Before we begin, let’s make one thing very clear: marketing on YouTube requires a lot more effort in 2019, because more than 50 million creators are putting videos out there on a regular basis. Ever since the YouTube ban has been lifted, many Pakistani Creators have also dedicated their time and efforts to a YouTube channel. Moreover, reaching your target audience will also become difficult because no one likes to entertain ads between a video. So, how do you make your business stand out?

With the help of this guide, and a lot more research about the people you are trying to reach and the message you are trying to spread, marketing on YouTube is totally doable.

Topics covered in the article:

1. Basic Components of YouTube Marketing Strategy
   • Creating a Channel
   • Identify Target Audience
   • Take a Peek at Competitors
   • Pick Inspiration
   • Optimize Content for SEO
   • Uploading and Scheduling
   • Optimize the Channel
   • Playlists are Helpful
   • YouTube Advertising
2. YouTube with Influencer Marketing
   • Partner with Influencers
   • Reach Out
   • Make Arrangements
   • Two ways to Reach Out
   • Don’t ask for too much
   • A winning YouTube Partnership
3. How Pakistani Brands are working with Creators on YouTube

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Basic Components of YouTube Marketing Strategy

Let’s start with the basics, here is how you create a YouTube channel:

Creating a Channel

Firstly, you have to open an account on Google as your brand. You and others can manage this account as a brand. One of the Google services you can use with a brand account is YouTube. Here is what you will do:

1. Sign in to YouTube using your computer or on a mobile device
2. Go to the ‘channel list’
3. Click on ‘create a new channel’ or ‘use existing brand account’
4. If you already have a company Google account, you can create a channel for the company account
5. Fill out the details to name your channel and add contact numbers, etc and click ‘Done’.
6. When a channel is linked to a brand account, multiple people can run it, so you have to enter account managers
7. View this tutorial by YouTube to add or remove channel managers

A brand’s channel on YouTube is better when multiple people are managing it. You can learn how to shift to a YouTube business account through this tutorial.

Identify Target Audience

You can’t make a YouTube channel for everyone. Decide who is going to be the target audience for your channel. The Analytics tab in your channel will give you tons of information about viewers and their demographics. You can see view times, an average time for which people watch your videos and the interactions with your videos.

Demographics tab is where you have to perform the research. monitor the demographics to answer key questions like

Who is watching your videos?

How long are they watching for?

It is a strategy that works, because you can be happy when the target audience is watching and you can tweak the strategy to reach out to the target audience when required.

The Community tab in your channel is a goldmine. You can interact with your subscribers directly over here. Nobody like raking through comments, but when you pay close attention, you will find valuable feedback here. You can start a chain of questions here or run polls to understand your audience better.

Take a Peek at Competitors

Competition is inevitable because YouTube is open to all. If you are from a unique niche, you may not have this problem, but people from a saturated market have to look at what the competitor is doing. For starters, browse through your competitor’s channel and see what they are doing. Which videos are getting more views? What kinds of videos are more popular and where are they getting more dislikes?

Analyze everything: the kind of editing they have done, how they interact in the comments section, the keywords they use in the description, and at what time they post.

Most importantly, make sure your competitors are not running ads on your videos! You can find out how by reading through this Google adsense article.

Pick Inspiration

You are new to YouTube, so you immediately have a competitive edge over others, because you bring a new thought process with your channel. This also means that you can browse through your favorite channel and randomly pick a quality you like. Maybe someone has amazing typography on their thumbnails, or maybe someone has a really cool profile header image. Inspiration will help you decorate your channel beautifully.

On the other hand, YouTube itself is a great learning hub for people all over the globe. So you can search and watch videos about landing a channel, running a successful brand channel and other helpful tips.

Also Check Out:  Top Pakistani Youtubers with most subscribers 

Optimize Video Content for SEO

Then comes the search engine optimization. Do you know that some videos also appear on Google search results? You can curate every video of yours to appear on Google SERPS. Don’t worry if this doesn’t happen in one go. You can fix it and move on to better tactics. Here are some common and most important tips for beginners:

Title: Use a good/relevant title. Clickbait is popular, but your target audience might not like being fooled. YouTube titles can have 70 characters, but 60 are recommended to show up on Google SERPs.

