Vloggers & Marketing

HOW YOUTUBE VLOGGERS CAN CREATE A GOOD MARKETING PLAN

The following are some key findings by Vlognation

• Video has become essential: A significant 60% of marketers use video in their marketing and 73% plan on increasing their use of video. 

• Live video is hot: A significant 50% of marketers plan on using live video services such as Facebook Live and Periscope, and 50% want to learn more about live video. 

• Facebook and YouTube hold the top spots for future plans: At least 63% of marketers plan on increasing their use of these social networks.

• Snapchat is on a growth trajectory: Only 5% of marketers are using Snapchat, yet 16% plan on increasing their Snapchat activities and 28% of marketers want to learn more about Snapchat.

• Facebook is the most important social network for marketers by a long shot! When asked to select their most important platform, 55% of marketers chose Facebook, followed by LinkedIn at 18%. Plus, 67% of marketers plan on increasing their Facebook marketing activities.

• Many marketers are unsure about their Facebook marketing: A significant 40% of marketers don't know if Facebook traffic has declined in the last 12 months and 35% aren't sure if their Facebook marketing is effective.

• Facebook ads dominate: A surprising 86% of social marketers regularly use Facebook ads, while only 18% use Twitter ads. 

• Tactics and engagement are top areas marketers want to master: At least 90% of marketers want to know the most effective social tactics and the best ways to engage their audience with social media. 

Blogging & Vlogging

In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to worry about marketing and advertising for your YouTube channel. You could just create high-quality content, upload it to YouTube, and the views and subscribers would just start flowing in.

Well, as you know, we most definitely do not live in a perfect world. If you want to build your vlog channel and make your vlogging brand successful, you need to create (and stick to) a good marketing plan. Fortunately, this is a simple process. With a little bit of research and organization, you can come up with and maintain a really solid plan in very little time.

Research Your Target Market (Vlog Audience)

Before you do anything else, you first need to research your market. Who is your target audience on YouTube? How old are they? What are their interests? Where are the majority of them located? What kind of content do they follow and why? 

Get as specific as possible about your target market, and you’ll have a better idea of how to reach them and what kind of brand voice to use when you market to them. Identify that brand voice, and make sure that you use it consistently in your YouTube vlogs, your social media posts, your advertisements, and in any other marketing media for your channel.

Create Goals for Your YouTube Channel

Next, sit down and think about what you want to do with your YouTube channel and where you want to see it go. How many subscribers do you want to have one month from now? Six months from now? In one year? Do you want to monetize your YouTube channel, and, if so, do you want to turn your vlogs into your main source of income?

Once you’ve identified and established your long-term goals, start making a few short-term goals. Write these down, and then write down some milestones that will get you to those goals. Between those milestones, write down tasks and deadlines to get you to them.

As you follow the next few steps, you can work these into this plan, and you’ll have a full map of how to get from where you are to where you want to be with your YouTube channel.

Identify Your Top Marketing Outlets

To reach your goals, you know that you’ll need to spread the word and do some effective marketing for your vlogs on YouTube. As one of your first tasks, identify some marketing outlets that will allow you to do this. These include blogging, social networks where your viewers hang out online, print publications that they read, online magazines and publications, and other outlets. Find as many as you can and start to look into how you can become involved with them.

Know Your Strategy for Each Marketing Outlet

After you’ve identified these outlets, you can organize and streamline your efforts to get involved with them, and published in them, by creating a strategy for each. For example, your strategy for Facebook could be to encourage your friends to follow your new page, post regularly, and comment on and share other relevant users’ material regularly. Your blogging strategy could be to recap your YouTube vlogs, provide additional tips, engage with your audience in the blog comments, and more.

Your strategies shouldn’t, however, involve making multiple posts per day, all of which are nothing more than advertisements for your YouTube vlogs. Create a strategy for each of your marketing outlets, and be as detailed as possible!

Add Deadlines to The Plan

Next, assign deadlines for your short- and long-term marketing goals, as well as your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Setting deadlines for these items is a great way to make them feel more real and more concrete to you. Furthermore, if you’re consistently working on small deadlines (e.g., write this week’s Facebook posts, post a blog by Wednesday, etc.), you are guaranteed to be working toward your bigger deadlines, too.

Instead of setting yourself with a huge task like, “Get 1000 new viewers by next month,” you’ll be setting yourself much easier, more tangible tasks, like, “Upload today’s vlog by 11:00 AM and post about it to Twitter and Facebook by 11:30.”

Keep Your Marketing Plan Open

Finally, don’t make your YouTube channel’s marketing plan so set-in-stone that it can’t be adapted, tweaked, and improved. Give yourself room to breathe so that you can avoid burning out and so that you can keep up with the latest social media and vlogging trends.

For example, hashtags and mentions are great ways to get more exposure right now, but you never know when Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram might implement a new structure to help you get even more people to see your posts, pictures, and tweets.

Use these six tips together, and you’ll be on your way to creating a good marketing plan that you can easily shift and improve as you learn what works and what does not. Don’t forget to use your analytics tools for your social media outlets and your YouTube channel. These will let you see which methods are working the best and which videos and posts are the most popular. By using this information, you can easily improve your YouTube channel and your marketing plan and tailor them more to your audience for success.

†This article has been reposted from the following source:

http://www.vlognation.com/youtube-vlog-channel-marketing-plan/

New Media

In 2008 the average American was spending 2.8 hours per day consuming digital media. By 2015 that number had doubled to 5.6 hours and is predicted to continue rising. (Angwin, 2010) This trend towards digital media is relatively new. Within the past decade westerners have switched from consuming passive forms of media like television, newspapers and magazines, to consuming and creating media using active, two-way forms. Today the majority of consumption happens through the web using devices such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. These devices allow users not only to consume media, but also to produce it. As a result individuals using this new technology have left behind a virtual treasure-trove of information pertaining to their personality as well as their personal and social habits. The aggregation and utilization of this data is revolutionizing industry and academia in ways never before possible. Online advertisements are now customized for individual users increasing the likelihood of companies getting their products in front of potential customers. (Turow, 2011) Within academia, scientists are now able to predict things like gender, age, income, and intelligence, based solely on a person’s online social habits. (Adah et al. 2014)