Is branding worth the investment? And how much should a business owner invest in their brand?

These are the typical questions business owners face when developing their business plan. What if there was a way to determine the revenue generated by your brand? In this blog post, we dive into multiple studies that show the direct value of having a brand strategy. And more importantly, how having a brand strategy is the lifeline and health of your business.

1) Builds Customer Relationship

The customer-brand dynamic has significantly changed over the last century, and is even more rapidly changing in the last decade. It’s evolved from a transactional relationship based on product features and benefits, to an emotional relationship based on shared beliefs, values, mission and principles. According to the 2017 Cone Communications CSR Study, 87% of consumers stated they would purchase products based on brand values that aligned with their own. At the end of the day, people seek to make a positive contribution to the economy. And they exercise this power by supporting certain brand values.

2) Increases Revenue

However, it’s not merely about strengthening your customer relationship. Having a brand strategy also contributes to building a thriving, long-standing business. A 2016 Imperative/LinkedIn study discovered that 85% of companies that had a clearly articulated brand purpose that was well understood and received by their audience, experienced positive growth, while 42% of companies that didn’t prioritize communicating their purpose, experienced a drop in revenue.

3) Builds Employee Morale

We also see a healthier business environment internally. A brand strategy cultivates happier, well functioning company culture, which ultimately builds a stronger relationship with your employees and partners. According to the Imperative/LinkedIn study, 73% of purpose-driven employees reported high satisfaction with their jobs. People are inspired by vision; contributing to a greater purpose. Therefore when you work for a company that has a well articulated brand strategy and deeply rooted values and vision, the work becomes more meaningful and thereby more enjoyable in working towards achieving these goals.

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So prior to launching your business, build a brand strategy within your business plan to ensure the longevity and success of your business. These are just a few examples of how we can measure the direct value of having a brand strategy.

There are also other factors, such as increased company value, customer loyalty for new product/ service launches, market share and more.

Check out this brand calculator, which will show you how much revenue a good brand can generate each year. This allows you to determine if branding is worth the investment.

Marketing is an active verb. When you do it, you eventually get results that are partially driven by others. To create and build your audience though, just publishing great content isn’t good enough. It’s important to actively drive traffic to your content and you can do it better on YouTube than on any other social platform.

One of the first things you need to do is identify your target market and then find it on YouTube. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people say ‘My target market is everyone’. Yeah OK, good luck with that. Unless you’re a very big brand, a lack of targeting will reduce the profitability of your business.

You should be able to visualize your target market as a person. This person should have a name, a job, be a specific age and like to do specific things. Try to know everything you can about this ‘Persona’ or average customer because it’s a key business issue. How does your typical customer talk, eat and travel.

What kind of music do they like, what books do they read and what kind of movies do they watch? Knowing this information will give you a profound advantage and will reveal to you exactly how to sell to your market. Once you’ve defined your target market, here are some ways to find it online:

Yep, that’s right. Sounds easy but it’s a bit more complicated than that. To avoid wasting time going through listings that don’t meet your needs, it’s important to use search strings. If we just enter a keyword as our search string, in blended search we end up with a variety of unrelated content from a variety of websites.

We are targeting a specific website, YouTube, and a specific keyword. This is one search string that you can use to identify YouTube channels:

inurl:http://www.youtube.com/user/*

Enter this into the search field in blended search and a large list of high authority YouTube channels will be returned. Generally the highest ranking channels will be at the top and you just click on the ones you like, find some content and leave a comment.

Today though, we are talking about finding a Targeted audience on YouTube. The listings we are after are on YouTube but also related to a specific vertical or topic. Here is a search string you can use to get a targeted list of results:

site:http://www.youtube.com/user “kitten training”

This search will return nothing but YouTube Channels, not videos, that are about ‘kitten training’. Make a note in a spreadsheet of all the channels that you want to connect with and then go to those channels. Take a look at who is leaving comments and make a note of the ones that have influential channels. It doesn’t take long to build up a spreadsheet of dozens of potential customers.

