Optimize Your YouTube Brand Account To Increase Channel Traffic

If you’re brand new to the EmberTribe blog, you might not know that we publish a weekly TribeTalk video on YouTube. Each episode brings together different EmberTribe team members to talk about what’s hot in digital marketing news, discuss tips for improving growth strategy, and share tutorials for popular advertising tools. Video is a powerful marketing tool, and while it’s always been attractive to advertisers, the massive popularity of short-form videos (a la TikTok) has proven, once again, that video marketing is here to stay. 

I’m going to pull back the curtain for a second and reveal something...when we started our YouTube brand account and channel, it wasn’t only out of a desire to share free valuable content with the masses. Anyone who works in digital marketing knows that single channel marketing is a thing of the past. It’s just not enough to have a super cool website anymore! That’s why brands use a combination of paid ads, social media engagement, email marketing, and so on. All of that stuff combined equals your growth system.

So now that the illusion is shattered 😉 let’s talk about how to grow your YouTube account to boost traffic to your videos and your website. EmberTribe’s YouTube brand channel recently hit 1,000 subscribers, which is a pretty significant accomplishment! We are honored that 1,000 people want to tune into our team’s insights every week. When we hit this milestone, it also got us thinking about how we could leverage our YouTube channel for more website traffic and, ultimately, more clients.

Let’s take a look at how businesses can grow their YouTube brand account to generate leads and sales. 

Optimize Your Business YouTube Channel

YouTube has a ton of features to help content creators get their videos to the people. But if you’re not familiar with YouTube or you’re only using it for the occasional video, you’ll probably find all of the features to be a bit overwhelming. So how can you really optimize your YouTube channel without getting lost in all the possibilities? 

First, customize your brand channel page. You should add a branded header, channel trailer, and channel description first. Make sure you are highlighting a video with a lot of value, that your header clearly represents your business. Your description should describe what your company does and what kind of content subscribers can expect from your channel.

Another important thing to remember about YouTube is that it’s a part of Google world, and content can actually be optimized for search both within YouTube and through the Google search engine. Pretty rad! That means you’ll want to make sure your video titles and video descriptions include targeted keywords and are well-written.

(Remember that search engines are smart enough to know if you’re writing valuable information for humans or just plugging a bunch of keywords. In other words, don’t skimp on writing a solid video description!)

You’ll need to do keyword research to figure out what terms you should use in your text. You don’t need anything particularly fancy, but if you already do keyword research for your content development strategy, check in to see if your keyword tool has a YouTube function. If you’re interested in a tool built specifically for optimizing YouTube content, consider adding a channel management platform like TubeBuddy to your toolbelt. 

Monitor Your Channel To Gather Insights

Chances are, you’re going to start out creating content that interests you and/or aligns with topics you’ve uncovered in your industry keyword research. Once you post and promote that content, you’ll get to discover how your target audience responds to what you’re publishing. Now you’re in a whole new world of optimization opportunities to grow your channel!

Here are a few things you can do to keep your YouTube growth momentum going:

• Engage with your audience! If they are leaving comments or asking questions, answer them to the best of your ability. If you can, invite them to learn more about your brand by visiting a landing page or website. 
• Pull reports from your channel content to see which videos have gotten the most views. Can you recreate your success by duplicating the format, video description template, or main topic?
• Promote your YouTube page across multiple channels (and use those channels to promote your YouTube page). Multi-touch acquisition is the new normal, and keeping folks interested in your offer will keep them coming back
• Recommend videos. Did you know that you can recommend what video a viewer should watch next by suggesting videos through content cards? And if you don’t want to get too deep into that task, you might instead opt to create playlists to keep your viewer watching your channel for longer. 

Creating and maintaining a business channel on YouTube might seem like a lot of work. Not gonna lie, it can be! But you could be leveraging the huge user base of YouTube to drive more traffic to your website through a customized and curated channel, and even get conversions because of it.