For beginners, the following are some things to know about YouTube marketing in 2019.

Is YouTube Right for You?

YouTube is one of the most popular websites in the world, and it’s also the second most popular search engine, only behind Google. On paper, this platform seems like the best option for your video marketing efforts.

While YouTube has some great advantages for marketing, you really need to determine if it’s right for what you want to achieve and for your business.

Video content can be great if it’s in-line with your brand, but you need to be able to ensure you can dedicate the time to stay consistent when you’re keeping up with your channel.

Even if your business doesn’t inherently seem like one that’s visual or lends itself to videos, that might not be the case.

People often go to YouTube to find answers to questions, so you could position yourself or someone in your business as an authority and create videos based on that.

Be Specific In What You Want to Achieve

We mentioned the importance of a dashboard above, and one of the reasons is so that you can measure how well you’re meeting your objective.

With any marketing or advertising, you want to be strategic. A key part of being strategic is having specific goals in mind and then measuring to see how well you’re meeting them.

For example, you might want to start with clicks or general traffic, and then you can move on as your channel and following grow to start looking at engagement. You can get more views by using a bot – click here for more details.  Even with the targets you’re measuring, within those you’ll need to define your key performance indicators.

Set a Schedule

You have to be consistent if you’re going to effectively use the power of YouTube for your marketing or advertising.

When people start following your channel, they’re going to want to see new content regularly. To keep yourself on track, create a publishing schedule, and make sure you follow it. This helps people keep coming back because they know when they can expect new content from you.

Create a Targeted Audience

Before you start creating videos, you want to develop a targeted audience persona. This will help give you a better idea of specifically how you want to create your videos and the approach you want to take.

Then, once you actually have your channel up and going, and you have some people watching your videos, you can use analytics to learn about your audience.

If you’re using YouTube for business, you can take advantage of their Analytics tab which will show you insights on your audience and their behaviors, as well as general insight about how your videos and channel are performing.

There is a tab specifically for Demographics, and this can show you important details such as the gender of your viewers, the age, and the times of day your videos are most often viewed.

If you start looking at your audience demographics and see they’re not exactly in line with your audience persona you outlined at the beginning of starting your channel, it might show you that you need to reevaluate somewhere.

Conduct Competitive Analysis

You can find out a lot that will help you see what your competitors are doing right and what they’re either not doing right, or perhaps aren’t doing at all by researching their channels. This can save you time, resources, and eliminate the guesswork.

Go through your competitors’ channels and videos and see what’s getting the most views. What about their least popular videos? What are people interacting with most? Read the comments on videos and see what people like about them and also what people don’t like.

You also have to keep in mind that YouTube is a search engine, and that means keywords are important. Look at what keywords your competitors are using and how they’re using them so you can boost your own rankings.

Finally, think about what you personally like to watch on YouTube and what you find most compelling, and this might help guide your strategy as well.