4 Mistakes New YouTube Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them

YouTube marketing can be a great way to connect with your potential customers and target audience. After all, video can be a more effective way of encouraging a user to take action than other forms of marketing mediums in many cases.

But YouTube marketers make a lot of common mistakes when starting out, and often don’t get the results they are looking for.

However, let’s try to change that with this post where we walk you through the 4 most common mistakes YouTube marketers make and how you can avoid them.

#1 Not Staying True to Your Niche

Niche relevancy is very important in the eyes of both Google and YouTube. Just like Google gives preference to sites that are an authority in their niche for search terms relevant to that particular niche, YouTube too tries to give more exposure to channels that it perceives as an expert for the particular niche they are in.

What we mean is don’t make videos on everything you think users on YouTube will find fun. Even if those videos can get you the views.

After all, you want to get views, but you want to get them from your target audience, not random YouTube users. Moreover, when you put out videos on many different topics, YouTube won’t see you as an expert in your niche.

You won’t get any favors from YouTube when it comes to giving you exposure from your target audience, and you certainly don’t want that to happen.

So simply put, be ruthlessly relevant to your niche. Never make a video that deviates away from your niche. Every video on your channel should be perfectly relevant to your niche, and be directed only towards your target audience.

Following this tip alone will get you quite far in terms of YouTube marketing.

Not Doing Competitor Research

We get you. You know your niche and you know how to make good videos (or maybe you think you do!).

But do you know what works on YouTube? Well, it may be hard to digest, but the fact is that ideas are a dime a dozen, particularly on YouTube. And the reality is that it pays to not try to reinvent the wheel and just go with the flow.

Basically, you should stick to what’s already working, what’s working well for others. And then try to do it better.

When many of your competitors are using a similar strategy, or a similar type or style of content, and if they are doing well, then it doesn’t make much sense to do something completely different and take a very different route.

So many competitors doing something successfully only means that it’s what YouTube wants and expects of you as well. Sure, you can experiment with different ideas, but only relying on your ideas isn’t going to serve you well.

That said, here are some of the key things you would want to take a note of when doing competitor research:

• What type of videos are working best for them – You can find their best videos by checking out your competitor channels and sorting their videos by the “most popular” option
• What type of content they are creating, and brainstorming on how you can do it better
• How they optimize their videos – Their video titles, descriptions, thumbnails and so on

An important factor is also going to be to find the keywords your competitors are using on their successful videos that have managed to get a lot of exposure. There’s a little trick that you can use for that.

When you’re on their video page that you want to find the keywords for, right click on the page and click on the View Page Source option. Then simply use the Find function by pressing CTRL+F and type in “keywords” until you find the keywords being used for that particular video.

We just did this on a popular video of one of our potential competitors and here are the keywords we found. You can find the keywords being used by your competitors in the same way.

Not Utilizing Video Playlists

It’s surprising how few YouTube marketers know how to use video playlists to retain viewers and increase views and engagement on their videos. This includes many popular YouTube channels as well.

As you probably already know, YouTube tries its best to make users stay on its platform for as long as possible. One of the ways it uses to do this is instantly start another related video for them once the current one they are watching ends.

They are popularly known as ‘suggested videos.’ However, most of the time, they suggest videos from other channels after your video ends. This means a targeted user for you who just viewed your video is now going to watch a video from some other channel, who might belong to one of your competitor as well.

But how good it would be if the next video that would auto-start for them belonged to your channel as well? This is precisely what the video playlists can help you do.

Image source

When you create different playlists based on different cluster of topics you’re targeting within your niche, YouTube won’t direct the users to videos from different channels once your video that they were watching ends.

They would instead simply start playing the next video in your playlist. Imagine how many more views it would get for your videos? Of course, it would also prevent your targeted viewers to land on other channels right after viewing your video.

Not Building a Trustworthy “Platform”

Of course, YouTube is the platform that we are discussing here, but you too need to create your own little platform that your target audience can trust.

Just think about it. How likely would one of your potential users be to view your video if your channel has less than 20 subscribers?

Now think how much more likely they would be to view your video they stumble upon if your channel has a few thousand subscribers?

It just adds so much authenticity to your channel. Of course, your content still needs to be very good to make them keep watching and turn them into a subscriber or customer, but building a trustworthy platform for your content is going to play a big role in attracting your target audience.

This is why buying YouTube subscribers can be so important for new channels. It not only makes your channel more trustworthy and attractive to potential viewers, but if done right, can also make YouTube give you more exposure.

A Final Word

Avoiding these common mistakes itself can give you a good head-start with your YouTube marketing endeavors. Don’t let the initial lack of results discourage you, as it takes quite a bit of patience to start getting traction on YouTube.

But once it does, then the snowballing effect often does the rest!