YouTube Marketing

kimarketingsolutio
May 30, 2025
13 min read

Let’s talk about YouTube. Chances are we’ve all wasted an afternoon watching one silly cat video or travel vlog after another.

YouTube has always been a source of entertaining content, but it’s also staking its claim as an essential tool for marketers. 51% of marketers currently use YouTube, and 59% plan on increasing their use of YouTube, which is the largest percentage of any other social platform.

I didn’t grow up as a YouTube kid, so I’ve always wondered: how many people are actually on YouTube?

2.7 billion people globally use YouTube every month. Every day, users watch more than 1 billion hours of content on YouTube, making it the second most popular social media platform after Instagram.

So, I’d say it’s a pretty good space to market to your audience!

Table of Contents

Why YouTube Matters
How to Create a YouTube Channel
How to Optimize Your YouTube Videos for SEO
How to Create Videos for YouTube
How to Promote Your YouTube Channel
Understanding YouTube Analytics
How to Run a YouTube Advertising Campaign
YouTube Marketing Tools
YouTube Marketing Tips
Ready, Set, Action!

How to Create a YouTube Channel

So, you’ve decided to create a YouTube channel. Great! Now, you’ll need a YouTube marketing strategy to help you identify goals, decide on video topics, and properly promote your brand on your new channel.

Before I dive in, it’s important to note that maintaining a YouTube channel takes a lot of time and planning. Are you ready for it?

Unlike other social networking platforms, YouTube exclusively hosts video content. You’ll need to set aside time to plan, film, edit, market, and analyze your content consistently.

You’ll also need to define your brand’s goals and plan for how video can specifically help you achieve these.

If you can devote an appropriate amount of time and energy to the platform, you can create engaging, shareable content for your growing audience. And grow it will — after all, YouTube accounts for around 25% of global mobile traffic.

Creating a Google Account

Before filming any video content, you’ll need to set up your YouTube channel. Since YouTube is owned by Google, you automatically gain access to a YouTube and Google+ account when you sign up for Gmail.

Depending on your business, you may not want to tie your email to your business’s YouTube channel — especially if you need to share access to the account with team members or an agency partner. I suggest creating a common, team email account.

Creating a YouTube Account

Now that you have a Google account, you’re almost ready to publish some awesome video content.

But, you’re not done yet; you now need to set up a YouTube Brand Account. A Brand Account allows users to manage editing permissions and create a more holistic online presence.

How to Optimize Your YouTube Videos for SEO

Now that your YouTube channel is up and running, let’s talk about your YouTube SEO strategy.

Remember how I mentioned YouTube is the second-largest search engine? While creating engaging content is a must, it’s not the only factor for success. There are several ways to optimize your videos to rank highly on both YouTube and within the Google search results.

The first step to becoming a YouTube marketing pro is creating and optimizing your video’s metadata. Simply put, metadata gives viewers information about your video, which includes your video’s title, description, tags, category, thumbnail, subtitles, and closed captions.

Providing the right information in your video’s metadata ensures it is properly indexed by YouTube and appears when people are searching for videos like yours. Be succinct and straightforward when filling out your metadata — your content could be removed if you try to promote it with unrelated keywords. Check out the video below to learn more about optimizing your video for search.

[Video: How to Optimize your Youtube Videos for search]

Title

YouTube is similar to on-page SEO in that it’s important to optimize your video’s title and description. The first thing people read when scrolling through a list of videos are the titles, so make sure yours is clear and compelling — it should make searchers curious about your content or make it obvious that your video will help them solve a problem.

Do some keyword research to understand what viewers are searching for. Include the most important information and keywords at the beginning of your title. Lastly, keep titles to around 60 characters to keep text from being cut off in results pages.

Description

YouTube videos display the first three lines of their descriptions before requiring users to click “Show More” to read the rest. This is only approximately 140 characters. For that reason, always include important links or CTAs at the beginning of your description and write the copy so that it drives views and engagement.

