Organic YouTube Marketing Basics for Musicians

How you present yourself on YouTube can make or break your exposure on the platform. When it comes to YouTube, marketing and advertising are the best tools in your arsenal. As opposed to paid advertising, organic marketing lets you optimize your channel without breaking the bank. That means making your channel look professional, ensuring it has all the appropriate links, optimizing the little details, and everything else you can do behind the scenes is all you need to make sure your videos are performing the best they can. Here’s the rundown…

Organic YouTube Marketing Basics for Musicians

Have Good Quality Photos

Your banner and profile picture should be good quality and fit your branding as an artist. These photos represent you! You need to make sure they’re in tip-top shape.

• Banners should be 2560 pixels wide by 1440 pixels tall, and the safe area for text and logos is 1546×423.
• The ideal size for your channel profile image is 800px by 800px (a 1:1 aspect ratio).

Organize Your Content

If you have a bunch of videos, it’s a good idea to organize them into different categories. This makes it easier for your fans to find what they’re looking for if you have a ton of content. You can also customize the layout of your channel so that viewers will see your channel trailer, featured video, and featured sections when they get to your channel homepage.

To customize your channel, here’s what to do:

• Sign in to YouTube Studio.
• From the left menu, select Customization.
• Use the tabs to customize your channel:

Then, you can also organize your videos based on content. As an artist, these are good to have:

• Official Music Videos
• Official Remixes of Your Singles
• Lyric Music Videos
• Live Performances
• Acoustic Performances or Recordings
• Behind-the-Scenes

Link To Your Socials

This one’s a no-brainer. If your socials aren’t all linked together, you’re behind on the times! Every platform you’re active on should be connected to ensure people know where they can find you and learn more.

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Upload Consistently

Consistency is key on every platform. Especially on YouTube, it helps keep viewers engaged with your content and gives them a solid timeframe for when they can expect more. How often you want to post is totally up to you. Whether it’s every other day or every other week, just make sure to stick with it.

To help you out, we recommend you stick to these guidelines below…

Make Sure Your SEO is On Point

SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization, is more simple than it sounds. All it is is making sure the titles and descriptions on your channel match what your audience is looking for. There are a lot of different tools you can use to help you figure out which terms are the best for your video, but the easiest one is the good ol’ YouTube search bar.

Go into the search bar and start typing the name of your video. Look at the suggested titles that come up, and look at which ones come up first. These are the most searched videos for that term. Giving your video a title that corresponds with these popular searches gives it a higher chance of being discovered among that content. Aside from that you can also use…

• Keywords Everywhere: free Google Chrome extension for SEO that shows an estimate of the volume of monthly searches to Google and YouTube search boxes.
• Google Trends: free Google tool that shows search trends (it is possible to show only searches on YouTube) and serves to identify hot topics.

Utilize YouTube Analytics

Back in 2020, YouTube announced a ton of new features to their Analytics for Artists platform. “Analytics for Artists, now in YouTube Studio, provides a new and improved view of an artist’s catalog on YouTube. Analytics for Artists will be available for all Official Artist Channels, and provide access to a unique set of features that will equip artists and their teams with the knowledge they need to make the most informed and strategic release plans.” — via YouTube for Artists official announcement.

With these detailed analytics, you can access information like how your audience engages with your content with impressions, clicks, demographics, engagement data, and more. All of which will help you optimize your content moving forward based on what works and what doesn’t.

• To learn more about analytics on YouTube, check out this post.

Repurpose Old Video Content

Lots of artists put out remix and lyric videos after their initial release. It gives your fans even more content to consume while strengthening the performance of a single release at the same time. That way, you can use your original video to create multiple video babies that you can repurpose across your channel.

If your fans love behind-the-scenes content, create a video with unseen footage from your video’s shoot. If you’re a rapper with great lyrics, put out a lyric video. This is a creative way to increase the traction on all of your existing work without needing to break the bank producing brand new content.

In Conclusion…

YouTube offers artists like you major potential for exposure. It’s a great platform for you to put out creative content to an audience that is committed and ready to engage with it. With so much content on the platform, it’s up to you to optimize it to make sure it stays ahead of the pack. Efforts like these are sure to help you stay there.

Good luck!