Proven Techniques to Enhance Subscriber Count with Effective Channel Branding

How to Brand Your YouTube Channel to Get More Subscribers

Shanoon Cox

Nov 01, 2022• Proven solutions

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Epic Meal Time. Michelle Phan. Peter McKinnon. When you think of each of these YouTube creators, what comes to mind? The feelings and thoughts you have are vastly different because each one of these channels has its own unique branding.

Epic Meal Time’s YouTube brand is in-your-face and intense. It pumps you full of adrenaline and increases your heart rate.

Michelle Phan’s YouTube brand is calm, whimsical, and aspirational.

The color palette she chose is pleasing to the eyes and doesn’t evoke any of the stress we get from Epic Meal Time.

They have different branding because they want to reflect different feelings for different audiences.

Bad Branding Causes Mistrust

When a branding element does not align with the message or the tone does not match with the material, then the audience is not going to trust what you offer. Without trust, you won’t be able to get the advocacy that is essential for a YouTube channel to grow.

Imagine Michelle Phan using the aggressive colors of Epic Meal Time or vice versa. Pretty weird, huh?

What is YouTube Branding?

You might think that branding simply comes together while making videos, but that’s not true. Branding takes a bit of preparation and foresight.

YouTube branding is the idea your viewers have in mind and the emotion they get when they think about your channel.

Here are notable elements of your channel’s branding:

- Channel name

- Channel art

- Video thumbnail

- Video title

- Icon

- Watermark

- Catchphrase

- Style of video

How to Start Branding Your YouTube Channel?

Before you start designing thumbnails and coming up with a catchphrase, the first step in branding is understanding the purpose of your channel. Once you have a purpose, you will know how you want your viewers to feel.

Here is a quick exercise to find your channel’s purpose:

Draw a 3 circle Venn diagram.

In circle 1, write down everything you consider yourself an expert in.

- What do your friends know you for?

- What can you give advice on?

- What did you go to school to learn?

In circle 2, write down all the topics you are passionate about.

- What can you talk effortlessly about for hours?

- At a party, where do you lead conversations towards?

In circle 3, write down everything that people will pay for that you can supply. Here is where you find the demand of the audience.

- Can you give me travel advice?

- Can you make people forget about their stressful day?

- Do you have experience in a specialized field?

Understanding what people will pay money for will help guide you in creating content that has true value.

In the center, come up with all the ideas that can be associated with all three circles. This will be the ideal purpose for your YouTube channel as it harnesses your expertise, your passion, and the demand of a viewership.

Examples:

Epic Meal Time

Expertise = Eating

Passion = Fast Food Culture

Demand = Unique Meals

PURPOSE: Showcase a unique combination of fast food people won’t make at home.

Michelle Phan

Expertise = Beauty Products

Passion = Makeup and Fashion

Demand = Beauty School

PURPOSE: Give people more confidence in beauty products.

How Is Your Channel Different From the Others?

Now that you have your purpose, it’s time to separate you from others with similar purposes. YouTube is a crowded space for content creators. If your channel is mimicking another more successful channel, you will be in the shadows.

Good branding allows you to differentiate from others .

Pick a Unique and Memorable Name

If your name is Michelle Phan, and you are not the Michelle Phan, I’m sorry, but you will need to pick another name for your YouTube channel:

If you do have to pick another name or if your channel is an ensemble with multiple members, make sure the name you choose is original, memorable, and short (4 words max).

Picking an Icon

Not every YouTuber needs to design an original logo for their brand. In fact, if the channel is about you — the YouTuber — you are the brand, so using a high-quality picture of yourself as the icon is okay.

However, if your channel has a specific theme or topic and you want your branding to convey it so it sticks in the viewers’ heads, especially if it’s their first time viewing your channel. A clear logo will help in amplifying your message:

Create Video Thumbnails That Stand Out

The power of good branding is that your viewers will be able to spot your brand in a crowded space. On YouTube, the crowded space is the suggested video section.

Epic Meal Time thumbnails standing out amongst other loud thumbnails.

Once you have the feeling you want to evoke, test out different thumbnails. Go incognito, search up your videos, and see how the visuals appear beside your competitions. Do they all have the same style or is your far more impressive?

Good branding doesn’t happen in the first try so keep experimenting.

