You have a channel ready on YouTube. Now it is time to concentrate on building your presence on the platform. The only way to establish your brand through a YouTube channel is ensuring you have organic growth in your audience and its engagement. This is why getting views is not enough. You need active viewers for your channel. You need YouTube subscribers who will view, comment on, like/dislike and share your videos. In other words, you need your viewers to convert into YouTube subscribers for the long term.
How Can YouTube Subscribers Enable You to Build Brand Awareness?
Your subscriber count is important in building brand awareness as:
- It acts as a gauge for visitors to estimate the trust value and credibility of your channel. If more people follow you, it usually means that your content is appealing and people want to view it. Your subscriber count is a testimony of the quality of your channel’s videos.
- It allows you to monetize your content. According to the YouTube Partner Program requirements, if you have at least 1,000 subscribers, you can monetize your account. As Google owns YouTube, Google AdSense is used in this program. Although the nature of revenue earned varies according to your selections, it goes without saying that the more views you generate on these ads, the more money you get out of the partnership.
- Organic subscribers affect the channel’s metrics and analytics in a manner that optimizes YouTube’s potential for building your brand awareness. Active subscribers affect your channel’s visibility on the platform by increasing the subscribers’ Subscribers to Views Ratio for your content.
How Can You Increase Brand Awareness Using YouTube?
The use of the video channel platform can be optimized to grow brand awareness in several other ways. Here are a few sure techniques you can use YouTube to your advantage:
- Keep Your Content Keyword Optimized
Although it is a video platform, social site, and advertising place all at once, as a platform YouTube operates more as a search engine than a social networking site. Just as you would keep your other web content SEO optimized for easy discovery on multiple search engines, keep your channel’s content optimized by keywords too. Use apps to analyze keywords that work well. If you have the budget, consider investing in services that do the groundwork for you. Viewers usually click on videos after they pop up on their search for a specific kind of video.
At the same time, remember to keep your keywords relevant. Misleading keywords will end you getting your content reported and disliked. This would have a negative impact on your brand.
- Create a Memorable Presentation Format or Persona and Stick to It
Give your content a visually recognizable image makeover that viewers can associate with your brand even before they see the entirety of your content. This could be a trademark opening music, the use of a color scheme, or an identifiable voice-over. You could also use mascots, acting persona, a genre of presentation as your identification mark. In other words, to stand out from the crowd, you must make an effort to give your brand its charisma. You will lose out on viewers and subscribers if your channel is “boring”. Remember, entertainment and engagement go hand in hand on YouTube. People watch what they find exciting and often re-watch it for the same reason.
- Experiment with Your Titles
How you caption your content can also end up directing viewer opinion. In addition to optimized keywords, you must give your content titles that stand out. You could use popular and trending captions like “how to do/use (something)”, “top 5 (something)”, or you can create your own trend. Whether you are posting a tutorial, review, or an opinion piece, be prepared to find thousands of others already out there doing something similar. You have to figure out how to present your content as unique, and how you caption your content is part of this planning.
- Identify Your USP
Ask yourself what makes your company unique and why it should be favored over its broad audience. Finding your USP is vital to the process of brand building, which holds for your YouTube marketing strategy. Once you figure out your unique selling proposition, you will be able to create content that genuinely draws your target audience to your channel. There can be no better way of building brand awareness than finding followers who vouch for your authenticity and supports you because your content speaks to them.
- Humanize Your Brand
A brand that is upon the pedestal and impersonal is likely to draw very few YouTube viewers and subscribers. Make your brand approachable and people-friendly. Be available for quick responses on comments, follow back subscribers to show you are as interested in their content as they are in yours. Keep interactions friendly and genuine.
You can do this while keeping your content relevant to the intent of your business. Make yourself likable, and you will find viewers warming up to your content too.
