YouTube Music Branding: 5 Essential Strategies

YYouTube is a massive social media platform. With 48 video hours uploaded every minute, 3 billion videos viewed on an average daily and 70% of traffic coming from non-US countries, musicians cannot ignore the power of YouTube networking.

As an artist in the 21st century, it is difficult to survive. You need a plan to earn from your talent and one of the first steps to execute this plan is YouTube music branding.

Image credit: sko11ie on Flickr

As an experienced online marketer and product promoter, I can list these 5 essential strategies to spread your music videos on YouTube. The applicability and success of these strategies depend on the estimated outcome of the music video(s).

1. Use Cross Promotion

Target existing music video advertisers whose channels attract a lot of eyeballs every week; you can find them through YouTube search. Approach these advertisers and request them to promote / recommend a snippet of your video with their videos.

Since you will be targeting established advertiser channels, people will really listen and follow their recommendations.

2. Use YouTube ‘Promotion’

YouTube hosts paid advertisement promotions; you can always see them on the right-hand upper corner or in the top list of keyword-based search results. Therefore, you can contact the YouTube representatives and get your video/s featured too.

Since this is a paid strategy, identify the desired outcome of this first. I am sure you won’t pay hundreds of dollars just to get people view the music video. Right! So if you want to increase subscribers list, sell music videos, get membership from music lovers, the YouTube featured promotion works really well.

3. Share Your Music Creation Experience

You can simply create and upload a video about “how I create music?” Some people get ideas walking in nature’s benevolence, some people like to close themselves off from the world and write… what tickles your creative bone?

To personally connect with the viewers, you need to give them something personal. Talk to the viewers. Show them what you do and how you do it. Make the viewers a part of your existence.

4. Give a Niche Channel Name & Be Accessible

Most of the time, YouTube videos do not have contact details of the uploader and the channel name is equally weird and funny. Therefore, if you want to distinguish your brand from the others on YouTube, make the channel your brand name. It shouldn’t be simple “xyz” or a random arrangement of letters.

Make the channel name specific and do not, absolutely do not forget to give contact details, especially the name and email address. You never know the opportunities you are going to miss just because a certain music patron couldn’t contact the music video creator!

5. Build Your YouTube Music Community

The reason online marketing fails is because we fail to communicate with our target audience. Social media marketing is not a miracle to hand you stardom automatically; you need to sweat it and you do it with communication – it is the key.

How do you build this community? Create a community page outside YouTube and encourage visitors who view your videos to sign up on the community page. Do this by embedding the community page URL in the video. Reply to viewer comments promptly and take criticisms positively.

Keep the YouTube channel and community content fresh. Give people incentives to come back again and again for your music videos. Such incentives could be rebate coupons on buying your music, discounts for people who hire your musical talents, weekly giveaways and lots of other stuff.

Summary

Music as an art is turning commercial as the time passes. If you want people to notice and appreciate your musical talents, you need to strategize position and market your talent.

In short, you need to create a brand presence online and what better way there is than YouTube.

Please also take a look at what Sarah Howard writes about optimizing videos online.

Chitraparna Sinha is the founder of SocialVani where she is building a useful resource for small business entrepreneurs and assisting clients in start-up blogging and building eCommerce ventures.