If you’re serious about leveraging social media marketing to grow your business, you can’t afford to ignore using video and YouTube is the best option out there. With more than 1.3 billion users, YouTube is the second most searching website on the internet. It offers you the opportunity to expand your audience significantly and drive traffic to your own website.
A branded YouTube channel is one of the best ways to build a brand online. Once you create your social profile on YouTube you can upload videos, as well as your playlists and channels you like are displayed. Your channel is your opportunity to hook people on YouTube and get them to spend more time with you.
Here’s a few tips to brand your YouTube channel.
Have Laser Focus
It’s important that everything on your YouTube channel centers around one theme. If you run a fashion line, your videos and channels should focus on that, not cute puppies and travel videos. By zeroing in on one topic, you brand yourself as an expert in that field.
Bonus Tip: If you already have a YouTube channel, go look at it right now. I’ll wait. How well does your channel focus on your target industry? If you have some videos or activity that don’t reflect what you need to brand yourself around, remove those videos and consider setting up a second personal channel for your leisurely interests.
Use Your Company Logo
Part of branding your YouTube channel is keeping it consistent with your other branding efforts online. One way to do that is to use your company logo for your channel. If you have other graphics you use elsewhere, you can use that as your banner image at the top of your channel.
Bonus Tip: If you’ve branded yourself as an individual rather than a brand, you’re better off using your headshot than a logo. Consider how people know your brand: as a company or as a person? That will help you decide which is the better option.
Always Include a Description in Your Videos
You’d be surprised how many people neglect to put in a detailed description when they upload videos, but it’s essential to help people find your videos! You want to make sure that you leverage keywords and hashtags. Both your video title and paragraph description should tell people what they can expect to find if they watch your video. Make it easy for people to find your video.
Bonus Tip: It’s also a smart idea to include a link back to your website in the description. This gets people off of YouTube and onto your website.
Include Links to Your Site and Social
At the top of your YouTube channel, embedded on top of the banner image, you’ll see icons for links. Here, you can include links to your website and social media. Use every opportunity you have to pull people away from YouTube to another one of your branded landing pages or web pages.
Bonus Tip: You can customize the text that appears, so if you want people to sign up for your newsletter and click over to your website, you could use the text “get monthly updates” or something similar.
Leverage the Power of Overlays
Overlays are bits of text with a call to action and link to click that you can — you guessed it — lay over your video. If, for example, you talk about a specific product in your video, you could include an overlay at that particular moment in the video for viewers to click and save 20% on that product.
Overlays give you the opportunity to catch people when they’re most willing to do something while watching your video.
Bonus Tip: Not technical? There are tools you can use that will guide you through creating an overlay template.
Make Small (But Effective) Tweaks
There are other actions you can take while setting up your YouTube channel or uploading videos that can maximize the time people spend watching your content.
You can remove other ads from appearing on your videos by clicking the box that says “Prevent ads from showing in my videos on this page” when you upload a video. If you’re planning on using overlays, you want your content, not someone else’s, to appear.
If you want to feature your newest video any time you upload a new one, you can do so by editing this feature when you upload a video, and it will continue for all future videos.
Another way to hook people into watching more of your videos is to enable auto-play so that your featured video on your channel plays as soon as someone visits your channel.
By default, subscribers to your YouTube channel are taken to your main channel page, but you have the option to make your Feed tab the default page they see. You want to do this because it shows your recent activity, including comments and videos, and subscribers are more likely to be interested in what you’ve been doing recently than what they’ve already seen on your main page.
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