How to Brand Your Youtube Channel To Attract Leads | Growth Secrets

Do you want to grow your business brand on YouTube?

If you want to attract and retain your audience on YouTube, it might be time to update your brand visual strategy.

Lisa shares 5 brand visual strategies on how to wield the power of your brand atmosphere to attract and retain the attention of your ideal client.

5 Tricks To Branding Your Youtube Channel To Attract Leads

Today, I’ll be covering 5 Tricks To Branding Your Youtube (YT) Channel To Attract Leads. Specifically, what I call the atmosphere of your YT channel. Atmosphere includes the style of images, fonts, and brand messaging to help attract and retain an audience to your channel.

We won’t be talking about your videos themselves -because that’s a whole other topic.

Hi. I’m Lisa Stewart, founder of Build-Your-Own Small Business. I’m a brand strategist, maker, and business coach and I help you STEAM entrepreneurs build products that sell and change the world from their workbench.

Let’s talk about brand for a moment.

What is brand?
Brand is who you are and branding is what you do.

It’s about who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

I help steam entrepreneurs build their brands from the ground up. This foundation builds a framework that emotionally connects with their customer, making them a fan for life.

This framework also helps to inform your brand atmosphere.

Let’s talk about 3D experiences.
For instance, if you were to walk into a spa, would you expect to hear Nine Inch Nails playing as you walk through the door?
No, right?
Abrasive, hard rock goth is not something one expects to help soothe and relax during self-care.
Okay, Deadpool might.

You wouldn’t believe that’s exactly what some YouTubers are doing. Matching up elements that don’t resonate with their customer’s expectations. It’s quite jarring.

I remind my clients of this all the time about their websites. It’s not about whether you as the CEO likes your website -its’ about what the website will do for their customer.

Same goes for any product you develop. Think of YT as a product.

When you do create an environment lets say, for your brick and mortar for instance, you’re creating atmosphere. The atmosphere influences mood and evokes reaction. It’s a rich combination of elements that reach all of your senses like touch, smell, hear, see, and possibly taste.

A Word on Video Types

You can create a variety of videos to Educate, Engage, Entertain.

You could begin with a straight Talking head video like this one and then add a few Visual Aids.

If you’re introvert like me and get queasy with the thought of doing a talking head video, you can still wield video to your advantage without ever showing your face.

• Examples might be
• How-to/Explainer
• Expert videos
• Testimonials
• Product reviews,
• Screencasting,
• Unboxing videos.

Those are just to name a few.

If you’re interested in learning more about what kind of content you could create to maintain a sustainable channel, let me know in the comments. I’m putting together a system that will help entrepreneurs build a content strategy for their businesses.

That should get you started as you begin thinking about building your video library for your YT channel.

Let’s Set the Stage

Think about going to a movie theater. Those giant Cineplexes where they have 12 movies to choose from.

Your YT channel is in a cineplex of millions of other channels. Your target customer can only choose one.

Let’s talk Genre

When you’re at the movie theater and you’re choosing movie at the cineplex, you start with the genre right? Is it horror? A RomCom? SciFi?

Think of the Plot
Beyond that, what’s the plot? What’s the emotional benefit? Is it going to satisfy? Come to a conclusion? A cliff hanger?

Lets’ talk about the Characters
Who’s starring in it? What roles will they be filling? Be sure they bring everything they’ve got to the table to help round out the watch experience.

Define and Meet Your Customer Expectations
Be sure to deliver the stories they’re looking for as they hunt through your channel.
It’s like choosing a rom-com and the opening act is some body chopping scene. Ah. That’s not what I signed up for!

If your channel promises millennial they’ll get help and insight on how to save money and plan for their financial future, be sure that your topics include that.

If you throw in a couple of videos on yoga for millennial moms, then you’ll confuse your audience and lose their attention -and you don’t want that. Time and Attention are two commodities you don’t want to mess with.

As Gary V states “Attention is the currency of your business”

So, no matter how good you are, you first need your audience’s attention. Without attention, your business ideas will fail. Attention leads to sales.
So you want to get it right the first time.

Let’s get into it!!

Now, on to the five tricks to attract leads

As I begin to build any product or experience, I create a brief.
First I ask…

1 Who is it for?
Be mindful as you choose your Industry, Market, Niche

• Is it for folks who live in the city who want to plant their own mini gardens?
• Have you invented a new kitchen gadget?

2 What’s your Channel Focus inside Industry, Market, Niche
Relates to Your Audience (WIIFM?) What do you want to talk about and will this be of interest to your audience?