Consider including the video transcript in the description, too. Video transcripts can greatly improve your SEO because your video will likely contain many keywords. Add a default channel description with links to your social channels, video credits, and video-specific time stamps. You can also include hashtags in your video titles and descriptions — just be sure to use them sparingly.

How to Create Videos for YouTube

Now that your YouTube channel is set up, it’s time to start populating it with content. This is where the fun begins!

In this section, I will discuss the different types of videos you can create and how to film and edit them. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or uninspired, check out these great video advertising and marketing campaigns for creative ideas to inspire your next project.

8 Types of YouTube Videos to Create

Before filming, decide what type of video would help you achieve your goal.

1. Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials are short-form interviews with satisfied customers. Customer testimonials can help build company and product credibility.

2. On-demand Product Demonstration Videos

Demonstration videos are short pieces of content showing a product’s benefits and proper uses.

3. Explainer and Tutorial Videos

Explainer videos are in-depth videos explaining how to use a product or various parts of a product or service. Tutorials can be used to answer customer support questions or explain a new product feature.

4. Thought Leader Interviews

Interviews with experts or thought leaders can help amplify your company’s credibility in an industry.

5. Project Reviews and Case Studies

Project reviews or case studies recap a successful campaign or project and often include statistics and results.

6. YouTube Live

YouTube Live allows users to broadcast live content to viewers. Live video allows you to share unfiltered moments and lets your audience participate with real-time comments and reactions. Live videos on YouTube are recorded and appear like any other video upload.

7. Video Blogs

Video blogs are daily or weekly videos documenting daily life or events. You could also record a video that summarizes or highlights a blog post so your audience has multiple ways to digest the content.

8. Event Videos

Event videos feature in-person experiences at a conference or expo and can be a great way to show the excitement of a crowd.

How to Promote Your YouTube Channel

Now that you’ve produced a video and optimized it for search, let’s talk about how to market your YouTube channel and videos. While ranking high in search results and having a large subscriber base are ideal, those goals can be difficult to achieve when starting.

That’s why it’s important to spread the word about your YouTube channel and videos across other platforms. Fortunately, YouTube and other platforms make it easy to share video content. Below are some tips for how to best promote your YouTube content on other channels.

How to Market Your YouTube Channel

Social Media

Sharing your videos on social media is an easy way to add additional insights to your video and engage with viewers. YouTube makes it incredibly simple for you and others to promote your video across other social networks.

Consider the best marketing strategy when promoting your YouTube channel or videos on your social media sites. Simply sharing the video on your timeline or feed may not be the most effective option.

Think of why you made the video. Maybe you created a tutorial because users were asking questions about how to use your product. In that case, you can respond to those questions with a link to your video.

If you created a video as part of a larger campaign or global trend, include relevant #hashtags where appropriate to ensure your video is included in the conversation. If you created a video to build awareness around your brand, consider posting the link in your profile bios.

Blog Posts and Website

Market your YouTube channel and videos on your website and blog. Add a YouTube follow icon to your website and blog so your audience can easily find your channel, and embed relevant videos on your website or in blog posts.

Consider creating a YouTube video to accompany a specific blog post or sharing customer video reviews or case studies on your website, as shown earlier. Not only will this help market your YouTube channel and videos, but it will also drive traffic to your website.

Email

While you’re on the quest to find and attract new customers and leads, don’t forget about the ones you already have. Share your video content and channel with relevant email lists.

Encourage your contacts to check out a video you've embedded into a blog post to increase video and website traffic, or direct them to a relevant playlist you’ve curated.

Sending an email newsletter with valuable information and video content is another great way to engage contacts.

Collaborate With Others

If your company has a relationship with another company with a great YouTube presence, ask them to collaborate! Collaborating with others is a fun way for both channels to gain exposure to another audience.

Create a video or playlist together — just ensure their audience and goal are similar to yours. The partnership should align with your marketing strategy.

