And if you’re running a business alone or with a small team you feel this pressure even more so. But, if there is one platform and format that has stood the test of time and grown over the years, it is YouTube and videos for marketing.

Videos are single-handedly one of the most consumed content forms across social networks. YouTube, the world’s largest video-based social network, is growing rapidly and has 2.291 billion active users as of July 2021. 

It is only second to Facebook on the list of the biggest social networks and is your biggest bet to gaining access to a variety of audiences. YouTube has a diverse user base and lends itself to several business niches. 

Starting your YouTube channel can change the face of your business forever. A branded YouTube channel is a different game altogether. It amplifies every benefit that the platform offers by tenfold. 

Curious about what’s so special about a branded YouTube channel, and how to create one? Let’s find out.

A Branded YouTube Channel – What is it, and why do you need one? 

YouTube offers two major channel options to people looking to grow their personal or professional brand through the platform.

With a business account, you can create an official profile for your brand, linked to your website, and use it to share your marketing and promotional content.

The advantage of having a branded YouTube channel via a business account is that you can add managers to the channel, making your workflow easy. And the success of your channel depends on the content you produce, your engagement metrics, and distribution methods. We will learn more about this in the coming sections. 

With the availability of managers, you can divide work easily amongst your team and ensure it all goes on smoothly.

In addition to this, a branded YouTube channel also helps you:

• Share your brand’s updates via an official medium to a wider and more diverse audience 
• Create and share your videos over the largest platform for video content 
• Raise brand awareness and create content for potential customers
• Leverage your channel for lead generation
• Improve your SEO 

Now that you know the value of a branded YouTube channel, it is time to dive into the specifics of building one. 

Building a Branded YouTube Channel – A step-by-step guide 

Social media marketing strategies are hard to tame, but not impossible if you have a well-defined plan in hand. Applying that logic to your branded YouTube channel, let’s explore the steps to building one for your business. 

This Kimp guide on branded YouTube channels will give you a holistic view of the entire process, with best practices on every step. 

Let’s get into it.

1) Setting up and Branding your channel 

Since you are making a decision to have a branded YouTube channel, it is important that you link your channel to your Google Business Account. This will allow you to have a professional account, add managers, and seamlessly manage your content marketing and advertising campaigns. 

Check Google’s guide on setting up a branded YouTube channel here. 

Once your channel is ready with the basic permissions and settings, it is time to transform it into a branded channel. What do you need for that? Well, since the aim of this channel is to raise awareness for your business and make the brand a household name, let’s start with branding basics.

Your YouTube channel has to reflect your brand even in the smallest detail, like the profile picture or the thumbnail design.

Start by reworking your branding designs to suit the size and quality requirements of YouTube profile pictures and banner images. All the artwork you use must match with the tone of the channel and the content you are going to present to your audience.

The guidelines for profile picture and banner images are:

Profile Picture: 

A square image that appears whenever you post, engage, and promote your content.

It must be a standard static JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG file with no animation. The recommended size is 800 X 800 px image, and that renders at 98×98 px. 

Banner Image: 

You can see that traditional banner images are rectangular in shape but appear different on laptops, phones, and television displays. When you design a banner image, you must remember that the platform may crop some of it for different screens. 

YouTube recommends a size of 2048×1152 px with an aspect ratio of 16:9. In this, you must place the text in a space of 1235×338 px so that you can avoid information getting cut off. 

Banner images are places to communicate important information like website, social media handles, upload schedule, and any new updates of the brand. 

You can keep updating this as and when the time demands. 

Kimp Tip: When you are starting a new channel and the content pipeline is sparse, it is the design and the branding that will make the user click the subscribe button. Your banner image must invite people to explore your channel and become a member of your page for the best results.  

You can also ensure that the thumbnails you choose for the videos are as per the branding requirements. 

Apple’s YouTube channel is a clear example of how profile picture and banner image can help raise brand awareness for your business. The company has kept the text and image to the center of the banner hence avoiding cropped images from getting displayed on any device. 

2) Customer and market research 

The next step to ensuring the success of your branded YouTube channel is to like always, start from the basics. Some may say that marketing that does not take customers’ opinions into account fails before it starts. And they would be right. Content has many forms, and not everyone has the same taste or expectation from a brand’s content marketing strategy. 

So, if you truly want your YouTube videos to resonate with your audience so that they see value in your business, you have to conduct a thorough market study. This includes customer base and competition too. You can use many tools for this such as

• Email marketing campaigns
• Analytic results of your other social networks content performance 
• Customer demographic analysis and market studies available by eminent institutions 

This will help you create content that is tailor-made to the sensibilities of your audience and beats your competition by a wide margin.

Kimp Tip: No matter what content marketing strategy you settle on, ensure that you have a consistent branding presence across all your videos. It is how you will find your unique voice in the crowd.

Need help creating your brand designs? Get Kimp Graphics for your profile, banner and thumbnail images. And Kimp Video for high-impact marketing videos. 

3) YouTube marketing Content Strategy 

Once you arrive at the type of content you want to produce for your branded YouTube channel, you can start planning your content marketing strategy. Now, it is tempting to do what the bigwigs in the industry are doing already, seeing that it has such a tremendous response. But it is also important to experiment to find what works for your brand and your audience.

