YouTube Music Marketing Strategy: Helpful Illustrative Guide (2021)
With over 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube is undoubtedly the best platform for budding and aspiring artists to share their music and grow their careers.
So, I will walk you through how to open a channel that gets thousands of views and how to optimize it even if you are not tech-savvy experience.
Before we delve into this article, you have to understand what marketing strategies are.
What’s Marketing Strategy?
It is a set of plans, processes and techniques utilized by a brand(artist) to reach their target audience (in this case music listeners) and turning them into customers (in this case fans) of their services(music) or products.
The purpose of this article is to show you certain strategies that when applied will skyrocket your music content and fan base on YouTube.
How To Get Started?
Starting out, there are some basic tips and tools you need to put together to smoothen up the journey. They are the nitty-gritties for succeeding in a competitive space like YouTube.
· Patience and Hard Work
Nothing good comes as a silver platter. It requires dedication and hard work to stay up to speed on the trends of YouTube music marketing. Keep in mind it’s not going be rosy.
· You Need A Dedicated Email
More than anything, you need a working email address from google. Your YouTube channel will be hosted on the email address. So, it’s super important.
More on email marketing for musicians? Read this article.
· Graphics Experience
Getting started, you need a basic graphic designing experience. You know why?
You will be creating YouTube thumbnails, Channel banner art, and channel logo.
if you want to make more money on Youtube as musicians check this article.
Don’t worry about those terms, we will talk about it in detail below.
Let’s move on!
How To Open A Music YouTube Channel
- Sign in to YouTube and click on the user icon at the top right of the screen
- Click on the gear icon to get to your account’s YouTube Settings
- Click on Create a new channel
- Then choose “Use a business or other name”
- Add your Brand name and click create.
Or You can watch this video.
YouTube Music Marketing Strategies On The Fly
- · Utilize YouTube SEO
- · Brand your content
- · Collaborate with other YouTube influencers and Music Bloggers
- · Choose Your Genre
- · Study other YouTube Channels
- · Leverage Social Media
- · Boss Your Videos with paid Ads
- · Properly Optimize Your Videos
- · Follow a Schedule
1. Utilize YouTube SEO
Unfamiliar with the term SEO? Well, it stands for Search Engine Optimization, it is a series of processes used to optimize your content to ensure it is indexed and ranked on search engines, in this case, YouTube.
If you really want to get more music views and subscribers to your YouTube channel, then you definitely need to carry out SEO, this way you’ll be getting a lot of views for free!
Have in mind, Search Engine Optimization takes time. You may not see immediate traffic and views to your channel.
But, in the long run, you will do extremely well.
Below Is A List Of Ways To Optimize Your Music Content For SEO
● Include relevant keywords in your content’s title as well as in the description field. How do you find relevant keywords? Use tools such as Tubebuddy or the Ubersuggest chrome extension to find words people are actually searching for on YouTube, then you could use these words as the title of your music content.
● Ensure you use between 5-7 tags for each of your music content. These tags should be words people are searching for but also related to your music, title and content.
Also, use the aforementioned keyword research tools to search for relevant words which you could use as tags.
Similarly, you could use the YouTube search bar. How? Go to youTube.com.
Punch into the search bar the keywords you are going after and YouTube will automatically suggest other variations.
● Ensure to use relevant hashtags, in this case your hashtags should include the title of your music, your stage name and of course other relevant words.
● Ask your audience to share your music content. The more your music is shared, the higher your views will be and this will in turn tell YouTube’s algorithm that your content is relevant, thus pushing your content higher up in its search rankings.
2. Brand Your Content
As an artist, you have to focus a lot on branding. Your voice, your sound and everything about you and your music must be original.
Branding your content will definitely make you stand out from the over-saturated music niche on YouTube.
How do you brand yourself on YouTube? Here are some tips:
● Use custom, original thumbnails for your content, thumbnails which are representative of your brand. Your thumbnails could contain your signature color, filters, or your personal editing style.
Recommended:
below is an exmaple of a youtube thumbnail.
● Set up a recognizable profile picture for your YouTube channel; this could be your personal picture or the brand’s picture.
● Set up a cover photo for your YouTube channel.
● Tell your audience about yourself, your journey, and your story in your channel’s description section, at the same time provide links to your various social media accounts or blogs.
for example on Kingdom Echos;
● You should adapt a particular font, colour, filter and editing style for all of your channel’s music content including your cover photos and profile picture.
3. Collaborate With Other YouTube Musicians/Influencers and Music Bloggers
This strategy is essential for all budding artists looking to leverage the YouTube platform.
If you’re starting out at first, most influencers/musicians wouldn’t want to work with you obviously because you have a little fanbase. However, this shouldn’t stop you from searching.
Music bloggers can also help move the needle in your career. In fact, I will help promote your videos on my channel and also refer some of our subscribers to your YouTube channel.
