10 Must-Haves For Brands Trying To Grow On YouTube

In today’s article, we’ll be tackling the 10 must-haves for brands trying to grow on YouTube. These are all mandatory parts of ensuring healthy growth of your brand on the world’s largest video consumption platform, so don’t skim through!

1. Identify Your Brand Voice

First and most importantly, identify the voice of your brand. Many brands prefer a stoic, professional voice, but this may not work well on YouTube (where people expect to be entertained, at least to some degree). Find the style, phrasing and approach that best suits your brand and your products. What’s important is that the user enjoys listening to that brand voice.

2. Identify An On-Brand Channel Name

Next up is choosing your channel name. Many companies will simply choose to name their YouTube channel after their company. This may be a valid choice for smaller or single-focus businesses, but for larger ones dealing with multiple brands, it’s important that you have a well-branded channel specific to what you’re trying to push. In addition to company or brand name, you may also want to take into consideration keywords that are relevant to your brand. For instance, you may name your channel with the suffix “For Creators” if you’re targeting that audience.

3. Use Brand-Relevant Channel Art

Channel art is an integral part of looking professional on YouTube. If thirteen years old making Minecraft Let’s Plays can have channel art, your brand can have it, too. What’s important is that your channel art is high-quality and uses design consistent with your pre-existing brand logos and promotional art.

4. Ensure High Quality Content

This may go without saying, but your content needs to have high quality. This means at least 720p resolution, with crystal-clear audio and sharp video editing. Aside from those metrics, it also needs to be genuinely entertaining, educational or both, depending on your brand’s approach.

5. Release Relevant Content

Let’s say you’re running a Hershey’s Channel. The Hershey Channel should reasonably focus solely on Hershey’s Chocolate. If the Hershey’s Channel suddenly began uploading news stories with no relevance to Chocolate, it’d be failing at its sole job and would quickly lose subscribers. If you’re a technology brand or IT provider, you should be uploading videos that fit within those topics. If you’re a food company, you should be uploading videos related to your food products and cooking instructions. Make sure your content is relevant to your brand and your product.

6. Upload Content Consistently

A consistent upload schedule is important for two reasons: reason one is that viewers appreciate a consistent schedule, and reason two is that YouTube (and search engines) prioritize content released on a schedule. For the sake of both your viewers and your search rankings, you want to release content on the same day(s) each week, around the same time, for the best results.

7. Use Custom Thumbnails For Your Videos

YouTube’s default thumbnail system works by choosing one of three randomly-selected stills from your video to use as a video thumbnail. Channels taking this shortcut are quickly apparent, and failing to put forth the extra effort will lead the viewer to think your content is low-effort, and therefore low-quality. A good video doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a title and thumbnail that grabs a viewer’s attention and encourages them to watch it.

8. Have A Consistent Format In Your Videos

Not all of your videos have to follow the same exact format, but if you’re running something like a weekly show, it’s a good idea to keep the voice, format and hosts of the show intact. This contributes not only to brand voice, but also brand recognition, since repeated episodes will leave a stronger impression on a viewer. A great place to start would be looking at news shows, like Philip DeFranco, or review shows, like Angry Video Game Nerd. People enjoy these YouTubers because they offer a familiar face with consistent entertainment value.

9. Mind SEO In Your Title, Description and Tags

Keyword research is no less important on YouTube than it is elsewhere on the web. In your video’s title, description and tags, you should plug keywords relevant to your video when possible. Specifically, the search keywords you expect people to use to find your video through YouTube’s own search engine or an outside search engine, like Google or Bing. Using your target keyword once in your title, twice in your description and multiple times in your tags (with phrasing variations) is the best practice for this.

10. Foster Community Engagement

Last but certainly not least, use your channel as a way to engage with your customers and your community. YouTube videos offer a comment section where people will discuss your video, give you appropriate feedback or even ask for assistance if they need it. Keeping a careful eye on your comment section and responding to users in need is a great way to inspire loyalty and keep them engaged with your brand.

Additionally, you can dedicate end-segments to your videos to comment responses. While your channel is small, this isn’t recommended. But once it grows to a large size, responding to the most relevant comments on the video will still encourage people to sound off in hopes of being recognized.

About author:
This was a Guest Post written by our friends at Grin. Grin is an influencer growth platform designed to help influencers grow their fan base. image: shutterstock