Over 122 million people watch one billion hours of Youtube daily - and the number of viewers that the video-sharing platform receives is only expected to increase more. With so many eyes glued on the platform, businesses have taken to YouTube to make themselves known to a broad audience.
While different brands join YouTube with specific goals in mind, YouTube has become an especially powerful avenue for increasing brand awareness. Using videos, brands can tell stories, educate viewers about their offerings, and provide an insider’s look into their missions and values.
While your goal might be to generate more sales, brand awareness is still the first step in achieving your objectives. Though difficult to measure by clear-cut metrics, brand awareness can achieve the loyalty, trust, and respect of an audience. And often, it’s these factors that make a brand memorable.
Of course, earning your audience’s loyalty, trust, and respect is no easy feat - and on a saturated platform like YouTube, it can be even more difficult for brands to break through to their target market. If you're looking for a YouTube growth strategy, we've got you covered.
In this blog post, we break down the task of increasing your YouTube brand awareness in 10 simple steps. Each step is actionable and can be implemented immediately to make an impact on the platform and among your audience.
Understand Your Target Audience
If you want to increase your YouTube brand awareness, it’s crucial to develop a keen understanding of your target audience. Knowing your audience provides valuable insight into who’s likely to watch and resonate with your videos. This information also leads to better videos in the future, and thereby, more brand awareness.
Understanding your target audience on a deeper level begins with referring to data or analytics that you’ve already obtained about your market. It also might involve a comparative analysis of key competitors on the video platform, focusing on the types of videos they produce and which of them made an impact on their viewers.
This research is also imperative for distinguishing your brand from the others. This is particularly important if your brand falls under a saturated niche or category, like the beauty or pet category.
Regardless, identifying your unique standpoint is crucial.
With this information, you may better address the value your brand provides your target audience and potentially increase the number of views, likes, and subscribers to your YouTube channel.
If you would like to learn more, we dive deeper into finding, researching, and understanding your target audience on this blog post.
Personalize Your YouTube Channel
The next step you should take towards increasing awareness is to personalize your YouTube channel. Because your channel is an extension of your brand, you want to ensure that viewers can recognize it at face value.
YouTube allows you to customize the appearance of your channel in a multitude of ways, including:
Your icon
Your banner
Your video thumbnails
Take advantage of Youtube’s customizable features and incorporate your logo and other visual elements unique to your brand, such as colors and typography.
Aside from your YouTube landing page, you can also personalize your videos using the same approach, starting from the fonts you use in your video to the colors of your background.
Regardless of how you personalize your YouTube channel, it’s essential to keep things consistent to avoid confusing your viewers. As you work through this step, you might want to refer to your style guide. That way, your YouTube channel is in line with your overall brand presentation.
Your visual representation is only one part of being able to grow your YouTube channel. If you want viewers to truly recognize your brand, it’s just as important to infuse personality into your channel - which leads us into the third step.
Punch Up Your YouTube Channel With Personality
If you want to increase your brand awareness on YouTube, you must be more than just a brand. You have to have personality. One way to make your personality shine is through your videos, and with this in mind, it’s essential to think about how you would like to present yourself to your viewers.
While it’s important to portray yourself as an expert in your field, it’s possible to present yourself as both knowledgeable and fun, warm, or approachable. People typically prefer brands that have a human element, too.
Why not appoint a friendly personality from your brand? Or put the spotlight on a customer for your videos?
Beyond your videos, it’s also important to interact with your audience. Respond promptly to your audience when they react to your videos or when they offer feedback, whether positive or otherwise, take it seriously. When you interact with your audience, make sure to speak with them from a place of understanding.
Overall, when you present yourself as approachable and relatable, viewers are more likely to interact with your video and potentially foster a lasting relationship with your brand. This, in turn, aids in boosting your brand awareness, and beyond that, recognition.
Tell A Story
This section of our YouTube growth strategy is probably one of the most important parts! Your videos are a powerful avenue for sharing what your brand is about - and one of the best ways to do this is through storytelling.
Stories draw people in, and when you focus on making stories that are valuable to your audience, it shows the depth of your brand beyond the services you offer and the products you sell.
You might, for instance, want to showcase tutorials, replete with a step-by-step process and result that follows after that. Otherwise, you might want to focus on the bigger picture and make a video reflecting your brand’s values and missions. You might also want to build a story around the faces behind your brand, be it your workmates or your buyers.
With this in mind, it’s no question that there are infinite ways to tell a story. Regardless of which story you plan on telling, it should be authentic. When you approach your stories with the intention of telling something genuine, you’re more likely to receive your viewers’ trust and respect.
Use SEO to Increase Visibility
No YouTube growth strategy is complete without learning how to optimize your channel for maximum views. You might create valuable videos for your audience, but you won’t obtain the recognition you deserve unless it reaches them.
More people can find and potentially like, share, and subscribe to your content by optimizing your channel.
Since YouTube is a search engine, you can use search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Research will allow you to identify which words or phrases are popular with your target audience, and if used appropriately, can make your videos more visible on YouTube.
Use Keyword research tools, like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Ubersuggest, to help you identify keywords that you can use. If you’re having trouble choosing keywords, one tip is to pick relevant terms that have a large search volume and low competitiveness, the combination of which can increase the visibility of your video content on YouTube.
