Like it or not YouTube is still the best way for musicians to reach new listeners and keep current fans excited. The Google-owned video platform is artists’ first choice when it comes down to launching a new single, sharing a live session or dropping a studio update. However, every artist who has tried ‘taming’ the YouTube algorithms or is generally self-managing their social media presence knows that it’s certainly not a walk in the park. It’s also time-consuming, exhausting and is most likely not yielding any significant results.
The devil’s in the details
To make things easier for people who are on a tight budget when it comes down to boosting YouTube presence we’ve picked a few tips and tools that have proven successful. Of course you’ll have to make some good music and ensure your video is of a competitive quality when compared to other artists from your scene. With so much audio-visual content flooding people’s feeds on a daily basis you have no other choice but to really stand out. Once you’re ready to drop the video on YouTube make sure your channel is properly named – you don’t want to post your future hit video on a channel named after your Minecraft nickname from 5 years ago. Want to be treated like a pro, act like one – pick a proper user name, tag your video with the right genre tags so you ensure not only fans of your band will easily discover you but fans of the very music you’re playing. Never use another band’s name to attract people’s attention with. Avoid using ‘For Fans Of…’ in any text related to your band. It’s not the 1990s anymore, everyone can preview the music and see that you’re not Depeche Mode 2.
Know your audience
If you want to grab someone’s attention, make sure you are aware of who your audience is. This is key to any phase of your work – from writing the lyrics to the track, to choosing a visual aesthetic for your video to the very language you use in descriptions and whatever social media copy you might spread around. This being said learn not only your audience but the other content-makers in your scene. Find a band you like, make something together, shout them out, do a collab track, unite your audience and built a community around your work. Yes, YouTube is a video streaming service but its ability to build communities that are actually capable of sustaining their favorite content-creators and artists is among its main strengths. Talking about a community, consider the best way for you to communicate with your viewers, nobody wants you to be online 24/7 answering each nit-picking comment. Instead, maintain a certain distance but be honest, kind and respectful of the people who will help you grow.
Start small, grow big
There are multiple ways and stats on YouTube that register growth. One of them are views. As we said, with so much content published daily, it’s not easy to reach the right audience on the right market effortlessly. For example, to help artists deal with that our friends at specialized musician-oriented social network Drooble are offering a pretty effective YouTube promo service as a part of their constantly growing portfolio of digital tools, all available at their store. The Drooble YouTube Promotion offers both newcomers and established artists the needed initial push so their new video content can start gaining further attention by reaching the right users. The Drooble’s YouTube Promo service is tailored for musical content and allows you to start a campaign with a budget as modest as $25. For your hard-earned money, you will see a growth mainly in views because everyone who knows a thing or two about YouTube will tell you ‘the battle’ for subscribers is a whole different game.
Conquer new markets
One of the artists who has been very transparent about the results is Brian Hazard. In his lengthy blog post on the subject, he wholeheartedly recommends the promo campaign as it minimizes the effort on the side of the artist. Launching a Drooble YouTube Promo campaign is as easy as a few simple steps. First, you drop the link to the content you’d like to promote. Then you pick the markets you’d like to reach. This is especially important as you can experiment with rising markets as India or Mexico, whose cost per click is way cheaper than highly competitive and oversaturated markets like the UK or USA. Naturally, the final step is choosing a budget. Currently, Drooble are offering some of the fairest prices and your content will be actually handled by actual social media marketing specialists and not by bot farms for example. June Niesein is another artist who recently employed the Drooble YouTube promo to promote his latest video single “Apocalypse”. Its views grew from 0 to 12k for a total amount of $50 and it was marketed simultaneously in three markets – the USA, Germany and Italy.
Good work won’t remain unnoticed
YouTube is always changing their internal mechanics and to make the best of the network means to be constantly experimenting with its algorithms. If this comes at the cost of time one could spend actually making music we can all agree it’s a big no go. However, we can all agree that while trusting a service specialized in promoting music content is definitely a safer choice it won’t do magic if you haven’t done your homework too. So, be creative, be free, learn from the best but find your own way and you’ll definitely be noticed.
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