If you already have a nice sized subscriber list, there is a great resource at your finger tips. Identify your subscribers that have the most authority and take a look at the channels they are following. You can’t see their subscribers but you can see the channels that they follow and the people that comment on their videos.

Audience targeting just doesn’t get any better than this. These are the people that are already active and interested in what you are doing.

Try these approaches to connecting with your audience:

You don’t need to respond to every comment but always try to answer direct questions. After awhile, you many find that you have to control the amount of time you spend on this. When you do, make sure you keep on top of interactions with your strongest connections.

Seek out new prospects and mine your existing subscribers to develop your business. This will bulk up your reach and deepen the effectiveness of your organic marketing campaigns on YouTube.

Additional Information:

http://evolvedesign.ca

I always hear a lot about ranking YouTube videos but not so much about how to build authority and rank for a YouTube Channel. It’s important to build the rank of your YouTube Channel in order to rank well in YouTube and Google Video Searches. In addition, the steps you take will increase the online buzz and notoriety of your video content.

Think of your YouTube channel as a website because it is a website. There are some critical differences between your YouTube Channel and your website though.

While you have complete control over the linking structure and the channelling of the SEO power of your back links on your website, on your YouTube channel you have absolutely no control over link structure.

This is because the “follow” attributes of links you place on your channel are controlled by YouTube. YouTube does this to discourage SPAM and encourage useful interaction with YouTube content.

“No Follow” links are read but not followed by the Search Bot. This means that the link is recognized but does not pass much in the way of SEO value or “link juice” to the linked to content.

On the other hand a “Do Follow” link is followed by the Search bot and the bot records the relevancy of the page to which you are linking. This is where the SEO value is obtained.

When ranking any website the most important factor by far is the relevancy and authority and quantity of back links. There are many other factors but if you get your back linking right, the lions share of the work is done.

I generally drive most of the link value for websites that I build to the home page. I do this by linking to the home page on site and off site. I link on site by placing a link to the home page at the bottom of other pages and articles.

You don’t have this kind of control on your YouTube Channel. Two powerful ways to build the page authority of your YouTube Channel home page are as follows:

1. Off site back linking – get high authority, relevant back links being careful to control your anchor text structure and the quality of your content

2. On site link building – link to your channel by commenting on high authority YouTube channels related to your audience

There are two prominent places on YouTube where you can place comments that will give you Do Follow links back to your channel. Video comments and the Channel Discussion area. When you place a comment, your channel name is displayed and linked to your channel and you can also link to your channel in the body of your comment using a special method.

This is exciting isn’t it? Think about this. Google rewards your YouTube Channel with powerful back links when you engage with high authority channels relevant to your niche! This is something it makes sense to do anyway in order to reach your audience. (Link to related post)

Here’s an Inside Ninja Tip. Instead of just interacting with authority channels in your niche, find those that have authority channels that also follow your competitors and interact with them. Think, with what types of channels are my potential customers interacting.

By doing this you get a rank building knock out punch. Great back links and more customers. Yeah, this is a High Value use of time and a crucial way of demonstrating expertise to your Subscribers. (link to related post)

When commenting I suggest picking a video with a low view count, watch it and then ask a specific question. Videos with a lower view count have fewer comments and it’s easier to stand out. Take a few minutes and give the question some thought. A good question about a specific piece of content shows you’re interested in engaging with the channel and not promoting spam.

These comment links are Do Follow which means if you place them on authoritative channels they will pass significant SEO power to your channel which builds your page rank. This automatically passes authority to your other Channel pages and content.

Follow these steps to build your channel authority, ranking performance and increase traffic to your content on YouTube.

For more information:

http://evolvedesign.ca

Ranking YouTube videos is different than ranking websites. There are certain advantages to ranking videos that are posted on YouTube.

YouTube videos respond well to rapid back link campaigns. There are a variety of tools that can be used for this purpose. Avoid letting your content quality slide for the sake of expediency. It’s always best to distribute useful and understandable articles and visual content on every tier of your projects. If a piece of content has a link to your website in it, you want that content to create a good impression.

