YouTube is a major social media platform and is the second-most popular social media channel worldwide — which is why learning how to promote your YouTube channel is vital for your online video strategy.
Short-form video is taking off on social media, and YouTube presents the rare opportunity to share both organic, lo-fi short-form content or hi-fi long-form video content in one central location. But how can your fantastic video content be found? By promoting your YouTube channel on other social media channels — and we’re here to share the best ways to do it.
In this blog, we explore:
- Benefits of promoting your YouTube channel.
- How to promote your channel.
- How to amplify your YouTube reach.
Benefits of Promoting Your YouTube Channel
Promoting your YouTube channel has many benefits — while ‘build it and they will come’ is a common refrain, this isn’t necessarily true for your online content. Even if your video performs well with organic search, promoting your YouTube channel on other channels can help expand your content’s reach and get it in front of more people.
Here are just some benefits of promoting your YouTube channel.
Increase Reach and Traffic
Would you guess that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google? It is — YouTube boasts over 2.5 million active monthly users. Sharing video content to YouTube helps your brand reach users from your target demographic who might not be as active on other channels like TikTok or Instagram. Plus, your content has the potential to reach a wider variety of users in general.
Suppose you decide to tap into paid advertising, like Instagram ads, to promote your YouTube channel. In that case, you can even hyper-target specific users based on demographics like region, age, interests and more.
Drive Website Traffic
The Google algorithm considers a wide range of factors regarding how well videos do or don’t rank, and one of these is the acronym EEAT. EEAT stands for expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness. Content that powerfully demonstrates these principles has a better chance of appearing higher in search results — but why is this important for YouTube? Marketers who create high-quality content with YouTube SEO best practices, like optimizing their videos with the right keywords, hashtags and titles (more on this below), have a better chance of appearing in search results and driving more traffic to your channel, website and social profiles.
Promoting your YouTube channel and receiving more views can indicate that your content is popular with users, making the Google and YouTube algorithms more likely to recommend your content above others.
Gain Deeper Understanding of your Audience
Promoting your YouTube channel gives you the benefit of generating interest in your video content, but it also helps your team learn more about your target audience and where they find you. By setting up the right UTM parameters, your team can measure which user groups are clicking your ads, YouTube LikeShop links or finding your channel from search, your website or other means. By understanding who finds your channel and where they find you, you can better position your YouTube promotion strategy.
How To Promote Your YouTube Channel: 15 Tips
Now that you understand the benefits of promoting your YouTube channel, let’s discuss how you can promote your channel, create a successful YouTube channel for your brand and produce easy-to-find content for your users.
1. Optimize With YouTube SEO Best Practices
We briefly mentioned it above, but a vital step in enhancing your YouTube presence is ensuring you optimize your videos. Optimizing your YouTube video is relatively simple, but does require some specific actions, like:
- Hashtags: Using the right mix of trending hashtags helps indicate what your video is about to YouTube and helps users find your content among related hashtags. This is why finding the right balance of hashtags not under or overused so your video can be found, but not lost in a sea of related videos is so essential.
- Keywords: Using the right keywords in your channel and video titles, descriptions, and captions can help your content be found.
- Channel and video descriptions: Using the right keywords is not just for your title but your channel, playlist and video descriptions. Using enticing words that clearly communicate your video’s content but are searchable and sound natural is key to attracting users to your content.
- Chapters: Adding and naming chapters for the specific segments of your video adds more context to the topics you cover and lets users easily navigate to particular sections.
- Title and end cards: Use descriptive, enticing title and end cards to compel users to watch your video and see what it’s about when hovering over the time bar.
- Accessibility: Tapping into YouTube’s accessibility features, like ensuring captions are lined up and grammatically correct, is helpful to ensure a variety of people can absorb and take in your content.
