Introduction, Things I've learnt growing a music promotion YouTube!
Hi Everyone it's good to meet you all! I'm Zaheer, a music marketer with a background in content strategy, content creation, playlisting and outreach. I'm running a barberbeats/triphop YouTube channel promoting smaller underground artists. Over the past few 2.5 months I've grown it to over 1.2K subs (growing rapidly now) organically with $0 spent and I'd like to share 3 key things I've learnt through this process: 1. You don't have to get super fancy, you just need to do 1 thing that's different from the competition There's loads of other channels that repost the exact same music with the exact same cover art, I stood out by adding visualizers to every album and video and designing my own thumbnails which takes a bit more time but has allowed me to create a stronger brand, a more consistent and loyal following along with developing more skills. 2. Define and know your audience well as this will allow you to make informed decisions for your next move. For example, I found out that the best time to post for my channel was at around 12PM eastern time. This is because my audience is primarily men in the USA aged 25-34. The playlists are targeted towards people working from home. After seeing my analytics, most of my viewers were active on YouTube from 12PM-4PM so I changed my upload schedule from posting at 9PM (I was trying to target the night shift workers) to 12PM, sure enough my videos suddenly started getting more initial traction going from an average of 20 views in the first hour to 200. A simple change which 10x my results and signaled to the algorithm to send more viewers my way which has also led to more subs. 3. What ends up working for the channel will likely not be what you expect so you've just gotta keep trying things out. This is where adaptability comes in, don't just keep throwin shit at the wall, apply yourself and think creatively about what you could do that will resonate with your specific audience, everyone's got something unique to offer and if you hit the right audience with that offer, you will see results.