For example, Gucci and Xbox launched a limited-edition collaboration in 2021 — a custom Xbox with a Gucci carrying case. To promote these luxury sets, the brands created cool, striking video content that bridged the gap between the fashion and gaming industries and resulted in strong fan discussion and appreciation on YouTube.

Engage With Viewers

Finally, be sure to engage with your viewers. Respond to comments, answer questions, ask for feedback, and thank viewers for their support. This is an easy task to forget or let fall by the wayside so try to choose a dedicated time to check video interactions and respond to users.

It can also be beneficial to hire a person or team to focus on providing service and support on YouTube since it’s an essential way to connect with users.

8 YouTube Marketing Strategy Tips for Your YouTube Channel and Videos

Above, I touched on some components to build a high-level marketing strategy for your YouTube videos. In this section, I will discuss some tips for how to best promote your YouTube content.

Keep your channel branding consistent with your other social media accounts.
Optimize your title and description for SEO and searcher intent.
Feature real people or animated faces in your videos, not just words or B-roll.
Choose a video thumbnail that accurately represents your video content.
Include calls-to-action (CTAs) in every video.
Make it easy for others to share your videos.
Create playlists that feature your videos and others.
Produce videos on a regular basis, and consider doing a video series.

Understanding YouTube Analytics

You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your YouTube channel. You’ve created interesting content, optimized it for SEO, and shared it across different platforms. Now, it’s time to measure your success.

YouTube Analytics can seem daunting at first. Let’s face it, interpreting a bunch of numbers and strange-looking graphs can be pretty challenging. Thankfully, understanding YouTube Analytics is pretty straightforward once you know your way around it.

1. Determine your goal.

First things firstmyou can’t measure your success without determining your goal. If you’ve filmed, edited, uploaded, optimized, and shared your video and still don’t know what goal you’re trying to achieve, we have an issue. Your goal should drive your video strategy from beginning to end.

You should focus on targeting one goal per video (as discussed here). Some of the most common video goals are to increase brand awareness, views, clicks, or inbound links or social shares. Depending on how you use the video in your marketing material, the goal could be to increase the open rate of an email series or improve the conversion rate on a landing page. YouTube is a great platform for growing brand awareness.

As the world’s second-largest search engine, YouTube allows your videos to be seen through organic search or paid advertising. Video is a great way to humanize your brand by showcasing real employees, customers, or partners.

It also allows you to build credibility by publishing informational content that helps your target buyer. Promoting your videos through paid advertising versus organic search can impact the type of video you should create. If you’re planning to increase awareness organically, consider filming the history of your company, customer reviews, or product tutorials.

2. Track key metrics.

Now that we’ve discussed why determining a goal is so important, we can discuss how to effectively measure success. At first glance, YouTube analytics can be pretty overwhelming.

However, it’s frustrating when you post a video and don’t receive as many views or as much engagement as you were expecting.

YouTube analytics shows how viewers found your content, how long they watched it, and how much they engaged with it. Let’s start by going over what exactly you can measure and how to find it.

YouTube Marketing Tips

1. Set a publishing schedule and stick to it.

YouTube watchers are loyal to the channels they subscribe to, and they expect those channels to produce content regularly. Therefore, it can be detrimental to be inconsistent with posting, especially early on.

Publishing one video per month can help you stay more consistent rather than planning to publish a video every week and taking a two-week break unexpectedly. Some of the YouTube marketing tools I mentioned earlier, such as Loomly, can help you maintain a consistent posting schedule.

2. Make the upfront investment for publishing videos.

Have you determined whether you’ll be on camera or someone else on your team? Perhaps you’ll be hiring talent externally specifically to present your video content. Do you have an in-house editor, or will you outsource production?

Be prepared for an upfront investment before publishing your first video, no matter which setup you choose for your business channel. The estimated costs of a video camera, lighting, editing software, music licensing, and more can add up to anywhere between $1,600 to $15,000.