2. Write Catchy Titles
While visuals matter on YouTube, don’t discount the importance of catchy titles. When writing YouTube video titles, consider your video’s topic and which terms people use to find similar content. Does your video contain information about the latest lipstick trends? Look at search results on YouTube to discover similarities in titles — copying other video titles is never a good idea, but this will give you a good indication of which keywords people use to find lipstick trends.
Another way to find specific keywords people use on YouTube is to use Google Trends. To find keywords to incorporate into your video titles, type in a keyword, ‘lipstick trends’ for example. You can then filter results by country, time period, categories and, most importantly, for this purpose, by search type. Select ‘YouTube Search’ and hit ‘enter’ to find related topics, queries, user interest over time and other details that will help you use the right keywords your audience actually searches with.
In this example, Sol de Janeiro uses the popularity of their star product and the buzz on social surrounding how to pronounce it to create an engaging video title for a fun and educational Short.
3. Engage With Your Community
To foster a strong YouTube presence, building a relationship with your community and followers is crucial to creating an engaged environment. A community management tool lets you respond to questions and queries from one central place while also allowing you to escalate customer issues to conversational commerce tools like Salesforce or Zendesk.
4. Link to YouTube in LikeShop
A relatively simple way to promote your YouTube is to link it in your link-in-bio tool, like LikeShop. This link lives in the website section of your social media profiles and typically includes a link to custom landing pages, campaign focuses, other social networks and more. This is a great way to make the most of the URL real estate in your bio and encourage traffic.
5. Create Custom Thumbnails
YouTube video thumbnails help entice viewers to your content and give them a quick picture of your video. You can use thumbnails generated by YouTube or upload your own custom thumbnails with Creator Studio if your account is verified. You can add intro and outro thumbnails to your video, and info cards throughout that feature links to playlists, your channel, another video or a link. This is a great way to link to specific products or campaigns for an interactive user experience.
Users can add automatic or custom thumbnails from their computer, iPhone, iPad or Android device.
In this example, Kevin Murphy uses the power of a before and after image in their thumbnail to attract users and pique their curiousity.
6. Embed YouTube Videos on Your Website
Embedding YouTube videos in your website on blogs, resource pages and even product pages, if appropriate, is a great way to garner video views, generate interest for your YouTube content and promote your YouTube channel.
7. Cross-Promote YouTube Channel (and Videos)
Cross-sharing your YouTube channel is a great way to encourage traffic and promote a YouTube channel. We’ve discussed linking your YouTube channel in your link-in-bio — here are some additional ways of cross-promoting your YouTube channel:
- Linking videos on relevant website landing pages.
- Share YouTube videos or playlists in newsletters.
- Allow embedding so others can embed your videos.
- Share edited video snippets of fun or compelling moments to TikTok or Instagram Reels.
8. Use Clear Call-to-Actions
12. Share Videos in YouTube Community Tab
The YouTube Community Tab is a feature on your profile available to creators with advanced features enabled with the right channel permissions. The Community Tab acts as a hub between your channel and your viewers and allows your team to share polls, GIFs, text updates, images and videos from other channels with your followers.
9. Collaborate With Creators
Collaborating with creators is a great way to expand your reach and promote your YouTube channel to new target demographics. Depending on your niche, partnering with creators can be especially useful to establish your YouTube presence if you’re new to the platform. Over 307K YouTube creators have between 10-50K followers, which presents an opportunity for your brand to reach thousands of new users and establish your following. Creators benefit from having reputable
10. Make YouTube Shorts and Livestreams
Short-form video is more engaging than ever — Shorts see higher cross-channel engagement at 3.9% compared to on-demand videos at 3.4%. While it’s certainly helpful to create video content specifically for YouTube Shorts, snipping longer video clips into bite-sized form for some brands is a great way to encourage viewers to interact with your content and visit your channel. Shorts use a similar format to TikTok or Reels, which encourages continuous scrolling — optimizing your Shorts content increases your chances of being shared among similar videos, which, in turn, increases your discoverability.