Designing Your Icon, Thumbnail, and Channel Art

There is a lot to consider when designing all the visual elements for your channel. I won’t get into all of it, but here are some tips that you should always keep in mind.

- Less is more: Don’t clutter your icons, thumbnails, or banner.

- Have a single focus: A channel and a video can have a lot of different topics, but the image can’t show everything a video can. Pick one important area and highlight that in the image.

- Quality matters: Your audience is savvier than ever. If they see a pixelated image, they will judge your channel poorly. That’s bad branding. Always use high-quality pictures.

- Make sure the color pops and the text is visible: Use eye-catching colors and visible text. This is a billboard, you have milliseconds to get people’s attention as they scroll past.

Want more resources for creating your channel’s visual elements? Yes? Well, we made this for you:

- How to Make YouTube Video Thumbnail

- How to Make YouTube Icons

- Free Youtube Banners

How to Make Your Visuals Consistent?

When a viewer finds your video and considers it pretty interesting, they will then go into your channel page to learn more. Here is where they make their decision: subscribe or not subscribe?

Consistent branding affirms the viewer that they are in the right place. Peter McKinnon’s brand is built upon his amazing photography, it only makes sense that his visual elements are awesome.

Peter McKinnon is best known for his photography and cinematography, and his branding amplifies that.

But Branding Is Not Designing, It’s A Feeling

Don’t get too caught up with a design.

Look at PewDiePie’s branding. You can argue that it is inconsistent and the design is not professional, but actually, his branding is spot on, because he is making you feel a certain way.

PewDiePie’s brand highlights its upbeat and unpredictable personality.

PewDiePie wants you to laugh. He is not branding his expertise like Peter McKinnon is, he’s branding his personality.

Consistent branding is about making the elements of your channel: channel art, logo, thumbnails, titles, etc. all harmonize together to evoke a sensation.

The humor in PewDiePie’s brand is consistent, even though his thumbnails don’t look like Philip DeFranco’s. It is up to you how you define consistency, and that will happen over time.

Philip DeFranco supplies commentary on current events with a satirical flair. Like a news broadcast, his branding and video format are consistent, while the daily news is different.

Inserting A Watermark

The main point of a watermark is to let the viewers know when they are watching your video that it is in fact your video.

Let’s be honest, YouTube content can all look the same, especially if you are making content that is quite general (like beauty or tech), so a watermark helps differentiate, so when viewers are ready to subscribe, they have an extra branding element connecting them to your channel.

Improvement Pill is a YouTube channel focused on inspiring and motivating its viewer to live a better life.

Above we see an example of a watermark from the YouTube channel Improvement Pill. You can see the watermark in the lower right-hand corner.

Improvement Pill is not the only channel that uses whiteboard animation to illustrate their story, and because of that, they need to set themselves apart. A watermark helps do that.

When a viewer lands on their video, the watermark gives the viewer another way to get more familiar with the channel, and if they are to scroll over the watermark a subscription button pops up.

Want to set up your subscription watermark? Here is a quick tutorial:

Coming Up With A Catchphrase

A catchphrase can be your greeting or sign off, but it doesn’t have to be an original line, it can simply be the way you say “hello.”

Check out some of the popular YouTuber’s catchphrases:

When coming up with a catchphrase that is connected to your channel’s branding remember how you want the viewer to feel. Do you want to leave them with a smile? Or do you want them to take action?

Final Thoughts On YouTube Branding

As you build and grow your YouTube channel, you can expand your purpose while still sticking within the overall theme. You might have started a channel that focused on the topic of nutrition, but as you grow, you will discover that your audience may also be interested in fitness tips or workout accessories as well. Take it slowly and grow with purpose.

Your branding doesn’t dictate the content you create, but it does affect how you go about making it.

Got more questions about branding your YouTube channel? Let us know in the comments below.

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox

Mastering the Art of YouTube Viewership: 6 Proven Methods

How to Get Your YouTube Video Seen - 6 Easy Steps

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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With an estimated 60 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute you might be left wondering how to get your YouTube video seen in the huge sea of content. The good news is that a large number of these videos are not optimized in the correct format and taking some extra time to make sure that every video you post is well optimized for YouTube’s search engine can give you an instant advantage.

Here’s how you can get your YouTube video ranked higher in search results and attract more views in 6 easy steps.