3. Keep your revenue expectations reasonable for the first year.

If your goal is to make money from your YouTube channel, it’s important to understand how creators make revenue. Content creators receive approximately 55% of the revenue generated on their YouTube channels. They receive an estimated $18 for every 1,000 views, but this is likely once they’ve garnered enough traffic to bring in views consistently.

That’s the key to building a YouTube channel; you may not make much money on your first few videos, but it’s important not to get discouraged.

4. Avoid common marketing mistakes in your videos.

It’s tough to toe the line between making content that is engaging and relevant while creating revenue. Avoid making your content too sales-y by ensuring authenticity and your true personality in each video.

Never underestimate the power of a solid CTA. Some of my favorite YouTubers, no matter how much their following has grown, consistently encourage viewers to like, comment, and subscribe. It may seem tedious, but users need the reminder.

Lastly, make sure you stay connected with your viewers and subscribers. If someone leaves a positive comment, give it a thumbs up and a reply. YouTube is a community, and engaging with your viewers shows them that you and your videos are worth consuming.

Ready, Set, Action!

With 2.49 billion active users, YouTube isn’t just a home for funny videos. It is a serious marketing platform with the opportunity to promote your brand and content in a visually engaging way.

As a YouTube user, I appreciate content that shares an interesting story while providing valuable information — and I encourage brands to do the same. It’s in your best interest to market content across different platforms, including social, email, and your company blog or website, and optimize it with info cards and end screens with clear CTAs.

While YouTube may initially seem intimidating, the platform makes it very easy to share and digest content. Viewers come to YouTube because they want to learn, be entertained, and engage with brands through video. Make the most of these YouTube marketing tools, tips, and strategies to make the most out of your YouTube marketing strategy.

Editor's note: This post was previously published and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Not only is your audience on YouTube, but as the internet’s second largest search engine, YouTube can help improve your SEO and overall brand presence. YouTube allows marketers to present unique content that's easy for viewers to consume and share.

YouTube marketing can be an intimidating tool for brands. It combines a strategic principle — SEO — with one of the most resource-intensive forms of media — video. That’s why we’ve created this complete guide for YouTube pros and newcomers alike. Below we’ll walk through each step of marketing on YouTube — from how to create a YouTube channel and optimize videos for SEO to how to run a YouTube advertising campaign and interpret video analytics.

YouTube Brand Guidelines

Your YouTube channel is an extension of your brand, and it should be treated as such. As you create and customize your channel, follow these YouTube brand guidelines so you can properly establish your channel’s identity and begin to attract subscribers.

Channel name: Your channel name is associated with every single video you publish. Make sure it’s correct and consistent with your other social media sites and overall branding.

Channel icon: Google recommends uploading an 800 x 800 px square or round image. Your channel icon is similar to a Facebook profile picture. This image will be used across all of your Google properties including Gmail. Consider using a company logo or, if you are a public figure, a professional headshot.

Brand visuals: Upload a 2560 x 1440 px image that will scale well across a desktop, tablet, mobile, and TV.

Channel description: Your description should provide more information on your company and explain what type of video content you plan on sharing. Search engines look at your description when determining how to rank your profile, so incorporate relevant keywords in your overview. We’ll talk more about how to optimize specific video descriptions below.

Channel trailer: Your trailer should be short and sweet (around 30 to 60 seconds). Focus on showing visitors what your channel is about and what they can expect to see in your videos. Your trailer won’t be interrupted by ads, which will keep the user focused on why they should watch more videos from your brand. At the end, don't forget to encourage them to subscribe.

Channel URL: Your channel may be eligible for a custom URL if you have over 100 subscribers, a channel icon, channel art, and is more than 30 days old. Learn more about custom YouTube URLs here.

Channel links: Link to all other social media accounts and relevant websites from the “About” section of your channel. Make it easy for subscribers to connect with you elsewhere.