Thumbnail: thumbnails should also not be click-bait, but they can have a wow factor to them. This is where you can partner with your design team to create the most beautiful thumbnails. Custom thumbnails perform better, but if you don’t have a designer right now you can freeze a frame.

Description: this is where you can use all the keywords you want. You can insert links in here and other helpful information related to the video. YouTube advises the following:

• Write up to 5000 characters (please don’t exhaust this capacity!)
• Use important keywords in the title and first paragraph of description
• Link to other videos or playlists from your channel
• Add hashtags (up to 15)

Hashtags can only work if you insert 2-4 most relevant ones. If you use all 15, the tags will be ignored. Also, YouTube has some rules about hashtags, take a look.

CTAs: you can add cards, watermarks and other clickable CTAs on your videos. They are effective, because they are placed on the corners, and lead the viewer on to an offer, another tutorial video or a webpage. Bumper ads are 6-second ads that can be placed before or after a video. The most important CTA is the subscribe button which can be placed at the end of a video.

Uploading and Scheduling

We recommend preparing 1-3 videos and cross-promoting them as you enter the YouTube world. Many subscribers will adhere to the rules you make, like on a TV station! If you tell them that you launch a video every Wednesday at 3 pm, they will wait. For this, you can easily schedule videos in advance.

The biggest marker of being a professional YouTuber is punctuality. That’s why; it is not for those who can’t deliver a promise. Scheduling gives you the benefit of preparing and launching content in advance. Creator Studio clearly displays the scheduling option for your perusal.

Optimize the Channel

As you optimize the videos, you should also optimize the channel. Fill out the bio section with the most important information about your channel. Start from the basics, like a bio with your keywords, a solid banner image, links to your website and other social media and your contact information.

If you have other channels, you can feature them on this section to cross-promote and educate the audience. You can even link to a competitor channel! After all, YouTube is a community and not a solo show! Making friends is an easier way to grow than by making rivals.

Playlists are Helpful

You can gather videos of similar topics into playlists, making it easier for the audience to watch relevant content. You can also insert partner videos into a playlist. Playlists are most useful because they refrain the user from clicking away to another channel. Once again, playlist titles should have relevant keywords.

YouTube Advertising

Here comes the most important part. If you’ve got the money, try YouTube advertising to extend your reach! There are six types of YouTube ads:

1. Sponsored cards
2. Non-skippable ads
3. Bumper ads
4. Overlays
5. Display ads
6. Skippable ads

You have to be very careful, because the viewer should be engaged with your ads, otherwise they will just try to ignore your brand altogether. It means that you keep things short but entertaining.

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YouTube and Influencer Marketing

Partner with influencers

Another way to promote your brand without obvious ads is by collaborating with an influencer. Google says that 60 percent of subscribers will buy something if an influencer tells them. here are some ground rules about partnering with a YouTube creator:

• Find someone who has a good subscriber base and a community around their channel
• Make sure both parties are upfront and honest about the collab, otherwise, the fans would be upset
• Let the influencer do the talking, and don’t force them to divert from their usual style of making videos
• Reach out to people who are relevant to your niche, or have some relation with your brand’s style
• Try to show how you enhance the influencer’s brand with your partnership, it will have a deep impact on their subscriber’s choices
• Be flexible, and your goal should be to produce good content that not only influences but urges people to buy

Also Check Out:  Top 10 Travel Vloggers and Youtubers from Pakistan

Reach out

It is pretty simple to reach out to an influencer on YouTube. Most of the creators have provided their contact details for brands to approach. Bradri has a community of influencers, many of whom are YouTube creators. We call ourselves perfect matchmakers, by linking you with the influencer who can be the most beneficial for your campaigns.

Mostly, the brand reaches out to the influencer, with a pitch. You can either mail them a pitch or start with a friendly hello.