• Step 1: Find Good Keywords for Your YouTube Videos
• Step 2: Make Full Use of Your Video’s Tags
• Step 3: Post a Transcript in Your Video Description
• Step 4: Write Searchable YouTube Video Titles
• Step 5: Optimize Your Video Description for YouTube SEO
• Step 6: Use Custom Video Thumbnails

1. Find Good Keywords for Your YouTube Videos

The keywords that you choose to use with your video will be the greatest factors in determining whether your video will actually be found by viewers searching for content like yours on YouTube. You need to be intelligent and choose strong keywords that are highly related to both your video and your niche on YouTube. Without the use of good keywords, your video will simply become lost in the endless stream of content being uploaded to YouTube, and audiences who might enjoy it will never get a chance to see it.

Consider doing some keyword research into your video’s subject using the Google Keyword Planner in or a variety of other keyword tools . Make sure the most important keywords are in your tags, title, and description.

2. Make Full Use of Your Video’s Tags

Tags are essential. A lot of creators either skip tags or only put in 1-5, and their actions will benefit you if you choose to use a lot.

Loading up your tags with keywords that are relevant to your video and genre will help your video appear in the viewer’s search results, which will earn you a lot more views. When users are looking for specific information, like how to recover lost data, just including things like ‘lost data’, ‘data recovery’, and even the full phrase ‘how to recover lost data’ in your video’s tags will give you a greater chance to actually appear in search engine results.

Including the maximum amount of tags possible will help to give YouTube the maximum amount of information to use in order to place your video in the results of different searches or to have it come up as ‘related’ to other videos. Users that only post 3 or 4 tags with each video could be missing out on countless amounts of traffic for their content.

3. Post a Transcript in Your Video Description

If you have a script or a transcript for your entire video you should consider posting it in the description of your video in order to improve your search engine ranking. This can also help for users that would like to have a written article to accompany your video and for indexing your video in search engine results. There are so many people that don’t make proper use of their video descriptions on YouTube that doing so will give you an advantage.

4. Write Searchable YouTube Video Tiles

By including your 1 or 2 most important keywords in the title of your video you will help YouTube sort your video into the correct search results. Generally, your most important keywords will be things like the name of the game you’re playing or the brand of makeup you’re reviewing.

Try to write titles that are searchable and which also get potential viewers excited about your content. Do not try to be mysterious or clickbait-y in your video title. Big channels can be very successful with those strategies because they’re already guaranteed a certain number of views, but this will almost always backfire for small channels.

Phrases such as ‘review’, ‘how-to’, and ‘tutorial’ get searched for a lot, so always include them in your titles when they apply to your videos.

5. Optimize your Video Description for YouTube SEO

Video descriptions should generally include around 4000 characters (about 900 words) in which you describe the content of your YouTube video, include important keywords, provide links to your other social media accounts, and ask viewers to subscribe. Using up all the space in your description is a good way to ensure you’re getting the maximum search value out of it.

If you use a lot of products in your videos (i.e. you make cooking videos, so your favorite frying pan is in a lot of shots) then it is a good idea to look into affiliate programs. Amazon has one of the best. If you become an affiliate you can post links to the products you use in your video description and, if a viewer follows one and buys something (even if it’s not the thing you liked to) you’ll earn a commission. This won’t help you with search rankings, but it’s a nice bonus.

6. Use Custom Video Thumbnails

A custom thumbnail is an excellent way to make your videos stand out (check out these awesome thumbnail makers ). A good thumbnail is its own piece of quality, customized, visual content that has the power to draw in audiences from search engine results. Make sure to take thumbnail-specific photos and perfect those images with text and graphics in Photoshop or a free alternative like Canva.

Custom thumbnails come with new metadata for your video and they can often be indexed in Google image searches along with the video content that you create. This means that you will have access to a text search via Google (your video title and description), video searches via Google, a video search via YouTube, and an image search via Google too.

In order to create a thumbnail that stands out and attracts more views, you should first search for your video’s title on YouTube and see what kinds of thumbnails come up. You want your thumbnail to be enough like the results that viewers recognize it as being on the same topic, and different enough that it doesn’t fade into the crowd (a good strategy is to use a splash of color the other creators haven’t included).

If you are interested in generating more traffic to any YouTube video be sure to follow these 6 steps for how to get your YouTube video seen (and check out 4 more here! ).

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett