Overcoming Five Difficult Things When Developing Your Unique Brand Identity on Youtube.

In addition, when trying to create engaging video topics, planning for long hours in advance is probably necessary to stay true to your brand identity and create commercial value for sponsorships or product placement opportunities. Creating synergy across all your videos is also a high priority as you grow your channel.

Below are 6 common problems you may run into when developing your YouTube channel and some ideas on how to overcome those challenges.

1. Competing For Attention is Both Direct and Indirect

It can be challenging to create an online brand identity that stands out on YouTube. Unlike other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are primarily text-based and allow users to post anything from status updates about their day or photos of themselves with friends at the beach, YouTube is a video platform where it’s difficult for your voice to stand out if you don’t have something compelling to say. This means you are not just competing with other content on YouTube, you are also competing with other social channels to capture the attention of your audience.

In order for your YouTube content to be successful in capturing attention, you should think carefully about what will make your company unique when developing your brand identity. Your company’s message should be clear and concise, and you need to answer some fairly simple questions before filming and posting any content.

Identify Your Brands Core Value Proposition

Answering these three questions before filming will help you to establish and stay true to your own brand.

1. Who am I?
2. What am I offering?
3. Why am I unique?

By answering these, you have taken control of a very large part of your public persona. It’s continually reframing these three answers that will drive your value and help to build a community because these are the essentials of what new followers want to know about you.

Now you need to find and define your audience.

Identify and Develop Your Audience

Defining and growing your audience requires studying who your current audience is. It is easy to discover who subscribes, who likes, who comments on your posts, and their demographics on every social media platform. With this knowledge in hand, you can pivot to focusing on increasing your target audience.

Do you offer a product, service, or commentary that caters to them? If so, then to further ensure their loyalty and encourage sharing your videos, you should always try to underscore why you are the best choice for them.

Another crucial factor to nail down, is when is the best time to post your videos to ensure engagement? Posting a relevant topic when most of your target audience is not tuned in will undermine your best efforts. The demographic studies will once again tell you when the best time to reach your potential subscribers is.

2. Community Can Take A Long Time To Build

Your interactions with your now growing audience are critical for turning viewers into subscribers and eventually into loyal promoters of your brand. What matters most is what you say, how you say it, and how quickly it is said. You will need to respond to video comments promptly when necessary and also take community feedback into consideration when creating future video content.

Your subscribers and viewers are a great source to identify future relevant topics. If you use suggested topics from your audience you’ll retain those subscribers for a longer period of time and they will become advocates for your brand.

3. Video Content Needs To Be High Quality, Concise, and Engaging

Social platforms are video-centric, just look at the rapid rise of TikTok. Its cross-pollination with Instagram shows that quick clips help you remain relative in followers’ feeds. Longer content on YouTube and Facebook Live allows you to deep dive into a topic that is important to you and your community of fans. Regardless of length, always upload them onto each appropriate platform separately so it will autoplay and embed it so that it is easily shareable, which will increase your view count.

Producing the Videos is Easy and Inexpensive

You don’t need to buy a bunch of gear or hire a production team. High-quality videos can be made with a small investment. Your smartphone can, with a little help, capture video that will help you present yourself in the best possible light.

Best Camera for YouTube

The good people at Soundstripe have a great article where they interviewed the Ingamells Brothers, who have a successful Youtube channel and production company, about the best camera for YouTube.

Here are a few highlights:

1. For their short clips, the Ingamells Brothers go with the Sony a6400.
2. They use a Rode ViceoMic Pro microphone for recording audio.
3. For lighting, the Ingamells Brothers rely on an Aputure MC RGBWW.
4. With longer videos, they depend on 2 Sony A7iii, one with a 35mm lens and the other with an 85mm lens.
5. The 35mm excels for wide shots.
6. And the 85mm is the go-to for great headshots, thanks to the lens slimming effect.
7. They use a steady cam to eliminate any shaky camera movements.
8. You don’t have to opt for a professional rig like the Ingamells Brothers use.
9. Using your smartphone’s camera and additional lighting will give you professional-quality video ready to be liked and shared.

4. It’s Can Be Difficult To Find Royalty-Free Music To Set The Tone

It can serve as your catchy theme song or effective transitions, but either way, your followers expect to hear it. Thankfully, you don’t have to produce it yourself. But you do have to be aware of the legal risks of using someone else’s tracks.

Copyright law says that you can’t use music in your posts without getting permission from the copyright holders. If you don’t then you run the risk of having your posts being taken down or a platform suspending your channel.

Once again, Soundstripe has another fine article explaining commercial use and when you need to get permission to use pre-recorded music in your videos.

Here are the highlights:

1. Many artists freely distribute royalty-free tracks to generate exposure.
2. However, you still must obtain a license to use royalty-free songs.
3. It’s best practice to always choose tracks that have a commercial CC license.
4. That way you can sidestep any legal issues in the future.
5. Companies like Soundstripe have libraries full of specialized royalty-free music, and for a low monthly or yearly fee, you can download as much as you want.
6. And you can include any of these collected works without worrying about getting the right licenses or being sued for copyright infringement.

5. Your Video Content Needs Synergy Across All Social Platforms

While videos with music will get the most views, don’t leave your other less video-heavy accounts hungry. All of your social media platforms should redirect to each other. Many successful brands use a free app called AllMyLinks to connect their audience to all of their other social media accounts.

But why stop there? Your website should also redirect to social media and vice-versa. This helps to ensure that all of your various audiences help to feed each platform along with your website which maximizes all your branding efforts.

Conclusion

Your goal is to build an active audience of subscribers who will engage with your content, share your videos with their networks and become paying customers. How you get there is by branding, targeting, engaging, and creating high quality videos.

By following some of the listed steps in this article you can avoid some of the major downfalls you may run into when building your brand identity on Youtube and build a highly engaged community of subscribers.