When you upload a video to YouTube a web page is created. As with your YouTube Channel, you have no control over the link attributes on this web page. Most of the links are No Follow. One notable exception is the link to your linked Channel Name which is Do Follow. Links in the description are all No Follow except for the Channel Add method which involves adding a special link to your channel in a comment.

Other links on the right side of the page are all Do Follow and include playlist links, channel name links and video name links. This is the main reason why it’s good to create a large series of videos. You want to occupy as many of the Related Videos spots as you can.

If you your content dominates in Related Videos, when you increase the authority of your video page, you will also pass on that authority to your other video content. If you don’t have related videos there is a good chance that your competitors videos will show up, which is a bad thing.

We build page rank for our videos by creating as many relevant PR back links as possible and by getting these links indexed. When we do this for all of our videos the resulting cumulative authority supports the authority of our YouTube channel.

But how do we rank them quickly? Starting at the beginning, the Title of your video must contain some variation of the exact keyword phrase that you’re trying to get ranked. Apply a little creativity and you can rearrange the words in your title to rank for a number of different keyword phrases.

Treat the description area of your video like a topic page. I usually at least quote the transcript of the video but add additional content to broaden the focus of the page. This is the same thing we do when we create content for a web page. When we create content for a page about Banjo Lessons, we make it a topic page by also mentioning banjo training, acoustic banjo lessons, electric banjo, 5 string banjo and learning banjo songs.

This is what Google is looking for and this is what we do. At the bottom of your description, add a link to an authority page about your topic. The last thing to consider for the On Page SEO for your video is tags.

As far as I can tell, tags don’t have much to do with ranking your video. One thing that tags are very good for is grouping your videos. Another very effective way to group videos is playlists and using well thought out tagging and playlists help you to control all the space on your video pages.

Frequently following these steps will rank your videos quickly without doing anything else. In more competitive situations, off page back links from authority websites and web 2.0 properties will finish the job and overwhelm your competition.

YouTube assets respond to correct SEO practices more than 5 times faster than web pages and should represent an irresistible priority for reaching your audience.

More Information:

http://eWriterPros.com

You might be surprised to know that video views don’t appear to have much of an effect on your ranking in the search engines. Good start huh.

Well there’s a reason why you need to keep reading. Even though views don’t do much to help your videos rank, they do mean that people are watching your videos. You may think that this is self evident but let’s take a closer look.

What causes people to watch our videos?

The title and the video thumbnail get the click. The title should be relevant and even a little unexpected. If it creates curiosity even better. For example the title of a marketing video for a CRM software company could be ‘Why I Always Do These 5 Simple Things Prior to Closing a Big Sale’. The idea is to make an appealing hint about your subject without actually spelling it out. Leave the reader asking: What 5 things?

Video Titles don’t need to be complete sentences. They do always need to contain your exact keyword phrase plus some additional text. The title of your video gets the click and your video begins to play automatically when someone lands on the page.

At this point it’s the content of your video that takes over. It’s a good idea to have ads turned off for your important videos so your viewers don’t get distracted. This of course doesn’t apply if you’re monetizing your channel using YouTube advertising.

There are techniques for holding the attention of your viewers that increase likelihood of watching your video to the end and seeing your full message. Some these techniques include:

We want people to view our videos so they will get to know us and take some kind of action. These actions can be:

All of these actions are trackable and the resulting data helps us to see which videos get the longest views, the most comments and shares among other things.

Getting views is great but one of the best things about YouTube is the functionality that allows you to find and target your market. To get targeted views, look for YouTube channels that your customers would subscribe to and check the video comments and discussion areas.

Look for people who leave meaningful, not spammy, comments and make a note of their channel in a spreadsheet. Send them messages, view and comment on their videos. Ask them to subscribe to your channel.

The key is to allocate resources so this gets done consistently. Over time you’ll experience steady growth of subscribers to interact with and share your content. This increases your view count fast and is a guaranteed way to rise above the crowd.

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