11. Curate Video Playlists
Video playlists are essential to a well-curated YouTube channel. Most YouTube marketing strategies include themed videos as part of a larger marketing campaign that often uses YouTube trends to create amusing content. For example, Alo Yoga (@aloyoga) uses playlists to showcase their recent product launches, while Elle magazine’s (@elle) channel features a ‘Song Association’ series, featured in playlists for their respective seasons. This helps them generate interest for their interviews and other features with various artists.
12. Share Videos in YouTube Community Tab
The YouTube Community Tab is a feature on your profile available to creators with advanced features enabled with the right channel permissions. The Community Tab acts as a hub between your channel and your viewers and allows your team to share polls, GIFs, text updates, images and videos from other channels with your followers.
13. Add a YouTube Widget to Your Website
Widgets are excellent tools for YouTube channel promotion. A YouTube widget is a small snippet of a YouTube interface that lets visitors interact with your channel or a specific video on a given landing page.
14. Run Paid YouTube Ads
Wondering how to promote your channel on YouTube? Running paid advertising on YouTube using Google Ads is a useful tactic to get more eyes on your channel or promote a campaign. These videos typically run on YouTube but will also feature on websites and apps that are Google video partners, depending on the ad format. The paid ad types available on YouTube include:
- Skippable in-stream: Skippable ads are featured on YouTube and Google Video Partners.
- In-feed: Clickable video ad content shown on YouTube, homefeed and YouTube search.
- Non-skippable in-stream: Non-skippable ads are shown on YouTube and Google Video Partners.
- Bumper: Non-skippable message pop-ups, mainly used for awareness and shown in YouTube Videos and Google Video Partners.
- Outstream: Shown only on Google Video Partners.
Amplify YouTube Reach With Dash Hudson
Dash Hudson’s YouTube Insights offers brands a deeper understanding of their audience's behaviors and preferences, which allows your team to tailor your video content and tactics strategically. Social Listening Trends and Topics lets brands monitor conversations and trends across YouTube, providing valuable insights using sentiment analysis into what content resonates with their audience. This also helps your team identify potential collaboration opportunities with influencers and creators.
Social Analytics and Monitoring help monitor your overall efforts on YouTube, providing custom reporting so you can keep track of the KPIs and YouTube metrics that matter most.
FAQs
How to promote your YouTube channel for free?
There is no best way to promote your YouTube channel, and many teams might want to start with free promotion before seeking paid options. If you want to know how to promote your YouTube channel for free, here are some tips:
- Be your own YouTube channel promoter: When creating content for YouTube or other websites, invite viewers to visit your YouTube channel for more content. Doing a makeup tutorial? Mention that you have a range of other tutorials available on your channel.
- Use cross-channel marketing: Share your YouTube channel in your link in bio, create bite-sized video snippets for for Instagram Reels and TikTok, and share relevant videos and playlists to social networks like X.
- Engage with other content: By engaging with other content from similar channels, liking and commenting on posts from nano and micro-influencers that your audience likely also follows helps get your channel — and brand — in front of more eyes and build connections with other creators.
How much does it cost to promote your channel on YouTube?
There is no one-size-fits-all budget when it comes to how to promote a YouTube channel. However, YouTube recommends that beginner accounts start small if they choose to run a paid campaign — this means a shared or daily ad budget of between $10 USD to $50 USD. Generally speaking, the smaller your budget, the less your ad will get shown, and the more you spend, the more your ad will be shown. Starting with a smaller budget is a great way to identify what works and what doesn’t before spending more.
Is it worth promoting your YouTube video?
Yes, it’s worth promoting your YouTube video. Whether you choose to do this with organic, free tactics, or paid measures depends entirely on your campaign, social and paid budgets, marketing goals and a slew of other factors. However, if you plan to create a YouTube channel and dedicate your time to honing your video strategy to meet your goals, it’s likely worth spending time incorporating promotional tactics to increase your channel’s scope.
