Brand Building through YouTube

Mirror and Smoke did an extensive research and studied how one can build a brand by producing a corporate film or a product film and then broadcasting it YouTube. This post talks about how one can use the wide dimensions of YouTube and cement your corporate image.

Nearly 81% of all internet users watch videos online with the average user watching 173 videos a month. With YouTube being the single largest repository for any kind of video from instructional videos, short films to product videos, it makes sense to ensure you have a presence on YouTube and try to maximize the advantages it can provide to your brand.

The primary step to any process is to define your success metrics. In the case of a YouTube product video, identify what role it has to play in your marketing strategy. Establish your marketing objective, identify your target audience and develop content that is engaging and relevant while also being entertaining or informative. Choosing the right film and Production Company is important as well. Ensure that the vendor knows the world of social media and corporate films well. The next step would be to sign up on YouTube which is simple enough.

Having done so, you automatically have a central page for yourself where you put host your videos. This hub is essentially your channel on YouTube. Choosing a name for the account might seem like mundane thing to do but choosing the right name could be the difference between nabbing a client and letting them go. Choose a name that reflects your online video strategy. You could include your brand/campaign name or the region you operate in or even just the word “official”.

YouTube offers businesses a commercial option called ‘Branded Channels’. This allows you to use YouTube like an in-house TV channel. For a brand like Reebok it’s fantastic for small and medium sized companies, spending upwards of $40,000 on Branded YouTube channel is hard to justify. While this approach has potential, the pricing structure makes it restrictive.

Having recognized the barrier this might pose, Google offers a new channel called ‘Enhanced YouTube Channels’. This comes very close to the features offered on a full-fledged Brand Channel. Among the features offered are a channel page header banner (this includes external linking), a side column branding box, background imagery along with analytics tracking and URL tracking.

Developing on this concept, Mirror and Smoke explains the benefits of such an approach:

• It aids your business in branding, making it easier for your business to have a brand presence on YouTube. Build and design your brand to reflect the brand strategy you wish to employ.Colours, themes and images you choose all add up. It is important to stay consistent and provide descriptive titles and tags for better discovery on a YouTube Search.
• Reach:  YouTube is the world’s 2^nd biggest search engine and fourth largest web property of any kind globally.
• It provides for social networking as users can interact with your brand – rating and commenting on the videos you post while subscribing to your channel. This also lets you get instant responses from prospective clients.
• The interactive banners that Enhanced YouTube Channels have a clickable feature. This allows you to link your channel to your website and also reproduce the look and feel of your website on YouTube. Standard channels don’t let you have such a banner. This also helps in increasing the page rank of your website by increasing relevancy thereby ensuring that your position on Google Searches is enhanced considerably.
• There is no delay time. The “featured video” feature on Enhanced channels play the moment a visitor hits upon the page thereby capturing the attention of the user immediately. Colleges and Universities have been known to use such a format to play their promotional videos.
• Enhanced YouTube Channels have blocks that let users sign up and link to specific topic areas. This helps funnel your visitors through to the relevant part of the websites thereby capturing your audience while their attention is still up. In today’s impatient world, it makes for an ingenious feature. The branding boxes also allows users to link back to your pages, this aids in the search engine optimization of your website thereby increasing your page rank through these new relevant links.
• Allows you to optimise your channel for mobile devices. It is important to give people on different devices the best experience. You should be adding mobile channel banners and choose mobile colour themes.
• Enhanced YouTube Channels give you access to extensive data that helps in tweaking your marketing objectives and broadcast video production to increase outreach and have a very targeted demographic.
• Finally they allow you to post corporate films, documentaries or product films that you might otherwise be unable to post because of the time limit enforced by standard channels.

This kind of insight is what you gain by investing in a production house like ourselves (Mirror and Smoke); the in house expertise could prove invaluable while branding yourself on the internet.

The content on your channel needs to be constantly updated, this ensures that people have something to look forwards to and therefore will return to your channel. Promote your videos in any way that your means will allow. This means using paid as well as earned media. Promote through YouTube videos themselves and cross promote using playlists and annotations. Embed product films on other sites which allow users to track back to your channel.

Among the most popular channels on YouTube is the DIY (Do It yourself) channel. Users of today are not satisfied with printed instructions or photos of a particular process. They appreciate seeing an actual representative of your company using your product or service successfully. If it appears to be easy to accomplish, applies to them and they feel it creates value and that they can do it too – they will almost surely convert.

For success you need to ensure that your channel is unique and stands out from all the other channels competing with you for the clientele’s attention. Be an active and responsible member of the YouTube community and it’s only a matter of time before your initiatives start to pay dividends.