In 2021 YouTube had 122 million daily active users and 1 billion hours of content was consumed across the world per day!

YouTube is one of the largest social communities today and using it to promote your brand is a great idea. But how do you reach, engage and build an audience on YouTube? We’ve got 6 strategies that will help you do just that.

6 Strategies To Build An Audience On YouTube

Create for your audience, not for views

Unless you are looking to make revenue off of YouTube advertisements, optimizing for views will not do much for your brand. When you optimize for page views – by creating content that is trending at the time even if it doesn’t align with your brand strategy, by using clickbait titles, etc, you get the numbers, but that’s it. You are not drawing in the right audience who will subscribe, visit your website and interact with your brand. A viral video draws a lot of clicks but does not help a brand build a relationship with its audience.

The strategy should be to optimize videos for your audience, not pageviews. What do they want to watch? How can you add value to their lives? These should be the questions you address.

Even if you are looking to earn through YouTube ads, optimizing your videos for your audience will eventually lead to page views, so it’s a win-win strategy.

Brands should educate over entertain

The majority of users watch YouTube videos for one of two things: entertainment, and education.

As a brand, your aim should be towards educating your user, towards creating informative videos that teach them something.

Always focus on the utility value of your videos. What are your viewers getting out of it? Are they leaving your channel more informed?

While the entertainment angle is also an option, it’s not always easy for professional brands to create entertaining content and maintain their brand persona.

If you can create content that is both informative and entertaining, it will yield the best results but otherwise, lean more towards being educational.

Build an emotional connection through characters and themes

Using the same intro on all videos, having a recurring theme, or having returning characters is great for building a relationship with users.

Why do brands pay big bucks for logos? Because the logo becomes a constant representative of the brand, people identify the brand just by the logo and its colors.

The same goes for recurring characters in a YouTube video. When you have a character, human or animated, consistently appearing in your videos, you create a relationship between the viewer and the character and consequently, with the brand.

Also, invest in creating a YouTube intro that you add to all your videos, it’s a great way of projecting your brand image to viewers. You can use an online YouTube video editor and get it done in minutes.

This strategy of using consistency in all videos works great for encouraging subscribers and shares, which in turn helps you build your YouTube audience.

Focus on quantity as much as quality

Being consistent and targeting quantity is as important as the quality of your videos. The more videos you put out, the more consistent you are with releasing new videos, the more your audience reach and engagement will be.

As you’re starting out, it might be difficult to target a good posting frequency of one video per week – you may not have the budget or time for it. A good tactic here is to get three to four videos shot during one shooting session. Before you have the camera team set up, plan content for three to four videos and the time you shoot so you can get all of them done in one session. You already have the team ready, so why not utilize them to the fullest?

If you set aside time in the beginning and get ten to twelve videos done in the first few weeks, you are sorted for the next few months.

Frequent posting is very important, it greatly increases organic reach and you can build an audience mush easily.

You do need to entertain but be creative

We spoke about educating your users earlier, about creating content that is informative. Just because it is educational doesn’t mean it has to be dull or boring. Adding some flair to your videos through animations or effects is a great way of bringing in production value.

Using colorful products or props in your how-to videos, and using animations to create a visual of what you are explaining is a great way of bringing in some movement and life to your videos.

Another great tip is creating some suspense over upcoming videos by releasing trailers or teasers, or just mentioning what’s coming next in the current video. This keeps your audience interested and anticipating more.

Use influencers

Lastly, you can reach out to influencers and micro-celebrities to give your channel a boost. Influencers are people on YouTube with a large number of subscribers, 100K or more. A shout out to your channel from an influencer can greatly increase traffic to your channel and help you build your audience.

The important thing here is to reach out to relevant influencers, someone who is posting videos in your niche. If you sell vegan peanut butter, you should reach out to vegan content creators or nutritionists on YouTube. If you do not partner with relevant influencers, you will not see any positive returns on this activity.

Conclusion

The last tip we have for you, a bonus seventh tip, is to be patient. Building a YouTube audience takes time, but if you are consistent with your quality and quantity of posting, you will get there.

Make use of hacks like using a YouTube video editor to speed up your video creating process. You need to save up on time and money during the initial stages of your marketing phase so that you can be consistent, and once you have a good number of subscribers, you can reduce posting frequency and spend more time on creating videos with high production value.