How to Create a YouTube Channel for Your Small Business

Millions of people all around the world use YouTube as their primary source of internet entertainment. There are numerous advantages to creating a YouTube channel that will help a small business.

The success of your YouTube efforts is highly dependent upon finding an effective strategy for optimizing your account. If you want to know how to start a YouTube channel for your business, there are several steps you must complete. This article covers the ways to build a massive channel that will attract customers to your website and generate income for you. 

Why does your company need a YouTube channel?

Before we dive into the specific details, let us go over how YouTube could benefit your company. 

The major advantages are building an active, targeted audience for your website and increasing your visibility to search engines. Secondly, you can develop relationships with other businesses and influencers by commenting on their videos and collaborating. Thirdly, you can brand yourself and your website as experts in your chosen niche when you get enough exposure.

So, how does all this work?

The amount of time people spend online has drastically increased, especially in the last two years due to the pandemic. This eventually led to larger video consumption – 82% of internet users prefer videos to other types of content. And that opens a whole lot of new opportunities for marketers.

In 2020, 88% of marketing specialists claimed to use YouTube as a part of their digital strategy. And that’s not surprising at all — the platform has an audience of 2 billion people, providing a wide range of niches your business can fit in. When you reach the right audience, you increase brand awareness, loyalty, and sales — and these are the ultimate goals of any business.

How to create a YouTube channel

As part of your digital marketing strategy, you must understand that YouTube offers several unique features that can help you promote your small business. Among them are advanced analytics, video optimization, search engine optimization, and more. Let’s take a closer look at the step-by-step process of starting a YouTube channel.

1. Set up an account

A Gmail account automatically creates a YouTube profile as soon as you log into the platform. For security reasons, it’s better to create a separate corporate account so that only your current employees can have access to the channel:

1. Log into your Youtube account via Google.
2. Click on the profile picture icon.
3. Choose “Create a channel” from the drop-down menu.
4. Enter your channel name and upload the profile picture.
5. Confirm your actions with the “Create channel” button.

Now you have a channel. You can access it via the “Your channel” button in the drop-down menu. It opens the dashboard where you can customize the look of your channel and manage videos. But first, you need to fill out the profile information.

1. Go to “Customize channel,” then click “Basic Info.”
2. Add channel description and contact info.
3. Add links to your site or social media accounts.
4. Change the URL to your channel to a custom one. Note that you can do it only after you have 100 subscribers and your account is at least 30 days old.
5. Go to the “Branding” tab.
6. Add a profile picture (if you haven’t already) and a banner image.
7. Upload a watermark logo that will appear on all your videos. Preferably, it should be your company’s logo.

Since it’s a corporate channel, you may want to have several people take care of it. Ideally, you should have a whole team of specialists – a videographer, a community manager, and a content manager. To give access to several people, go to the “Settings” section in the left-side menu, then click “Permissions.” There, you can send out invites to the people of interest and choose their roles:

• Managers can edit everything as well as add or remove other people.
• Editors can change profile information but can’t delete videos.
• Viewers can only view the profile but can’t change anything.

You can also give out limited editing or viewing permissions. Plus, the only person who can delete the channel is you, the creator.

2. Match the market

The next important thing to do is to research the market. Ask yourself these questions: “Are my competitors present on YouTube? What content do they make? How do they promote themselves?”

And most importantly, “How can I beat them?”

That’s right. You should never copy other brands, but make sure your company stands out. You need to invest some time and effort into the visual layout and branding of your channel, not to mention the quality of content. For now, let’s talk about your channel’s appearance.

Make a channel trailer

This will be the first thing people who are not subscribed to you see when they first visit your channel. It can be a short compilation of the best of your videos or a welcome video presenting the company. 

Highlight a featured video

This video is meant for your subscribers. You can use your latest video for this section or choose the one you think they should watch right away.

Add navigation sections

Help your followers navigate through your channel by making themed playlists: uploads, live streams, and custom lists.

