Do you use YouTube to promote your business, your blog, or even yourself? As one of the biggest and most popular websites in the world, YouTube presents numerous opportunities for marketers and businesses to reach their target audience with compelling content. And if you’re looking for the tools that will help you properly grow and manage your YouTube channel, you’re in the right place.
In this blog post, I’m going to share four tools for YouTube marketing to help you grow your channel.
If you’re not on YouTube, though…here are a few reasons to show you why you (maybe) should:
- After Google, YouTube is the most popular website in the world; in fact, as recently as May 2018 there were 8 billion monthly logged-in users
- About 95/96% of US Internet users aged 18 to 34 use YouTube; in fact, YouTube claims that more 18-34 years-olds from the US are watching YouTube than any TV network – on mobile alone
- It’s not just Americans that use YouTube – the platform is available in 88 countries and in 76 different languages
In other words, YouTube is extremely popular all over the world, steadily growing every year and attracting more users, more videos, and more influencers.
So if you want to make the most out of your YouTube channel, here are some of the best tools that will help you grow:
For managing your channel: Agorapulse
Like with other social networks, social media management tools are incredibly useful and time-saving because they allow you to manage your mentions in a quicker manner.
YouTube can actually get a bit difficult to manage, especially as your channel grows and you get more and more comments that need responding to.
Agorapulse is a social media management tool that works with most major social networks – including YouTube.
In terms of YouTube management, there are several useful features for managing your channels.
To start with, the comments; you can pre-moderate comments directly in your dashboard to decide which to approve (and when). Furthermore, you have access to a social inbox where you’ll be able to see all of your latest comments – as well as respond to them. To help you save more time, they also offer you the option to save “common replies”; meaning, you can save replies that you can re-use to respond to comments faster.
For example, if you get a lot of comments complimenting your videos, you can create a “common reply” to thank the viewer and only make small adjustments to your response as needed to personalize it.
If you manage your channel/s with as part of a team, you’ll be happy to know there are some collaboration tools for teams available as well; for example, add users to your account and give them specific roles, leave notes, and assign tasks and comments to the right person.
All of your interactions with viewers and subscribers will be logged into the built-in social CRM tool, which also allows you to make notes and tag users accordingly.
And last but not least, you can also monitor your brand name – meaning, you’ll be able to catch any mention in comments or videos so that you can react as soon as possible.
For optimizing your YouTube videos: TubeBuddy
YouTube isn’t just one of the biggest websites in the world – it’s also one of the biggest search engines. That makes it imperative to optimize your videos for the search engine if you want more people to find your videos.
There are several factors that contribute to your video’s ranking, including:
- Number of subscribers and number of new subscribers after viewing a video
- The keywords and tags you use
- Your watch time
- Your channel engagement: likes and dislikes, comments, and shares
TubeBuddy has a plethora of apps and tools for YouTubers – including, of course, video SEO tools (15, to be exact):
Some of them are for optimising your videos, while others are for tracking your SEO success.
For example, you can use the Insta-suggest tool to get tag suggestions for your videos automatically, as you write. Or, you can analyse your video performance to get SEO suggestions that will help you improve and grow your channel.
Additionally, you can also keep an eye on your video rankings for the tags you used and A/B test different headlines, descriptions, tags, and thumbnails to see how they perform.
Plus, another very useful feature is that you can see what tags others are using on their videos and copy them over to use on your own videos; this will help you understand what types of tags perform best in your niche so that you can better optimise your videos.
For creating YouTube artwork: Crello
Great channel and video artwork will help you generate more subscribers and more views – which then help boost your engagement too.
There are several types of artwork that you need to create for a YouTube channel; most notably, you need channel artwork (i.e. the main image on your channels’ page) and thumbnails for your videos.
To help you create these visuals quickly without compromising on quality, try Crello. It’s very similar to Canva– which is another great option, by the way – but it does have more options for custom thumbnails.
To create your own visuals, you can start from scratch and use images from their library (or your own), as well as all kinds of design elements to put together your channel artwork or thumbnails.
Or, you can use their templates; just browse through the list of formats to find the one you need and click on it to see your template options:
You can then customize the template to your liking and even completely change it (just use it for the precise image dimensions) – images, text, icons, illustrations, logos, and more.
It’s very easy and quick, which is so important – you’re likely spending enough time creating videos, so you don’t want to spend an hour creating a thumbnail for one of your videos.
Analyse any YouTube public channel: BirdSong Analytics
Analytics help you understand what works and what doesn’t. They allow you to see patterns in data, such as (and these are just examples, not facts!):
- Videos under 2 minutes perform better
- Videos will longer headlines get more views
- Certain video categories get more engagement on average
- How average views and engagement differ based on the length of a video
And so on and so forth – basically, this information helps you optimise your strategy so that you can create better videos, use better headlines and tags, adjust the length of your videos based on audience preference, and so on.
To help with all of this, use a tool like BirdSong YouTube Analytics. It’s a pay-as-you-go service that lets you analyse any public YouTube channel (including your own, of course) and provides engagement analytics, information about their video SEO strategy, video metadata (such as duration, titles, and so on), and in-depth post analytics (such as video posting times and days).
You can use this as a way to learn from similar channels that are performing very well both in terms of subscriber numbers and in terms of engagement. Make sure to analyse your channel too, though – there’s plenty to learn from your own mistakes and your wins to help you optimise your channel and videos.
Conclusion
Each of the tools in this list helps with one essential part of YouTube marketing:
- Engaging your users
- Optimising your videos for the YouTube search engine
- Creating artwork for your channel and videos
- Using analytics to understand trends and optimise strategies and videos
Have you tried any of these tools yet?