How To Grow Your YouTube Channel By Zooming Out

Read Time: 5 minutes

Marketing a brand in an age when YouTube exists pretty much requires being smart enough to take advantage of one of the most massively popular platforms the internet (or the world!) has ever seen. Statistics indicate the YouTube app alone boasts an audience of nearly one billion monthly active viewers. Clearly, generating and posting YouTube videos provides you with an opportunity to reach a massive audience.

If you’re here, odds are, you know this. That said, if you’ve already created and attempted to grow a YouTube channel one subscriber at a time, you may understand that sharing content on this platform isn’t the same as actually leveraging its power.

Maybe your subscriber list isn’t nearly as large as you think it should be. Perhaps your channel isn’t attracting enough regular viewers to justify the amount of effort you put into growing it. Or, your click-through rate is so frustratingly low you’re annoyed you even bothered to learn about click-throughs and other marketing metrics, to begin with.

Don’t worry if you feel this way.

Every minute, about 400 hours of video content gets added to YouTube. It can be tough for your YouTube videos to stand out in such a crowded environment.

There are steps you can take to remedy this issue, such as improving your thumbnail images, including more keywords in the titles and videos of your YouTube videos, and, most importantly, generating and sharing quality content.

You shouldn’t dismiss these ideas! That said, sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck in the mire of figuring out how to grow your YouTube channel that you forget to step back and focus on big-picture issues.

“Zooming out” offers you a new perspective on how to get more views on YouTube. It involves focusing less on the specific minor details of your strategy and instead addressing macro issues that can have a big impact on your success.

Want to know how to get more subscribers on YouTube (or why that might not be the best goal to obsess over)? Consider these points:

Choose Your KPIs Wisely

The subscriber count is often the go-to metric someone may focus on when measuring the success (or lack of success) of a YouTube channel. This is understandable. If your goal is to grow your YouTube channel, the more YouTube subscribers you have, the more effective your strategy is, right?

Sure… if your goal genuinely, truly, really is to attract more YouTube subscribers. But, if you think about it, that’s likely not what you’re actually trying to achieve.

Your actual goal might be the boost sales and turn leads into paying customers. If you focus primarily on how to get more subscribers on YouTube, you may forget to pay attention to whether those subscribers are actually translating into measurable financial achievements.

Again, the idea is to zoom out and think about the true purpose of your YouTube videos and channel. Understanding how to get more views on YouTube may be helpful, but if you’re not measuring the right KPIs, you’re perhaps not making the progress you think you’re making.

That’s not to say that growing your YouTube subscriber base shouldn’t be among your goals at all! Yes, you do need to pay attention to the extent to which those subscribers are becoming paying customers, but if your YouTube channel isn’t attracting an audience in the first place, it’s not going to deliver much value.

With that in mind, other big-picture tips on how to grow your YouTube channel include:

Think About What Keeps a Viewer Coming Back

You’re not a complete newbie, right? You understand that the whole point of generating and posting YouTube videos is to share the type of content that your target audience would consider valuable.

That’s fairly basic stuff. However, sharing one or two solid videos might be enough to help capture the fleeting attention of YouTubers briefly, but it’s not necessarily enough to keep viewers returning to your channel. Audience retention might be more important than quickly capturing a large number of views.

That’s key. Turning a lead into a customer doesn’t necessarily happen during the first interaction with your brand. A lead often needs to engage with a brand several times before they decide to make a purchase or sign up for a service.

There are several potential ways to convince viewers to return to your channel and watch your videos on a consistent basis. Ideas to consider include:

Cross-promote your YouTube videos on your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels, as well as your website, email newsletter, and more, providing all members of your audience with frequent reminders about your channel.
Create a series of videos (and corresponding playlists) so that viewers have a genuine reason to return.
Use YouTube annotations to direct viewers to other related videos on the channel and keep them engaged with more content.
Partner with a relevant influencer to cast a wider net and provide an untapped audience with updates when new videos are available on your channel.
Make your videos as accessible as possible to cast a wide net.

Perhaps most importantly, just as your goal is to put yourself in a subscriber’s shoes when thinking about what types of individual videos to create and upload, you should also adopt the perspective of an audience member when considering how to convince your subscribers to keep coming back for more content.

What YouTube channels do you frequently return to? Make a list and jot down ideas about why some channels draw you back more effectively than others. Knowing why you return to a particular YouTube channel often will help you determine how to maintain your active subscriber base.

Focus on Quality

Never lose sight of what’s most important when sharing new content on any platform: making sure the content is the best you can produce.

It may sound simple, but remember, the point of this guide is to re-orient your thinking so that you assume a “back-to-basics” approach.

Once more, yes, you absolutely ought to continue tracking YouTube videos and other such common metrics. However, if you want people to not only subscribe to your channel, but to find your brand’s marketing so impressive that they end up becoming paying customers, you need to devote the time, energy, and resources necessary into generating content that:

Boasts high-quality visuals
Delivers genuine value
Generates an emotional response in your audience
Convinces viewers your content is worth sharing with their friends

Be aware that producing and posting awesome videos may also be the best SEO tactic in your arsenal.

Although using the right keywords, optimizing thumbnail images, and improving your video descriptions are all helpful tactics, generally, it seems that the strongest video content still attracts the most viewers (who actually stay to watch an entire video to completion). In turn, these videos tend to be the ones that rank highest in relevant search results.

All that said, it’s also super-extremely important to remember this vital fact: learning how to grow your YouTube channel takes time! Don’t fret if you don’t see results overnight.

With practice, you’ll learn how to boost YouTube views and cultivate a loyal audience. Just remember to see the big picture when doing so!

Create Quality YouTube Content With Powtoon

Is your biggest concern not the fact that you have no idea how to get more subscribers on YouTube, but rather how you don’t have the experience and/or resources to create stunning videos?

That’s where Powtoon comes in. Powtoon does for video creation what Canva did for graphic design: ensuring those with modest budgets and minimal experience can still generate top-tier content easily. Sign up today to unlock your YouTube channel’s potential!

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Shoshi Davis

Shoshi joined Powtoon as a Marketing Assistant. To read more of her stuff, you can find her content on Upwork and Business 2 Community talking all things inbound marketing for SaaS. After only 2 weeks at Powtoon, Shoshi was dubbed by the marketing team as having the superpower of "Unbridled Enthusiasm." So that was pretty cool.