Grow Online With Small Business YouTube Branding

YouTube is among one of the lesser known places to brand your business online. How do you churn out quality video content regularly that is both entertaining and helpful to people while meeting your goal?

You can get started with small business YouTube branding without a lot of effort. As you discover the power behind YouTube to grow your business, you can ramp up your efforts quickly.

You may think YouTube is only a place where you can reach younger consumers but that’s not true anymore. According to Google, from 2015 to 2016 time spent on YouTube almost tripled among adults 55+.

That’s a huge increase! That goes for almost all age groups as YouTube becomes a normal media habit for all age groups.

That means there’s huge opportunity to reach people if you give them what they want.

The challenge always remains giving them what they want, though.

So, beyond YouTube’s audience growing exponentially, why would you want to brand your business on YouTube?

Why Brand On YouTube

Branding is all about people getting to know your company and understanding who you are. Big companies spend millions of dollars every year to brand their business on media. Commercials on traditional TV has always been the way they’ve done that.

That’s changing, though.

As the audience changes and how they consume media, so is companies marketing budget. That means the marketing department of any company who’s planning on growing must look into diversifying how they reach consumers.

If you need some statistics on why YouTube is the place to brand, there’s one that will stand out for you.

According to comScore (Oct 2016), YouTube reaches 95% of online adults 35+ in a month.

That’s a lot of adults who could also be consumers of your product or service! Not only that but YouTube viewers are more likely to have a college degree than the general population according to a Google commissioned study by Nielsen. More educated viewers means more affluent viewers.

There are over a billion users of YouTube which is over 1/3 of all people on the Internet according to YouTube statistics.

That’s a lot of people you could reach but what good does that do you as a small business? Aren’t these people getting on YouTube to be entertained and for funny cat videos?

Nope.

There are tons of different categories of videos that people are watching and to your delight some of the top categories can be directly related to your business.

People want to know:

• How to do stuff.
• What’s inside stuff (products, etc.)
• How stuff works.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Introduce People To Your Brand

No matter what type of video you create for your business, it’s a great way to introduce people to your brand. Your video can be branded down to a watermark seen on each video. People will get to know your brand, you, and your product/service.

Your website is a great way to reach people on Google (biggest search engine) and social media. YouTube is a great way to reach people too and it’s the second biggest search engine.

The ability to reach billions of people is a great reason for small business YouTube branding.

It’s a great way to reach customers but it sounds expensive to do it.

How Much It Costs

YouTube gives you access to billions of viewers. That’s cool but how do you reach them? Doesn’t it cost a lot of money?

Nope, the cost of putting a video on YouTube and reaching your audience is nothing. Now, you aren’t going to reach millions or even hundreds of people to start with, though.

With the right video topic and everything filled out right, you could reach hundreds to thousands eventually. I was able to get thousands of views on one of my videos with the right topic and it didn’t cost me anything.

That’s how much it costs to publish and reach your audience. There are other costs involved with YouTube, though.

Indirect Costs

There are some indirect costs because videos of course don’t appear out of thin air.

The biggest investment you’re going to have to make on YouTube is time. It takes time to put everything together on YouTube and to get your channel right. There are images that need to be created and videos that need to be edited.

You’ll have to record something and produce it which can take a lot of time. It does add up but it’s worth it.

Like everything, you either have to invest a lot of time or a lot of money.

There’s also the cost of equipment or software depending on what type of videos you’re creating.

The good thing about equipment is that if you have a smartphone you’re probably set. Not only that but there is free video editing software out there. Every Mac comes with iMovie which is sufficient for most video editing.

I could write a whole post on the various costs but I’ll leave some up to your imagination (and possibly a later post). I’m going to move onto the most important factor for small business YouTube branding.

YouTube’s Most Important Factor

After you have your YouTube profile and channel set up perfectly for your brand there’s one important factor to success. The next section covers important parts to make sure you do for your brand on YouTube. While those are important, they’re not the most important.

Consistency in quantity and quality.

That means come up with a regular schedule of posting videos as much as you can and stick with it. Your videos don’t have to be professional quality but they do need some basic level of quality.

With a basic level of quality and consistency, your videos will eventually start growing your brand presence on YouTube.

It takes time, though. YouTube won’t be an instant success as most things won’t be. There is tremendous free organic audience reach opportunity in YouTube, though.

I manage a YouTube channel that has grown from nothing to a channel doing on average of about 60,000+ views every day in January, 2017. See the graph below how long it took to grow into a significant number of views.

From January 1, 2016 to the end of May there was almost no growth. The channel was started in October 2015 so it took a long time before anything started to happen. About 6 months.

With patience, consistency, quantity, and quality your channel will eventually start growing into a lead powerhouse.

Now you know the most important part of growing your YouTube channel for your small business. There are also a lot of important factors you need to pay attention to.

Important Parts Of YouTube For Brand

Beyond the most important factor in growing a YouTube channel I mentioned above, channel completeness is also important. You don’t only have to pay attention to your channel, though. There’s also every video you have to take care of to present properly.

You need to set up your YouTube channel and videos to make sure it looks and feels consistent with your brand.

Here are the parts of your YouTube channel that you need to focus on to get small business YouTube branding right:

• Logo
• Watermark
• Complete about section
• Channel keywords
• Channel artwork
• Links to websites

And then for every video you publish, you also need to have consistency and the following:

• Descriptive and full title.
• Good description that helps YouTube figure out what the video is about.
• Link to your website, landing page, and/or social media profiles.
• Keywords that help define the video.
• Custom thumbnail.

YouTube gives you many tools to brand your business fully on YouTube. They give you a lot of places to include your logo, links to your website and social media profiles, and ways for you to include a call to action in every video.

I’ll cover more of these in future posts because there’s a lot to cover for each of them. It’s important to know how to set up your YouTube channel and brand your videos well.

What To Offer On YouTube

You want people to watch your videos on YouTube and then do something. Perhaps you want them to visit your website, fill out a form, sign up for a course, etc.

Before you even create video content you have to know what you want visitors to do.

What is your goal?

With that goal in mind then you can come up with content that will help viewers reach that goal. So, you have to come up with content that’s either entertaining or helpful. Something viewers would be seeking out.

YouTube gives you plenty of opportunities to give viewers a call to action. Video descriptions can contain links and it’s encouraged to provide one in the first two lines. The first two lines of your description is all that’s seen by viewers without clicking a link for more.

The image below illustrates how a YouTube video description looks to a viewer. YouTube displays the full text of the first two lines. That means it’ll show the first line and the next after you’ve pressed enter.

Everything else is “below the fold” or where the viewer has to click the show more link. You have to assume they’ll never see any of that.

YouTube also provides the ability to create end screen elements. These allow you to put a link to your website, other videos, or other features. This is a great way to provide a bridge from your video to the content you want viewers to go to next.

So, with a good offering on YouTube, small business YouTube branding can be a great way to reach viewers and get them to your call to action.

Small Business YouTube Branding

Hopefully this post has provided you with some first thoughts on the reason you should brand your business on YouTube. There’s a lot to think about and do on YouTube but it’s worth the time spent. YouTube is a great opportunity to reach your customers and clients.

YouTube is another opportunity to provide content that helps market your business and get your brand out there. There are lots of opportunities to get free targeted traffic to your business with content marketing, YouTube is another great option.

There will be many more articles on YouTube because it’s such an excellent way to brand your business online. I will be writing about my path to brand my business on YouTube after having already branded a high growth YouTube channel that has grown 729% in the last 90 days and is now doing almost 1 million views a month.