Work on channel art

The design of your YouTube channel should match the whole brand strategy and color book. Having the same patterns, colors, and fonts will invest in the trust and loyalty of your fanbase.

Get verified

A small gray checkmark next to a channel’s name means a lot, as it adds trust. It will let people know that your channel is the official representation of your brand on YouTube. To verify your account, you need to go to “Settings” – “Channel” – “Feature eligibility.” There you will find the button that lets you get verified. After the process is finished, you will be able to post longer videos, stream live, and add custom thumbnails.

3. Optimize for search

All of your efforts will be in vain if you don’t have enough search engine exposure. Now that you know how to create a YouTube channel, it’s time to learn how to optimize it for your purposes. 

The title, description, and tags should be optimized so that viewers searching for related items will find your content. You should do it for individual videos, but you can also have a pool of generic keywords that you will use every time. 
SEO on YouTube works the same way as in Google, Bing, or any other search engine. The easiest way to research the keywords is by typing them into the search bar. If you have a match in bold, that’s the phrase you need.

Alternatively, you can use services like Google Ads, Ahrefs, and Semrush to get the whole picture of what’s happening in your niche SEO-wise. Among other tools are vidIQ and TubeBuddy, which have YouTube in their primary focus.

One more important thing that differentiates YouTube is that you have to actually use keywords in your videos. Not just pronounced separately, but used in your speech and subtitles. That’s how search algorithms understand that your video is relevant and answers the users’ intent.

4. Dive into content-making

Making a cool video may take a lot of time, so, as we’ve mentioned before, you should consider having a dedicated YouTube team. They will take care of the video production and marketing, as well as building a community.

If you, however, are on a budget, you can rely on free tools for video-making and have a marketing specialist help you do the promotional part.

You will need: 

• An online video editor like Fastreel, Magisto, or Kapwing
• An illustration-maker for channel art: Canva, Venngage, or Crello
• A content planner like Loomly, Trello, or Agorapulse

When you have all the tools you need, it’s time to find out how to make a YouTube channel more interesting with different video content.

Types of content that perform well on YouTube

You will find dozens of video content types across YouTube. But which ones to pick for promoting a small business? The ones below work great for corporate accounts, so let’s take a closer look.

Brand introduction

A brand presentation is arguably the most important video on your channel. Tell your audience who you are, what you do, and what your content is about. This type of video works great as a channel trailer for the newcomers to get to know you. You can also make a series of short “meet the team” videos when introducing your employees. These videos can include short interviews, time-lapses of workdays, and little anecdotes about their lives.

Product overviews

If you produce cool items, develop handy software, or provide great services, YouTube is the best place to showcase your offerings. Product overviews are basically advertisements where you talk about features and benefits for users. These videos fit very well when you launch new products or release updates to your existing goods.

Instructions

Instructional guides are a must-have if you want the audience to treat you as an expert. Teach your subscribers how to use your services or products and make QA videos about the most troublesome moments. If you have your own profound guides and instructional videos, people won’t need to search for them anywhere else.

Educational videos

These differ from instructions in a way that they cover a wider range of topics. These topics, however, should be related to your product or service. For example, if you are a digital design agency, you can educate your audience about current design trends or color theory.

Customer testimonials

Client testimonials will draw viewers to your channel and provide valuable content for your subscriber base. A customer testimonial can include specific details about the benefits of a product or service based on real-life experience. Such feedback is more believable than bragging from the brand’s side.

Live streams

A scheduled live stream event will cause anticipation among your subscribers. You can tease the public on your other social media accounts and then talk to the audience in real-time. Live streams are perfect for product launches, QA sessions, and educational webinars.

Creating a successful YouTube channel takes time

As you can see, there are a lot of advantages to making use of YouTube. Not every company is successful in doing so, but with enough time and effort, you can reach your goal. A YouTube account will attract new audiences, improve relationships with customers, and draw more traffic to your site.

Plan out your digital strategy first, research the market, and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to optimize your content for search engines, upload videos regularly, and the followers won’t take long to come. By balancing the amount and types of content, you can keep your clients entertained for a long time.