Want to get potential customers (and existing ones) to better understand who you are and what your business can offer them? YouTube can be a fantastic tool for creating brand awareness … if you know how to best use it.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes turn to social media in hopes of finding new customers. If you’re watching top-performing accounts closely, however, you’ll notice that brands aren’t just trying to connect with new users and make a sale right away.
Instead, businesses are also fostering brand awareness by showcasing what they do and what they have to offer.
All social platforms can be valuable. But YouTube, in particular, can be your secret brand-building weapon when you wield it correctly.
In this post, we’re going to explain why YouTube is such a good choice for branding and specific ways to leverage the platform to get your name out there while building a following.
Why YouTube Is So Valuable for Brand Building
YouTube is different from all other social platforms. Users here focus more on watching content than on creating and even responding to content like you see on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
People come to YouTube for entertainment, education, and everything in between.
This is why the platform is so valuable for brand building.
In some ways, YouTube is actually more similar to content marketing than most conventional social media marketing sites.
It lets you more easily convey stories and information to an audience excited to pay attention. You have a chance to slowly introduce users in your brand while you promote brand recognition and an understanding of what makes your brand different.
6 Ways to Build Your Brand on YouTube
If you want to use YouTube for brand building, you should keep a few specific tactics in mind to make your campaigns as effective as possible.
Let’s take a look at each one in detail.
1. Start with keyword research
If you want to engage in brand building, create content that will help new members of your target audience discover your brand and keep them engaged. YouTube-specific keyword research will help with this, showing you what sorts of videos your audience wants and what topics they’re interested in.
This is so important because YouTube is its own powerful search engine. People are often looking for different types of content here than they are on Google or other platforms. Users are a lot more likely to search for “how-to” content, for example.
For keyword research for YouTube, my go-to tool is KeywordTool.io. It does require a paid subscription to access all the data, but if you’re on a tight budget, you can do a bunch of research all at once upfront and pause your subscription until it’s needed again.
Your brand-building efforts won’t amount to much, after all, if no one ever sees the videos in the first place.
2. Create content that aligns with your USP
When you’re creating your videos, think about your unique selling proposition (USP). This element of your branding helps you define what makes you unique and why audiences should invest in your business.
Incorporating elements of your USP into your videos will help set you apart by offering unique content that really resonates with your target audience.
Let’s say, for example, that I have a business selling green, organic products.
If I’m creating a YouTube video on how to use my organic laundry detergent, I will also offer tips on how to reduce water usage with each load of laundry by changing a washer’s settings, or mention using wool dryer balls to save on electricity and prevent using chemicals in most fabric softeners. This additional information shows the values and USP of my company, which my organic-oriented, eco-friendly audience would like.
You can also create short, promotional product videos that highlight your USP directly. The video below from Seventh Generation is a perfect example, showing the real, natural ingredients that go into its products.
3. Speak in a friendly, conversational tone
Before you ever start making videos, you want to hammer out your brand voice ahead of time. Doing this will ensure the tone of your videos is consistent. Your viewers will have a better sense of who you are, which is key for establishing a strong, distinctive brand that they can understand.
Remember that a friendly, conversational tone will typically work best on YouTube. This still leaves room for a lot of leeway in terms of creativity … You can be professional, or scientific, or quirky, or playful. But opt to always seem approachable and accessible.
You don’t want to drive people away by using language that’s too esoteric or comes across as stiff. People will respond best to your brand if they enjoy watching it.
This is a perfect example of a business discussing a technical topic in a professional way while still being friendly and approachable:
4. Tell short stories that resonate with your audience
Stories are powerful. Good ones are memorable and evoke an emotional response in your audience, which means that they’ll associate those feelings with your brand directly. Perhaps no medium is as effective for storytelling as video is.
Incorporating stories into your video content is wildly valuable, whether the whole video is focused on telling a single story or you’re including short, micro-stories into longer content.
You can use videos, for example, that simply tell the story of how and why your brand was created.
Doing so gives you a chance to highlight your brand mission and your USP big time, while building trust in addition to brand awareness.
This video from Orgain does this, using the emotional story of how the founder developed cancer, went through treatment, and then founded the company to help others live their best and healthiest lives.
You can also use a story to make the information you’re sharing more relevant and more engaging.
Jamie Wolfer does this with the video below, discussing what she wishes she knew when planning her own wedding. She frames it around a single story: the retelling of lessons she learned during the wedding planning process. And she includes shorter stories within each tip to keep the video interesting and engaging.
5. Opt for a unified, branded look
Brand building isn’t just about the videos themselves. The best results will happen when you’re creating a distinct branded look for your channel, too.
Having an easy-to-recognize look for your channel and all the content within it will go a long way with establishing brand recognition. So, when people see your videos pop up, they may even choose to click them knowing exactly what they’ll get.
Take a look at the following channel. It’s using color and design to tie everything together, with the bold yellow colors showing up in the channel art and in each video’s thumbnail. Those thumbnails are particularly important, using bold yellow text to highlight the selling point of each video to get clicks, all while creating a unified look. 
This is a small detail, but it’s a significant one. You want everything about your channel to be as branded and memorable as possible.
6. Nurture relationships with subscribers
The last important part of brand building is to actually nurture relationships with viewers and subscribers. Interacting with individuals gives you another chance to convey what your brand can offer and that you’re invested in viewers’ thoughts, experiences, and questions.
Keeping up with comment moderation on YouTube is crucial to successful brand building. Try to respond to all questions and comments, especially when there’s an opportunity for discussion here. Even if you’re simply pointing people to resources with a quick response, a little interaction can go a long way here.
You’ll also want to make sure that you’re keeping spam, hate speech, and trolls in general off your channel by getting rid of their comments quickly. It can absolutely impact viewers’ perception of your brand if you look like you’re neglecting your comments section.
You don’t want someone discovering your site for the first time to see nothing but spam, arguing, or your standard Internet nastiness on your content.
Moderation tools like those available with Agorapulse can help with this. They alert you every time there are new comments, so you can respond appropriately. You can even set up rules that will allow you to hide certain comments for review, like those coming from specific users or any that contain specific words or phrases.
In Conclusion
YouTube is a prime platform for brand-building opportunities. People are ready to watch your videos and to hear about your story along the way.
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