People who choose a topic first and then try and find an audience for that topic generally struggle a lot more than people who choose an audience first and then serve that audience.

It’s a subtle distinction because a topic often correlates with an audience. For instance, my friend Dory targets INFPs, which is both a topic AND an audience. It’s an important distinction.

Whatever market you choose, you’ll want to get narrow on who you want to help and those who want help (that’s key)

• Bookkeeper (huge market): finance App for millennials
• Gardener (huge market): provide urban garden plans for city dwellers

Be sure to keep this focus as you build your content for your channel

3 Is your Channel Name Relevant?

What if you already have a channel and you’re using your name?
You could continue with your Name as personal brand + Focus = Geri Gryffindor – City Garden Guide. If you have a business name, be sure to plant it as the root of your business Google directory. That way you can connect it to your YouTube channel and build from there. (I have a video on that here)

4 What is your video promise?
People come to YT to learn something. So, teach me something. Then Layer it with intent (inform, describe, convince, or tell a story) with a distinct emotional state (ie. Dream, hope, desire, or fear.)
Match those 2 elements and you’ll be well on your way to capturing a bigger audience.

HOT TIP The title of your video and your channel is the promise you’re making to your viewer.

5 Does your channel atmosphere match your customer’s expectations?
Why did I leave this for last? Because all of these questions above help to inform your aesthetics. The secret is in the descriptive words that you use to help shape your world.

People want to get captivated and swept away with your channel banner and your thumbnails. Think of them like the movie posters you see as you walk into the cineplex.

• Simple, few elements.
• Focus is on the person or product, and
• The background has less detail allowing the product or person to remain the hero of the story

HOT TIP: The channel is for your viewer, not you.

I often remind my clients of this as I build their websites. It doesn’t matter as the CEO if you like your site -its about how its going to attract and perform for your customers.
This is easily confused because many of us are makers at heart and we get so involved in the moment that we sometimes forget others.

What does atmosphere look like on a YouTube channel?

When I plan visual aesthetics for my clients, I use a brand style board. That’s a combination of a mood board and design guidelines and its a nice balance between the two.

When you think of mood board, interior designers come to mind. That board is filled with paint colors, fabrics, and other textures to convey to their client how a room might come together.

Design guidelines for a website are the nuts and bolts of font faces, sizes, imagery and other minute details. That can be overwhelming for a client.

Like the Goldie Locks and the 3 bears, A style board is just right. It helps to convey the atmosphere without the worry of technical specs of the project. It conveys the feeling that your customer will respond to once they reach your site-or YT channel in this case.

To create consistency on your YT channel, consider creating a style board of your own. It should have:

• 3 brand colors
• One distinct font
• Clean thumbnails with High contrasting images and graphics

This will give you the consistency that your channel needs. Consistency creates trust for your viewers.

Here’s an example of my brand style board.
Banner example, colors, fonts, examples of thumbnails, and end board.
In the event I hire an assistant, they’ll know exactly what my atmosphere should contain when they assemble these components together.

This is something you might want to consider.
I’ve got a link to a free brand template to use for your own channel in the description.

So, when you’re designing your YT Header, use:

• Your established brand colors
• High contrast image & fonts, And
• Be sure to have it centered to fit mobile.

In my world…Mobile first! Plus, this is how YT has designed its parameters.

For your thumbnails:

• Use bright colors and high contrast images
• Include a close up of a face or product whenever possible (no more than 3 elements for clarity)
• Use fonts, colors, shapes that are consistent with your brand. (This rounds out and reinforces your brand’s atmosphere)

Don’t be afraid to test your thumbnail images to garner more views. If you change your thumbnails on a handful of videos, you might see amazing results. Many folks often play and swap out their thumbnail images to test the attraction and click-thru rates. They can see an amazing increase in views.

To summarize branding your YouTube channel to attract leads:

1. Set the Stage with your brand to stand out within the thousands of other channels at the cineplex of YT
2. Continue with genre, plot, characters, and meet your customers expectations with your videos
3. Remember who your audience is
4. Remember to define your channel focus and match your channel name and your channel’s promise and
5 Craft your YT atmosphere to capture and retain the attention of your growing audience with a brand style board.

Remember, great things take time. So keep building!

Thank you!

Thanks for stopping by -I’m so grateful that you’re here.

If you want to get featured in one of my videos, take a photo of yourself watching one of my vids and tag me on Instagram!

RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED:

Free Brand Style Board Template https://buildyourownsmb.com/free-youtube-brand-style-board//

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