Call: 08096763980 or Email: KingdomEchoe@gmail.com
In this scenario, you should search for smaller artists/influencers in your niche and collaborate with them then cross-promote your music to your various audience, this will create a win-win situation for the both of you.
4. Determine Your Target Audience.
Before you start posting your music to YouTube, you need to determine who your target audience is, what they’re searching for and how to target them.
You can do this by checking channels similar to yours and see the kind of audience they’re targeting.
After spying on your competitors, replicate all the stuff you find.
5. Choose Your Niche(Genre) And Post Music Relevant To Your Audience
The last thing you’d want to do as an artist is make rock music for hip hop fans or make metal music for gospel fans.
You are not going to well.
Recommended:
This is why you need to choose a niche(genre) and make music that resonates with the fans of your niche, meaning you should post music that’s relevant to your audience.
When you post music that’s relevant to your audience, they’re more likely to resonate with your music, engage with your content and share your music.
The longer they watch your videos the higher you shoot up in the rankings.
This will in turn drive more traffic to your content, thus increasing your subscribers/fanbase.
6. Study Other YouTube Channels
This is one of the most important things you need to do as an artist. You should study other music channels, find out their strategy, what they’re doing and what they aren’t doing.
After figuring out the aforementioned, you should then go ahead to create your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), meaning what you’re offering that your competitors aren’t. This is an effective way to stand out from the crowd and become unique.
Your Unique Value Proposition will be the basis for your success on YouTube. Because if your offering what no is willing to offer you will automatically retain more viewers and subscribers.
7. Leverage Social Media
Social media is extremely important. The top 4 social media platforms for promoting your music in 2021 —Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram— have a combined user base of over 4.5 billion monthly active users.
That’s a lot of potential fans you need to reach in order for your music to be heard far & wide.
Recommended.
You should create social media pages on at least 3 platforms which you’ll use to promote your YouTube music content.
Each time you upload your music to your YouTube channel, you should drop a link on your social media pages, this will drive traffic to your content.
Better still, you can create short versions of your videos then embed a link in the comments so they go watch the full version on YouTube.
8. Boost Your Video With Paid Ads
Earlier on, I talked about SEO and how it could help you get a lot of free traffic, but this isn’t always the case for newcomers as it takes a lot of time and consistency for SEO traffic to kick in.
In this case, you should consider using paid ads to promote your music content from time to time, until SEO starts working for you.
Best of all, its affordable for as low as 5$.
This will provide a short temporary boost for your music content, and if your content is good, relevant, and catchy, you would see your fanbase increasing exponentially.
9. Properly Optimize Your Videos
Ever heard of the phrase ‘first impression matters’? Well yes, it actually applies to YouTube.
With the attention span of internet users continuously decreasing, you have but a few seconds to catch their attention, and what better to do this than to properly optimize your videos!
Below is a list of ways to properly optimize your videos:
● Use thumbnails—your thumbnails should be catchy and clear. It could be an edit or a good photograph, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s good.
● Ensure your videos has captions. Though this is optional, it’s an added advantage, as it’ll help fans to easily read your lyrics or whatever it is that’s on your music videos. Alternatively, you could use subtitles.
● Use end cards. End Cards help point viewers to the next video on your channel.
● Although not necessary, but you could use place a signature intro on all your music content.
10. Follow A Schedule
Like it or not, consistency is the key to a successful musical career on YouTube.
You should have a regular posting schedule; be it once a month, twice a week, or once a week, it doesn’t matter as long as you consistently follow the schedule.
This way your fans can know when to expect new content from you, also YouTube’s algorithm will favor your content when you’re consistent by showing your videos in the ‘recommended‘ section, and this will, in turn, drive thousands and millions of views to your content.
Conclusion – Music marketing strategies 2020
Like other forms of marketing, marketing your music on YouTube is not easy. It requires consistency, determination and focus and a little bit of constant self-education.
When you strictly follow all the strategies in this article, in no time you will see your music content performing extremely well on the platform.
A quick recap;
So, today, we went over some music marketing strategies on YouTube which ae;
Utilize YouTube SEO, Brand your content, collaborate with other YouTube influencers and Music Bloggers, Choose Your Genre, Study other YouTube Channels, Leverage Social Media, Boss Your Videos with paid Ads, Properly Optimize Your Videos and Follow a Schedule.
For reference you can check out our YouTube Channel
Over to you;
what are you going try out first? Was this really helpful?
Let’s chat in the comments.
Music Marketing Articles:
- 8 Free Steps To Promote Music Covers On YouTube (2020)
- How To Make Your Songs Trend: 8 Steps (2020 Guide)
- Social Media For Musicians: 9 Strategies That Work
- TikTok For Musicians (Helpful Guide For Beginners) 2020
- Email Marketing For Musician Using Social Media For Free (Definitive Guide)
- TikTok Music Promotion: 8 Easy Strategies To Increase Engagement and Go viral
- What Should Musicians Post On Instagram? How Often?
