Do you recall when YouTube first launched? From viral videos like “Charlie Bit My Finger!” to classic hits like “Chocolate Rain,” the video platform has won hearts and provided a space for people to interact from all over the world.
YouTube has significantly grown in popularity since its inception in 2005, becoming the second-largest search engine and the second-most-visited website behind Google. In 2019 alone, over 30,000 hours of video were submitted to the platform every hour. This number is likely increasing today.
With that said, having a consistent and creative approach is key when it comes to winning on YouTube if you want to grow your views and subscribers. Incorporating an inbound strategy into your YouTube channel allows you to do all of this and more.
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What is inbound?
Before we leap right into the nitty-gritty, let’s take a quick look at inbound marketing methodology and why it matters.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that attracts customers by delivering relevant information and experiences tailored to their specific needs. Additionally, inbound marketing enables businesses to engage and build relationships with their customers while addressing current issues.
As a result, inbound marketing allows you to build long-term relationships with your customers. And over time, that long-term relationship creates a community of brand ambassadors, attracting new prospects while delighting existing ones. This is an approach that applies to YouTube. Let’s have a look at some suggestions.
Implementing inbound marketing to YouTube
Here are six inbound marketing tips to help you grow your YouTube channel and establish a long-term relationship with your audience.
1. Have a driven purpose
What is the purpose of your YouTube channel? Is it to educate customers about a certain topic, product, or industry? Is it to provide people with interesting and entertaining videos that they want to watch? A content producer or company may create a YouTube channel for a variety of reasons.
Before generating the content, consider why you created the channel and whether there are any content possibilities you can pursue. Let us use Khan Academy as an example:
Sal Khan established Khan Academy unexpectedly because he wanted to tutor his cousins. Khan provided them with videos to help them learn algebra and other subjects. When the word spread and people started watching, he saw an opportunity to teach others while remaining faithful to his mission. Today, Khan Academy has grown to become one of the world’s largest non-profit educational institutions.
Having a focused purpose enables you to stay in touch with the heart of your channel, drawing high-quality viewers who resonate with what you do. Furthermore, it will allow you to have more fun creating original content, which will leave your audience delighted, happy, and hooked.
2. Implement the inbound flywheel mindset
You can develop evergreen and ever-converting content if you have an inbound flywheel philosophy. And putting it into practice will give your viewers a fantastic experience that they want to share with others. What is the flywheel model, exactly?
The flywheel is a HubSpot-adapted model that describes the momentum gained when your entire business is aligned around providing an exceptional customer experience.
Consider it a cycle that leads from a casual watcher to a devoted subscriber. To promote community and build relationships with your audience, use the flywheel as part of your YouTube strategy.
Provide relevant content to attract new viewers, engage with them through comments and messages, and delight them by rewarding them with a prize or free content offer such as an eBook.
Finally, the flywheel model will pave the way for your viewers to endorse the material you make, attracting a new audience to your channel. Remember to put yourself in their position and consider it as material that people want to share, which will help you reach a new audience.
3. Know your audience
Understanding your audience is one of the most crucial guidelines to follow when producing content for YouTube. Creating awesome videos will not generate great results if they do not resonate with your target audience. In order to do that, you must grasp your YouTube audience through buyer personas.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Create buyer personas to have a better understanding of your audience. Consider creating a template and filling in this information:
- Demographics
- Behavior patterns
- Goals
- Motivations
- Challenges
You can create your personas by conducting a survey, social listening, or see what video content yields the highest engagement from an analytics standpoint. To make things easier, YouTube has an analytics tool that lets you understand your videos and audience on a deeper level.
4. Set SMART goals
Setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) will help you measure and benchmark the success of your channel.
By setting SMART goals you will be able to develop content that aligns with your purpose resulting in a better impact for you and, in return, your audience. Additionally, it will enable you to measure your progress, giving clarity and motivation for you and your team in the process.
5. Develop content consistency
Another important component of drawing visitors to your channel is consistency. People will subscribe if your YouTube channel is well-organized and produces content on a regular basis. Having said that, creating a style guide for a YouTube channel is essential.
A style guide is a set of writing and design guidelines. It assists in getting everyone in your organization on the same page when it comes to the look and feels of your brand’s content, including anything from videos and social media pictures to blog articles and landing sites.
Generating a style guide will save you time and effort while creating content, enabling you to concentrate on other areas of your video (i.e., production). For example, if you have written processes to base your video on, you may save time recording it.
Adapting a style guide will create a brand image that will resonate with your target audience.
6. Optimize your content
Once you’ve written your content and made your video, it’s time to upload and optimize it for YouTube. We propose using YouTube SEO best practices in your plan to strengthen your content even more. These are the recommended practices:
- Add organic keywords to titles
- Implement keywords into the description
- Add a thorough and detailed description
- Categorize the video
- Add tags, subtitles, and captions
- Upload custom content
Following best practices helps your content rank better on YouTube, making it simpler for viewers to locate. Furthermore, optimizing your video generates better and more structured material, making it more appealing to viewers and easier for them to explore, enjoy, and follow your channel.
Now it’s time to put this advice into action in your new or existing channel. Depending on your channel and audience, it may take time and practice to get results, but practice makes perfect. As a result, you should always strive to improve and create content that matters to your audience. Remember to put yourself in their shoes and think of the content they want to watch and share.
