YouTube is the most popular online video platform as of now. Over hundreds of hours of content is uploaded every minute on this platform, and on average, the viewership crosses billions of hours every day.

This makes YouTube a viable, if not the best, medium of marketing and entrepreneurship.

However, in real life, it's not as simple as it sounds. Many people don't even possess the basic ideas when it comes to competitive marketing via YouTube strategy.

Even though this article is primarily for entry-level YouTubers, the strategies explained here will help you out in the long run.

So, sit tight and explore the world of YouTube marketing while we discuss how you can ensure the growth of your brand’s channel.

Once you have created your YouTube channel, you need to map out a content plan right away. The most important thing about content, apart from quality, is that you have to be consistent.

There's no alternative to consistency to ensure a loyal community for your channel.

Think of it like this. Let’s say you opened a channel about sports and uploaded various related clips. You'd soon gain subscriptions from sport-lovers throughout the world, given that the clips you upload are of high quality and cater to a specific audience or community.

If you were to suddenly stop posting said clips altogether and upload cooking streams instead, it would ruin the consistency of your channel.

You'll indeed lose a significant portion of your viewers. 

While it's true that many other factors play into the up and down of viewership, it doesn't negate the fact that if you continuously keep changing the direction of your channel, you'll ultimately find no place of your own.

As a result, it will leave a negative imprint on your channel unless you start providing consistent content again.

So, decide on a particular niche before opening your YouTube channel and build up your whole content plan around that. Remember - with consistency comes reliability.

If your videos are all interrelated and consistent, you will soon establish yourself as a trustworthy content creator before your audience.

Even though there's ultimately no alternative to quality content with progressive consistency, YouTube ads will make the job a lot easier for you. It can take over months, if not years, to drive significant traffic to your channel if you only adopt organic ways. 

That's why we highly recommend partnering up with YouTube ads to drive up the overall traffic.

It works even better if you pair up with an advertising agency that caters to the same products as your niche. For example - if your channel is sports-related and you get sponsorship from an agency that promotes sports apparel, it could create a win-win situation. For more info on the cost of running paid ads, check out this guide to PPC management pricing.

Why? Because people are more likely to click on the ads if they find them relevant to the content they are watching. The more clicks the ad gets, the more your revenue increases.

As for revenue, YouTube ads are a great way to add to the overall investment in your channel. Once you have a functioning channel, you can utilize these tips to bring in even more revenue from YouTube.

However, you have to remain careful while using YouTube ads to your advantage. Initially, you might want to opt for more ads to increase the traffic but that would be a great mistake.

YouTube ads are only worth it when they are limited to a certain extent. If you overload your videos with several different ads every few seconds, it will come off as extremely spammy.

When that happens, you'll lose reliability before your audience, and they'll unsubscribe from your channel.

So, it's best to first build up your channel with a variety of amazing content. Once that's done, and you start to get a little traction, you can lightly monetize your videos.

If you do it right and keep the ads within control, you'll eventually receive personal sponsorships from various agencies, which will be even better for your channel.

This one seems quite redundant at first, as it's pretty self-explanatory. However, multiple studies have confirmed that even though it seems unnecessary, a specific call to action helps grow your YouTube channel by manifold.

People somehow feel more included when you are directly inviting them to be a part of your community. This builds up a sense of trustworthiness between both parties and ensures mutual appreciation.

As a result, it's best to keep a specific call to action in all your clips.

You can present the call to action in various ways. For example - you can directly add a monologue either at the beginning or at the end, asking your viewers to subscribe to your channel.

In addition to the subscription, you can politely ask them to like, comment, and share your videos with others.

Again, if it's more of a slide-based video with an instrumental background, you can just add a separate slide at the end with the same monologue. You can use Canva, PicsArt, etc., to make a convincing slide for no cost at all. You should also consider color psychology in the design for the best impact with your call to action.

However, make sure that your call to action is to the point. Like advertisements, if you include them too often and ask for subscriptions every two seconds, the quality of your content will instantly take a major hit.

It will come across as 'begging for engagement', which will leave a lasting negative impact on your channel. Try to strategically include your call to action in a convincing and potent format.

SERP, keyword density, keyword length - these aren't terms for Google’s search engine optimization only. YouTube also qualifies as a search engine itself which directly refers to the presence of YouTube SEO.

Just like you do your research before publishing content on your blog so that Google will rank it higher, you have to optimize your YouTube videos as well. Unfortunately, it’s harder to rank your videos on YouTube as there are an array of additional factors that you have to keep in mind.

For starters - you have to do routine keyword research to create a convincing title for your videos. Then, you need to prepare a bunch of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords to include in your content.

Plus, you have to ensure you keep a keyword-rich short description of your videos with links to your socials and include multiple trending hashtags.

But that's not even half of it. You also need to create the perfect thumbnail for your videos. An enticing thumbnail will highly influence the overall click rate in your videos, 

That being said, refrain from using overly saturated thumbnails with misleading information - that's just a cheap tactic.

Finally, no matter what niche you select for your channel, chances are that there are already thousands of channels dedicated to that same topic. So, if you want to rise to the top amongst them, you need to research your contemporary channels thoroughly.

Start by using the free Keyword Planner service by Google Ads once you have selected the keywords for your niche. Then, search them up and filter channel-wise to find your competitors.

After that, it's just hours and hours of research. Thoroughly investigate their titles, descriptions, slides, call to action, thumbnails, viewership, etc. In other words, find their strengths and weaknesses in that particular niche.

Target the areas they are weak in and then strategically optimize your content to one-up them.

Of course, it will take a while, but if you keep at it, you'll slowly start to see substantial growth in your channel and community engagement.

Growing your company’s YouTube channel can have a significant impact on the bottom line of your business.

By following these five steps, you should start to see an uptick in subscribers, and eventually sales from your channel.