Make Arrangements

As we mentioned before, you should let the influencer do the talking. They have been in this game for long, so it is highly probable that they will have some demands from you. Give them the creative controls. Influencers spend countless hours cooking up the ideas behind their personal brand, so it will be like an extension of your brand form their viewpoint.

If there is one thing you should not tell the influencer, it is: “we want the product to be showcased in this way”. Because it will ruin their creative process.

Two ways to reach out

You can pick the right influencer in two ways: by doing research and going through their comments or simply by following a YouTube who is so popular that their audience will love whatever they do.

Either way, make sure your ideas are projected in the right way and the partnership makes sense for both parties. If it is a smaller channel, then the product and its message have to align with the influencer’s usual tone. The creative decisions are up to you. A quick search on Google or YouTube will educate you more on this.

Don’t ask for too much

Here is a difficult situation: you approach a creator with a million followers and offer them good money. But in exchange, you want them to post 10 photos on Instagram, Snapchat and make a YouTube video. For people who have cultivated their own brand, it is taxing for their mind. Don’t ask the creator for too much, and try to achieve your target through lesser, but more influential content pieces.

The most important reason behind this is the audience. One out of five videos can be sponsored, and it makes sense. As you try to sponsor every video, your subscribers will start feeling like you have no ideas of your own and you just do it for the money.

A winning YouTube partnership

You can tell that a partnership has really hit off when the influencer looks like a spokesperson of your brand but in the most comfortable manner. Many times, the influencer will agree that this is the collaboration they were waiting for all along. It also makes the subscribers happy, because they love to keep up with the lives of their favorite influencers.

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How Pakistani Brands are collaborating with Creators on YouTube

Storm Fiber and Teeli

Teeli is a media company which creates videos, targeted at Pakistani youth. Teeli’s videos get a lot of traction because of good production and funny scripts. Soon after their launch, Teeli uploaded this skit of a wedding ceremony on their YouTube channel. The video was sponsored by Stormfiber, an internet service provider. As we mentioned before, Teeli took charge of the creative process and produced a very good skit that plugged the sponsor message in the most comfortable way. Take a look:

Veet Pakistan and Glossips

Fatima irfan Shaikh is a Pakistani YouTuber who makes videos on lifestyle, beauty, and hairstyles. Her channel is called Glossips. Veet Pakistan collaborated with her in the most common partnerships- by sending her their product. As the subscriber base of Glossips is already aware of her frequent testing of products, this collaboration does not look out of place or out of theme at all.

In this video, the brand provided some clear guidelines to Glossips, which don’t affect the tone of her video but also project the message at the same time. Using the campaign ttagline:hamesha ready, Fatima does a quick makeover for the shadi season and gives you tips on using the hair removal cream in 3 minutes. That’s not all, because, in the end, Fatima announces some discounts for her followers and ongoing promotions by Veet Pakistan.

Galito’s Pakistan and Khujlee Family

Galito’s is a local restaurant, which has become really popular because of their collaboration with a popular YouTuber, Raza Samo. The channel’s name is Khujlee Family, and if you watch some of their videos in a row, you will hear the familiar line “Galito’s presents Awesamo Speaks”. It teaches us so much about how influencers can pick up tips from conventional TV advertising and implement them on YouTube videos.

The brand has sponsored Khujlee Family for a very long time, and it has contributed to their popularity in so many ways. For starters, Galito’s is a known name for Raza’s subscribers and is even used as a keyword to search for Raza Samo’s videos on YouTube (try galitos awesamo speaks).

Noor Petrol Pump and Karachi Vynz

If you are thinking that your brand is not as big or does not have a nation-wide reach, we have the perfect example of a local brand using YouTube marketing. Noor Petrol Pump in Karachi collaborated with Karachi Vynz (it makes sense to work with someone who is from the same place as you) to promote their new petrol station.

This video is a skit, and the petrol pump’s promotional offers are subtly placed between the skit by Karachi Vynz, to avoid damaging the flow of their usual tone.

Last word

Congratulations on making your way through our YouTube marketing guide for Pakistani brands. Consider this as your first lesson on working with this social medium, and if you have any questions, we are just a message away!