I’ve seen this pattern a thousand times with product based channels. Other creators who feature their products blow up and get hundreds of thousands of views, meanwhile the channel that actually makes the product doesn’t even show up in the search results.

Most of these product focussed channels aren’t failing because their product is weak, they are failing because their videos never reach anyone new.

Brands understand the importance of video. They know YouTube can be a very powerful discovery engine, they just approach it wrong. It all comes down to what the end-goal is, and most brands don’t give that enough thought.

You can use YouTube as a hosting site for resources, or you can leverage it as a discovery engine to build a community and attract customers. Most product businesses are trying to do achieve the latter by doing the former.

Too many brands treat their YouTube channel like their LinkedIn profile. They post product demos, tutorials and feature rundowns. Everything is packaged and polished to be a beautiful branded encyclopedia of resources centered around the product, but here’s the kicker - nobody cares.

More importantly, the people you are trying to reach don’t care, yet!

If your goal is growth, YouTube is at the top of your funnel. That means reaching people who are not looking for your brand yet, but who identify with the problems that your product solves.

In order to grow a YouTube channel, product businesses need to be making content that attracts a cold audience who have never heard about the product by talking directly to experienced problems.

That means making a hard shift from the “on brand” product-focussed content they are conditioned to produce. It means building a community around aligned shared interests that intersect with the business mission. It means thinking like a content creator.

Content creators don’t start out promoting a product or offer. They begin by making content around something the audience can already relate to, tapping into their frustrations, goals, curiosities and pain points. This does something critical, they earn trust.

Most product channels aren’t doing this. They are entirely focussed on promoting their product to a cold audience who aren’t yet ready to hear about it.

The brands that grow onYouTube are the ones that stop treating the platform like a content library and start using it to build meaningful trust with content that aligns with the audience, not with the product.

Instead of asking “how can we demonstrate our product?”, brands should start by asking “what does our audience already care about before they even know we exist?”. This reframing leads to different content ideas that connect better with a cold audience and over time will build trust. In short — less feature explanation, more problem recognition.

If this sounds like you, I’d love to help! I work with brands who want help aligning their content strategy with business objectives and achieving real growth without viral hacks and trend chasing noise. Book a free discovery call with me to see how we could work together.

The online video content industry right now is booming. People are consuming more and more information in video format over traditional written articles than ever before, and brands are acutely aware that if they want their cut of the attention in the marketplace then they need to take video seriously.

I help brands with creating content for YouTube and building strategies to enable them to grow on the platform and get the most out of what YouTube has to offer.

One thing I’ve noticed time and time again working with clients and looking at what other companies are doing on the platform is that brands just don’t get YouTube. Between misconceptions and a fundamental misunderstandings of how YouTube works, brands are consistently failing to grow for a few simple reasons. In this article I’ll explain why brands struggle so much with YouTube growth and what they can do to fix it.

The first mistake many brands are making when approaching YouTube is not fully considering exactly what they want to achieve. The first question I would ask any potential client is what they hope to get out of it in the next year or two. Most brands will say that they want to grow their YouTube channel, increase views and increase subscribers. All good things, but my next question is always going to be; Why?

Goals

This brings us to the goal that the brand is hoping to achieve. Nine times out of ten the goal is to get more customers. There are exceptions that we will talk about later, but for now let’s focus on that. Now we have the “what” and the “why” we can start to get to the real meat on the bone, and that’s the “how”.

This is where it’s important to have a clear content strategy with a well thought out path to achieve said goal. Most brands I see either lack a strategy altogether or have developed one that is not aligned with the goals set out. A good content strategy for attracting new customers can be summarised as a way to get discovered by a cold audience and convert those viewers into a warm audience.

Building a content strategy

The first step to building an effective content strategy is understanding where YouTube fits in to the overall sales and marketing funnel. If the goal for the channel is to grow in order to attract new customers then we want our content to appeal to a cold audience, viewers who may not have even heard about the brand or its products and services. In marketing terms this is considered top-of-funnel, a wide reach to a broad audience with the intent of converting them to a warm audience. A viewer can be considered “warm” when they are aware of your brand and place a certain amount of trust in your message.

Growing a warm audience is the key to lead generation and ultimately sales, so the first step of converting a wider cold audience is critical to the rest of the funnel. YouTube is probably the most effective platform in existence for reaching a cold audience and increasing brand awareness among those potential customers. The key to success on YouTube is through a powerful concept called organic community building.

Community Building

Building a community on YouTube is about far more than just subscriber numbers. A community is a following with a shared interest in a problem space or topic of interest that will build a genuine connection with your content at a personal level. That connection is the key to establishing a channels credibility and gaining trust with the audience. Establishing credibility and earning trust with your audience are the cornerstones of a good content strategy.

This is where I see most brands simply failing to deliver, or losing sight of the goal. The number one mistake I see with so many brands is making the wrong type of content and not understanding the target audience.

The most common example of this I see is when brands start to produce all of their content topics around their own products and services. These are channels that become self-focussed; our company, our journey, our story, our products…

Bringing this back to our content strategy and target audience, we need to ask a simple question, what value are we delivering with this content? That is not to say that the content isn’t in itself valuable, but who gets the most value out of it? This self-focussed content can deliver great value to existing customers or people looking to evaluate the brand. This is a warm audience, already familiar with the brand and its products who likely arrived at the channel through search or other social media platforms. This type of content does not align at all with the growth strategy that we are trying to implement as it does nothing to appeal to a colder audience.