- Collaborate with Fellow YouTubers
Growing your presence is a hard task. It needs patience and effort. Consider collaborating with users of the platform to help each other grow their brands. You could tie up with affiliate businesses, supplementary businesses, or influencers to reach out to a wider audience. Chances are you will be able to gain subscribers from such collaborations as well as fare higher in searches on the platform. Established brands and influencers already have a large target reach. Moreover, you can benefit from their keyword-optimized presence on the platform.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
- Organize Giveaways, Shoutouts, and Acknowledgements
You could do this individually or in collaboration with other YouTubers. Sponsor a reward for certain activities or offer your gratitude to your followers publicly. Although the system of giving away freebies works slightly (differently) than it does on social media channels, it utilizes the same principle of audience engagement. Display testimonials and endorsements, especially if they come from the popular persona, to prove your credibility as a brand.
Periodically create content honoring your loyal customers. Interview them, use their feedback as a source or material for your content or create a montage of their photographs. Connecting to your audience is important for building brand presence.
- Cross-Promote Your Videos
Simulcast your videos on other platforms and post links to fresh content on your social media handles. You can also use a mailing list to direct viewers to your channel. YouTube videos do not need a YouTube account on the part of viewers so anyone can watch them. Build your brand up by cross-posting on all avenues available to you virtually. This will highly affect your Likes to Views Ratio and Views to Comment Ratios as well.
- Plan out Your Story Telling Strategy
Videos are a powerful form of narrative. Find out what kind of stories work for your brand. Would creating content that leaves cliff-hangers be a beneficial storytelling format for you? Would you prefer posting stand-alone videos? Perhaps micro-stories that cross-reference each other are more suited to your brand.
Identifying how you want to publish your content dramatically impacts how you are building your presence on YouTube. Often YouTubers sign off one video with a pointer to another one in their playlist so the audience can stay on their channel for a longer viewing experience.
This develops an interest in your content, in addition to brand recognition. Your viewers are likely to return to your content and even turn subscribers if they find your videos resonating with them.
- Make Use of YouTube’s Features
YouTube gives you several tools to optimize the platform to your advantage. Use them and augment them to give yourself the best experience on this platform to create a niche for your brand.
- Be Consistent but Leave Room for Flexibility
You must be regular with your posting schedule and give YouTube your time and effort. Subscribers come to your channel with expectations of regular uploads of fresh content. Play around with formats, and revisit already covered content if you need to but plan your presence on the channel ahead of time to keep audience interest alive. Use a scheduling tool or app, if necessary, to maintain a posting schedule. Building up visibility requires frequent engagement with the site as a user yourself. The number of your uploads plays a significant role here. You need to figure out how often your content downloads. Also, research at what time posting content yields the best results for you.
At the same time, do not forget to review your goals and target achievements. Be open to trying out fresh creative ways to bring engagement and visibility to your content without losing focus on original goals. Building brand presence required you to hold your ground to stand out as well as to go with the flow. Finding a delicate balance between the two requires concentration.
Should You Use Paid Strategies?
Paid Subscribers – As you can see, having a decent number of subscribers is essential for your YouTube channel. In order to make this happen, several users turn to buy YouTube subscribers. New YouTubers are especially tempted to do this as they feel lost in the number of channels already existing in their field. While this hack works to give your channel a subscriber count boost, you must be wary of how you are going about buying subscribers and, more importantly, from which services. You must remember:
- An inauthentic and abrupt rise in your subscribers’ count can result in your account getting suspended or banned. Never invest in an instant increase of subscribers, especially if you are purchasing a large number of subscribers.
- Moreover, inorganic bots don’t create engagement. The mere increase in YouTube subscribers will not result in the desired change in the channel’s algorithms, and your channel will fare no better in YouTube’s searches. Ensure you are making purchases from trusted services that guarantee real subscribers for your YouTube channel.
YouTube Ads – In an effort to get instant conversions, many companies use YouTube Advertising to lure subscribers. This, technically, does not amount to buying YouTube subscribers, though the purchasing of organic AdSense views can result in gaining more followers. This is an indirect means of paying to increase one’s subscribers to build brand awareness as well as to increase the channel’s monetizing potential.
YouTube Influencers – Another indirect method of paying to increase subscribers is to buy them jointly with influencers as part of your marketing strategy. Usually, such joint contracts result in an organic increase in subscribers for both parties involved.
Summing Up
In conclusion, YouTube can be effectively used to grow your online presence. Discover what works best for you to increase your visibility on this platform, and you will soon find your brand grow popular and well recognized.