Establishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your YouTube marketing. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup an YouTube presence, made a few posts, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. So, before you even begin establishing any sort of YouTube presence or strategy, you need to establish clear marketing goals. Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my social following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your marketing efforts petering out after a while
because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 likes by Christmas” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in.

Traffic to Website (Sales, Leads, Content) Probably one of the most popular goals of YouTube Marketing is to funnel your YouTube traffic back to your own web properties. After all, most businesses don’t do business “on” YouTube. You’re leveraging YouTube to obtain traffic and convert that YouTube traffic into brand-followers, leads, prospects, and customers. So maybe your goal is to get people to a landing page with a free offer where they can subscribe to your list and become a lead. Maybe they’re being sent to a sales page or an eCommerce store. Maybe you just
want to do some content marketing and send them to your blog. Whatever the case, the end goal for a lot of businesses will likely be bringing YouTube traffic AWAY from YouTube and over to their own web properties. Social Following (aka YouTube as Autoresponder) In this goal category, your aim is to build a large number of followers. The reason we also refer to this as “YouTube as Autoresponder” is because the main sought-after benefit here is to increase the number of people who will see your uploads in their feeds. In this sense, your YouTube posts become
similar to sending out email broadcasts via your autoresponder. If you grow a large enough community, this can be very beneficial and if your content is engaging enough to get a lot of traction in the form of likes, comments, subscribes and shares, you can significantly increase the
range of your organic reach into people’s feeds. Passive Presence
Some businesses might have purely passive goals. Simply being present and discoverable inside YouTube is a benefit that has wider appeal and greater utility than you may think. In many cases, a company’s YouTube presence might supersede or at least augment what was once the role of a blog, assuming most of your content can be conveyed in the form of or attached to videos. When people come across this content of yours and look at your account they can see some basic info about your brand or business and you can get some traffic to your website. This same approach can also be used for events, communities, and brands.

Brand Awareness Another goal that’s less thought about might be spreading brand awareness and recognition. If you’re just starting out,
there’s a good chance your brand might be in need of a jumpstart. If nobody’s ever heard of you, a great way to increase recognition is to simply create and share unique, helpful, or entertaining content and get your name, logo, and overall brand identity in front of as many people as possible as many times as possible. If this is your goal, you want to
avoid being salesy in the beginning. Ensure you’re focused almost entirely on posting helpful, relevant, or entertaining content.
Expand Existing Audiences If you’ve already got an audience, your goal might be to make it bigger. This can be done via several social marketing
methods. Sharing viral content, either curated or created yourself, can lead to a huge increase in your YouTube audience. Although creating your own viral content like that can be great, if you don’t have the time or means to do so, you can simply leverage existing content that’s already proven itself to be viral by curating/re-sharing it with your own comments or angle added to it. Obviously, you don’t want to actually steal and re-upload someone else’s videos. We’re talking doing a little video review or commentary about a content piece. Also, a few humorous videos can’t hurt either. Other ways to expand existing audiences can include contests, sweepstakes, and gamification. Assuming your offers/prizes are compelling enough, incentivized sharing, liking, and subscribing can be very effective. Just ensure your methods are permitted by YouTube’s Terms of Service. Enhancing or Repairing Public Relations Do you want to set your company apart in the public eye? Do you want to associate your brand with feelings of good will and community involvement? Was your business recently involved in a controversial incident that requires damage control? It doesn’t take a humiliating public catastrophe to make PR enhancement a good idea. This is a goal that any business can engage in. Non-sales-related campaigns can include videos that foster positive values and goodwill or even involvement in social movements (be careful not alienate half
your prospects) and noble causes. Did your business recently donate to a charity, build a school in a third world country, serve food at a local pantry? These are all things to post about. These don’t necessarily need to be about things that your business participated in. They can be content about general things like a heart-warming video about helping the
poor or caring for the elderly. Special holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Mother’s Day also present opportunities to
leverage emotions, foster goodwill, and enhance your PR. Market Research. A hugely beneficial goal of YouTube marketing is market research. If you’re just starting your business or going down a new path, YouTube can be an excellent place to learn more about your audience and your market. This can be done in a structured way with things like mentioning surveys and questionnaires at the end of videos and linking to them in the description, or in a less structured way by simply engaging with your audience, commenting, asking questions, and so on. Also, lurking or conversing in YouTube channels or the comments of videos related to your industry can teach you a ton about what your customers want and who they are. Beyond that, you can monitor your competitors’ accounts and posts to see what their customers like and what they’re complaining about so you can adjust your business accordingly. Creating your own account, posting, and engaging within it is another great way to get a constant stream of market/audience data flowing into your business.
Ultimately, your goal should be to come up with one or two ideal customer avatars that you can then base your marketing and product development on. All of the goals you’ve learned about in this section require some sort of presence on YouTube. Getting that presence
started is what we’re going to talk about next.