This is the disconnect that so many brands arrive at. They stop community building and start creating a content library around their own products and services. Both are valuable assets which is why it’s important to establish what we’re trying to achieve and stick to a strategy to accomplish it.

A YouTube channel can be one of two things for a brand; a content library of resources or a community. If you are trying to organically grow a community and reach a colder and wider audience then you need to be making content focussed on solutions and education around the problem space the viewer is in. You can then leverage that audience to raise awareness about your products and services off the back of the trust you gain through delivering value. Always ask yourself if the content you are making delivers value to someone who has never heard of your brand.

Content Library

Of course, a content library channel can also foster a community. It can be a community channel that is based around the brand itself that publishes educational resources and reference content centred around the products and services it provides. An example of this would be a software brand that publishes tutorials and explainer videos on how to use its products. This type of channel caters to a very different audience that is much warmer and may already be deeply familiar with the brand.

In this case the function of the channel is very different. Here we are using our YouTube channel to deliver extra value to an already existing audience. The strategy for this type of channel is very different. We rely on SEO rankings for keywords around our products and other social media or existing marketing channels to promote our content.

This all gets back to the original question of what we want to achieve with our content strategy. Brands need to ask themselves what they want out of YouTube, to produce content that delivers value to their existing customers and prospects or to capture a new audience and bring in new customers.

Community or Content Library

It can be hard to do both. One key factor in growing organically on YouTube is giving the platform enough data that it can more effectively target your content at the right audience to gain maximum reach. It does this by testing your videos on a subset of viewers, and based on the levels of engagement will start pushing them to a wider audience. When a channel starts posting a mixture of content for two different audiences, this can potentially hurt the growth of your organic content.

This is why it’s so important for a brand to understand what it expects to get out of YouTube and create a clear strategy that has those goals in mind.

One brand I see executing this process really well is HubSpot, a well known CRM platform focussed on helping companies improve their sales and marketing processes. HubSpot demonstrate that they understand the value of both community building and a value driven content library and have adopted a great approach to maximize both strategies; they have two YouTube channels.

Well, technically they have several, but their two flagship channels are HubSpot-CRM which is a product focussed channel delivering value through tutorials and explainer videos about the platform, and HubSpot-Marketing (recently renamed to Masters in Marketing). The latter is a much broader channel covering a variety of topics around marketing, social media and digital marketing. Two different channels, two audiences and two well defined strategies.

By publishing on two YouTube channels HubSpot are able to grow a community and raise brand awareness by tackling issues in the sales and marketing niche and also provide valuable resources and educational content to their users. This clear distinction between content types helps maximize the effectiveness of both strategies.

I should note I am not in any way sponsored or affiliated with HubSpot, I just admire their thoughtful and well executed YouTube strategy and I think other brands could learn a lot from them.

Final thoughts

In summary, the key to success for brands is to decide on a desired goal and then build a content strategy that delivers value to the right target audience to accomplish it. If your goal is to grow an organic community then focus on creating engaging and valuable content that is going to resonate with a wide audience.

I hope you found this helpful. If you’re looking for advice on YouTube channel strategy or help with video production or editing then get in touch on Instagram. Follow me on Threads for more.

This is the first of a series of regular updates around content creation, YouTube growth and social media. In this series you can expect to receive a condensed summary of the latest curated news in the creator economy.

Thanks for being part of our community, I hope you find this newsletter useful. Let’s get started!

#1 The future of AI on YouTube 🤖

Since the explosion of AI recently we’ve seen a tidal wave of AI generated content hit YouTube. “YouTube Automation” has become a buzzword amongst eager new creators looking for an easy path to monetize a channel and pump out copious amounts of content all generated using AI tools. From using ChatGPT to generate scripts that get fed into AI voiceover tools and then more AI generated or sourced b-roll footage to stream out an endless stream of mind numbing content that seems to be dominating Shorts right now.

At one end of the scale AI generated content is an annoying plague of unoriginal content that still seems to garner some traction on the platform when done right. On the other end superior AI technology is being used to produce deep-fake videos and spread misinformation in a way that is potentially damaging.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is the future and those that don’t harness the opportunities that it gives creators is going to get left behind. But AI is a tool to improve our processes as creators, not a replacement for quality original content. YouTube have finally started to look at how to mitigate the potentially damaging consequences of AI content in a way that doesn’t stifle genuine uses of AI to improve already original content.

YouTube is recognising that AI can add great value to video content creation, but it also poses a risk if it’s misused to create misleading or fake content. The first step YouTube has taken is to require creators to disclose if their content is AI generated by setting an optional flag "altered content”. This tells YouTube that AI has been used to significantly alter audio or video within your content. Right now this will cause a message to be displayed to viewers advising them that the content is AI generated.

YouTube have been careful to emphasise that adding this label to your videos will not effect distribution or monetization of the video. This is an interesting move and it shows that they are genuinely trying to manage the risk of AI in a controlled way that doesn’t penalize creators using AI for genuine content.

If you use AI for your content then don’t worry. It’s clear that YouTube are not planning on banning AI content, nor are they discouraging it through algorithm suppression or demonetzation. The guidance released by YouTube lays out the requirements for declaring AI content and it’s clear that what they are trying to address is AI generated content that represents a real situation or a person falsely. This includes deep-fake videos and realistic looking videos generated by apps like Sora.

I don’t think this is the end of the matter. This is new guidance from YouTube and is likely to be refined over the coming months. But so far we’ve seen them take a pragmatic and sensible approach that so far has little impact on 99% of creators. But we'll be following this topic very closely, so stay tuned!