How to Promote your YouTube music channel

You’ve uploaded your first music video, now what? You promote it.

The first 24 hours will determine any music video’s success so you should front load your promotion efforts in the first day.

When you upload your videos the people who are subscribed to your channel will automatically get a message when your video goes live. That’s handy but you should remember the Law of 7

Every video upload demands bulk email notifications and social media shares. Consider staggering the messages, so you’re not bombarding fans on multiple platforms all at once.

How to Promote your YouTube music videos

You should incorporate your marketing in all stages of your workflow beginning with creating the video right through to ‘post’. Promotion should be…

Have a clear CTA (call to action). Ask them to subscribe, visit your website, leave a comment (this is how you go viral).

There are lots of free ‘ring the bell’ animations you can overlay ‘in Post’ (when editing).

I actually take a contrarian view on asking for subs if you are a musician. It’s not cool and I doubt more than 1 in a 1,000 respond. You don’t hear Justin Bieber asking for subs (he already has 64 million though).

If you talk on the video incorporate your CTA (call to action) in the dialog for a much more powerful message.

Graphic optimisation and Marketing

You need to focus on three areas — the headline, the thumbnail, and the description.

Long before they hear your music these three elements will have the biggest impact on influencing YouTube users to click on your music videos.

Titles: Do keyword research and use targeted keywords within your title

Target: Where are your viewers watching, PC or TV? Optimize your thumbnails for click-through on all devices. Mobile is now the most important device to target.

Tags: These are essentially keywords. The value of tags to rank is unclear. I’ve A/B tested with and without them but, like all personal testing, the datasets are too small to say definitively whether they are within the margin of error. My feeling is they are not important because YouTube is placing less emphasis on them by hiding the tags input below the fold and needing a click to reveal. That suggests to me that they may phase tags out. All your keywords should be in your title and description fields anyway. Those are highly visible so must carry more weight.

‘Keyword stuffing’ tags can probably hurt you much more than it can help you.

Statistics

Promote your music video hard in the first 24 hours through email/push notifications. Share to Twitter and Facebook. Success within this time period will be the deciding factor for short to medium term popularity.

Then…

Check your stats youtube.com analytics

Engagement

Engagement on a music video tends to come in the following forms:

Google Tools

Google provides a suite of tools to help creators create and analyze content at studio.youtube.com/

On YouTube studio you can…

Analytics

Analytics is the area you’ll spend most of your time. It shows analysis that will be a very useful to guide for your future releases.

On YouTube Analytics you can see how many views overall you are getting, real time user count, top videos, and more.

Full details here

Third party tools

Google analytics is not the only game in town. For more in-depth tools…

Conclusion

Incorporate marketing in all stages of your workflow, have a clear Call to Action within your headline, thumbnail, and description. Strive for engagement and use all available analytic tools to improve.

YouTube company profile infographic