In last week’s workshop “YouTube for Marketers,” Dror Shimshowitz, YouTube Product Manager for content creators and curators, shared his thoughts on how to build a successful YouTube brand presence.  Dror outlined ways in which YouTube can help you reinforce your brand, raise awareness, and receive feedback from the YouTube community.

YouTube can reinforce your brand through storytelling on channel pages.  Channel pages are brand destinations that are customizable with your logo and colors, featured content, descriptions, and links.  Though adding quality content may seem daunting, some businesses have leveraged their communities by curating customer-created videos.  Furthermore, available tools such as the YouTube Video Editor can improve your video’s quality through image stabilization, color correction, and sound and visual effects.

You can also use YouTube to raise product awareness.  Given that YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the web, there are a few tricks to generate traffic and subscribers:

• Bootstrap the view count of a video by getting the video embedded on external sites such as blogs, review sites, and company pages.  Doing so increases the video’s virality potential and will surface the video on YouTube’s search and top charts.
• Get the video featured on another popular YouTube channel.  Channel owners often seek relevant content and can be easily reached through comments or posted contact information.
• Create video content around trending topics or internet memes.  Views will then be generated by referrals from search or the suggested videos section on other videos.

Finally, YouTube is a powerful way to interact with your customers and receive feedback.  Unlike television, you can communicate with viewers through comments.  Additionally, YouTube Analytics can provide information on audience demographics, and a video’s drop-off points and hotspots can help you better understand if your content is interesting to viewers. For real-time interaction, Hangouts On Air allows businesses to engage with up to nine customers at once.  This video can be broadcast live or watched on-demand by viewers on your YouTube channel after the conversation concludes.  It is a great and easy way to generate more content for one’s channel.

For more YouTube marketing tips, check out the playbook on the YouTube Creator Hub. Thanks to everyone who attended; we’ll see you at an upcoming event in the new Startup Lab in a couple weeks!