Fold Relevant Keywords Into Your Videos
Once you’ve identified your keywords, you can start using them in your YouTube channel. There are a few strategic locations to place your keywords for the most optimal results, which include:
Video titles
Video thumbnails
Video descriptions
Insert your keywords into any of the locations mentioned above on the list and avoid stuffing.
Additionally, if you mention any keywords in your videos, ensure to include them in the closed captions (CC) of your videos, too. Mentioning keywords in your CC can also increase more visibility to your YouTube channel when the keyword is searched in YouTube or Google.
Partner With Similar YouTubers
Partnering with similar brands is another way to grow your YouTube channel. You wouldn’t just be taking advantage of the traffic their platforms receive, but it also further reinforces what your brand is about, what you stand for, and the products or services you offer.
For instance, if your brand sells makeup products, you might want to partner up with a beauty influencer. You might want to ask them to review your products on a video or build a makeup routine around your products. That way, you’re showing - not telling! - your product’s value.
When you plan on partnering with others on YouTube, it’s important to ensure that it is beneficial to both you and the other party. Whether that means offering them compensation for their efforts or featuring them on your channel.
It’s also important to partner with people who share the same values as your brand. Otherwise, it may muddle your brand identity.
Watch this short video below to learn how to approach other creators about collaborating with you on YouTube.
Make Attractive Video Titles And Thumbnails
One of the first things people will see on YouTube is your video title - many of whom will make a snap decision on whether your video is worth their attention based on it. That’s why it’s important to create titles that strike a balance between catchy and informative.
As a tip, tell people exactly what they can expect from your video in as few characters as possible. While YouTube allows you to create titles up to 100 characters long, you might want to keep it to 70. Titles longer than 70 characters will be trimmed in the platform’s search listings.
Since you’re allotted limited character space for your titles, you want to use it wisely. Include your keyword, and build an enticing statement around it that invites readers to click on your video. An enticing title won’t only describe what your video’s content is about but also why they should watch in the first place.
Just remember to steer clear of using clickbait when creating your titles. While clickbait effectively attracts attention and encourages viewers to “click” on your video, it can negatively impact your channel, losing you views, respect, and support from your audience.
Another thing people will encounter when they first stumble upon your videos is your thumbnail. Like your title, it should look compelling enough for people to want to click on it. Thumbnails serve as billboards for each video, and they can drive up brand awareness if they are created strategically.
Your thumbnail can be an interesting screenshot from your video or include a human element if possible. You can also fold in relevant keywords using a text overlay without resorting to clickbait. In any case, the picture in your thumbnail should have a clear resolution.
Encourage Your Subscribers To Take Action
You might want to initiate the powers of your viewers by sharing your videos. If your videos have already attracted their attention, it’s essential to take the opportunity to like, subscribe, and share what you produce. It’s likely they will if they resonate with your videos, and if they do, this will further increase your brand awareness.
When your audience shares what you’ve made, their peers will take notice of your brand. Not only that, but it will also increase your brand’s trustworthiness because it shows that you’ve attracted an audience and they liked you well enough to share what you put out into the world.
Use a call-to-action (CTA) in your videos when you already have your attention, encouraging viewers to act upon a specific request. This can be anything from asking them to like your video to sharing your content and subscribing to your channel - or all of the above.
Experiment With YouTube Ads
Even if YouTube is a wonderful platform to scale your organic reach among your target audience, you can further boost your brand awareness with ads. Like most social media platforms, YouTube has its own advertising arm built into its platform.
Utilizing YouTube ads will allow you to reach your target audience to have a better opportunity to convert them into subscribers. There are several ad variations that you can avail of when you want to promote your channel on YouTube.
According to a post by Neil Patel, the best ads for boosting YouTube brand awareness are non-skippable ads. These ads can last up to 15 seconds at a time, and as the name implies, viewers can’t skip through them. These ads appear in the beginning, middle, or even after the video.
While these ads work to muscle their way through to viewers’ attention, they’re more likely to visit your channel if they are intrigued by the ad. And when that happens, you can wow them with your video content and ensure that discovering your brand is a pleasant experience.
Increasing Your YouTube Brand Awareness
To summarize everything, these are the ten simple steps to increase your YouTube brand awareness:
Understand Your Target Audience
Personalize Your Youtube Channel
Punch Up Your YouTube Channel With Personality
Tell A Story
Partner With Similar YouTubers
Use SEO to Increase Visibility
Fold Relevant Keywords Into Your Videos
Make Attractive Video Titles And Thumbnails
Encourage Your Subscribers To Take Action
Experiment With YouTube Ads
Conclusion
If there’s another piece of advice we can offer you, it’s to be patient with the process. Building brand awareness never results in overnight success. It takes hard work and consistency in order to grow your YouTube channel, and more importantly, time for viewers to foster a lasting relationship with you.
This process can be no doubt overwhelming, especially if you’re stretching your efforts among multiple online platforms. The good news is that you don’t have to tackle it all on your own - and we’d gladly lend you a helping hand if you need it.
Just reach out to us through our website, and we’ll respond to you as soon as possible. Our team is available 24/7 to ensure that you reach your goals and get the YouTube brand awareness that you deserve. We’re excited to hear from you!
Danielle Calma is a contributing writer for Zoek, the SEO, Web Design, and Digital Marketing Agency that assists small and medium-sized businesses with their online footprint. She has been a writer for over five years, with most of her experience concentrated in the e-commerce industry. When she isn't typing away on her keyboard, she can be found outside, taking aimless walks around her city, or curled up with a book next to her cat.