As we describe in our guide on social media strategy, you can split the content into four major types: 

• Educational: This includes product guides, how-to informational videos, tutorials, and so on. 
• Entertainment: This caters to a more fun vibe with videos like reaction videos, behind-the-scenes content, blooper reels, and so on. 
• Inspirational: Stories that inspire people such as customer journeys, founder stories, or any relevant event that your audience may find inspirational 
• Company Updates: Since it is your brand’s place on the platform, it is only right that this is where you release all exclusive content related to the firm as well such as product launches, giveaways, any new milestone, press coverage, and so on. 

Each of these video types needs a different approach and creation process. Right from the treatment to the editing, the styles are diverse. But, it is also important that you have a consistent brand voice and design presence so that customers can identify it anywhere. 

You need a professional team that can handle every video type as your content marketing strategy will not have just one category of content at any point. 

Kimp Tip: Produce a channel trailer so that anyone new coming across your channel knows exactly what to expect. It is like a promo video for your channel and the business, too. 

With a professional service like Kimp Video, you can leave a great first impression on your audience with your channel trailer. 

Samsung’s YouTube channel has a mix of educational, entertainment, and brand stories neatly segregated to attract the audience. 

Samsung’s YouTube channel has a mix of educational, entertainment, and brand stories neatly segregated to attract the audience. 

You can see how each video category has a different style and approach, making editing and treatment a vital part of content marketing in YouTube.

4) Optimizing the videos 

On any other platform, the next step after content creation would be distribution and then promotion. But YouTube is different. The platform is a part of Google’s growing network of social media platforms, and you have a mid-step here between these two processes. And that is optimization.

YouTube presents a tremendous opportunity to improve your SEO rankings on search engine pages. Even within the platform, you can ensure that your video lists in the first few results for a search query by:

• Including the right and relevant keywords for your video and business objectives. This is a mandatory component of your video description. 
• Paying attention to your engagement rates such as total watch time, comments, likes, shares, and subscriber rates. If these go down, you must actively seek them out via design and other techniques in your video.
• Improve your watch time metrics by tailoring all your videos to the ideal duration your audience prefers. This will improve your engagement rates and also help you produce better content over time. 

Kimp Tip: Adding a watermark lends authenticity and ownership to your content, while also safeguarding it from plagiarism. Watermarks are usually square-ish logos that you can integrate into your videos strategically without impacting the original content.

Usually, brands use their logos for this. However, you have to repurpose and tweak your logo a little before you import it into your video. You don’t want it to stick out too much and hamper user experience.

5) Distribution and promotion plan

Once the content is ready, it is time to put the distribution plan in motion. With an overload of videos on YouTube, there are only so many videos that can appear on any person’s homepage. It is how you plan your distribution and promotion efforts that determine the success of your content. 

So, how do you ace distribution and promotion for your branded YouTube channel?

Consistency

YouTube is an extremely demanding platform. As it is the largest video platform, you can understand the sheer volume of content that is available to the audience. By showing up consistently with new and improved ideas, you set an expectation with your audience. You show up; they show up, your engagement goes higher, and then bam! You are on the explore page.

Scheduling

This is part of your consistency regime. It’s hard to manage content creation and distribution. But, remember you have a branded YouTube channel which means you can add your team as managers and use scheduling tools so that the content always arrives on time. 

Non-YouTube distribution and promotion avenues 

While YouTube is a great platform, it is always best to over-promote than under. You can shine a light on your YouTube content outside of the platform by including them on your sales pages, websites, and social media channels.

You can repurpose your videos to suit each networks’ requirement and eventually link them all back to the original content. This way, your audience on all platforms has an awareness of your YouTube channel.

6) YouTube Video Ads

Anyone who knows Youtube knows how notorious the platform is for pushing video ads aggressively. While this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it is a great opportunity for you to promote your Youtube channel.

By including video ads in your content marketing strategy, you gain the opportunity to share your content with viewers outside of your audience base.

As a best practice, you must choose videos that:

• Exist on your channel and display a higher engagement rate. 
• Adequately explains your brand and business model to the audience, making them curious about your YouTube channel 
• Can work in the long-form and short-form too, to factor in ad skipping.

Kimp Tip: While YouTube aggressively promotes advertisements, it is tricky to catch someone’s attention with one. So, to capture the audiences’ focus on you, you must design a video ad with a great opening line, an intriguing script, and the best quality so that the user experience stays top-notch.

YouTube video ads allow you to promote your channel, website and any service during the display duration. 

7) Analytics 

The best part of any social network is the real-time reaction and analytics you get to access that can help you understand how you are faring. YouTube analytics, to be honest, are a grade apart. You can understand everything right from how content is faring, how long people are watching videos for, what is the viewer to subscriber ratio, and so on.

With this knowledge, after every content production cycle, it is prudent that you and the design team convene back at the drawing board to see how to best tweak the next cycle. 

Right from design issues to production issues, or to any specific content piece, you can iron all the kinks out before you start creating again.

Grow your Branded YouTube channel with Kimp Video 

Running a YouTube channel is no easy feat. Especially when the demand to constantly create excellent content is so high. And video production, editing, and optimizing take a lot of time – something not every business can afford.

Outsourcing these can also pinch your pocket unless you are working with Kimp Video. Our subscription plans allow you to make unlimited requests and revisions without breaking the bank.

A flat-monthly rate gives you the freedom to ideate and innovate to grow your business via YouTube. 

Sign up for the free trial today and launch your branded YouTube channel soon.