How to Create a Company YouTube Channel: 3 Steps
By the end of this article, you will have a go-to plan for creating your company’s YouTube channel and content strategy.
Having worked at YouTube for 10 years, I got a 30,000-foot view of the platform and all its types of creators.
From vloggers, to musicians, athletes, gamers, and slime-makers, the list goes on and on.
As I’m sure you’ve seen, young people with lots of time on their hands can see explosive growth on this platform.
They can make and launch channels in a matter of hours.
And they can do this at a cost of nothing!
It’s enough to make the employee jealous, because it’s their job to create a YouTube channel for their company, business, corporation, or non-profit.
And in doing so, they face a ton of challenges, including:
Who’s gonna be the face of the channel?
Who’s gonna write the videos?
Who’s gonna make the thumbnails?
Who’s gonna shoot the videos?
Who’s gonna edit the videos?
Who’s gonna optimize and upload the videos?
Who’s gonna respond to the comments?
And on and on. The list of hurdles faced for a company YouTube channel are staggering.
So, by the end of this article, you - the employee - will have a framework for how to build out your company’s YouTube channel.
But before we get into content strategy, if you’re looking to literally set-up your company channel, let’s be sure to cover that real quick:
How to Set-up Your Company YouTube Channel: a “Brand Channel”
A Brand channel is different from an individual's channel. It's designed to represent a company or organization, and is identified by the business or company name. It can have lots of managers (and emails) associated with it.
Creating a Brand channel is pretty straightforward. Here’s the gist, although you of course want to follow Google’s official steps as you go through it:
Create a Google Account. Since YouTube is a Google-owned product, you will need a Google account. Many companies use Google Workspace, so this may not be a problem.
Go to YouTube.com and click “Sign in” in the upper right. Think about which email should be the one to set-up the account, because if you ever leave the company, you don't want to leave your coworkers without access to their channel! Once you’ve logged in –
Set up the Brand channel. Click on the icon at the top right of the screen once logged in. S
Select the gear icon to go into your YouTube settings. Choose "create a new channel" and then select "use a business or other name." You can then fill in the "brand name" with your business or brand name and click "create" to finish setting up your YouTube Brand Account.
Customize your YouTube Brand Account. Add a profile photo, a banner image, a description of your company, and other relevant information that you want to share with users. You can also add your coworkers as managers to help run the channel.
Don’t fuss about all this too much yet! Since the channel really won’t be discoverable until you start uploading videos. For now, just build out the channel as if it’s your “storefront”.
If you need a much more detailed walk-through, my friend Rob at VidIQ made this excellent video tutorial.
Alright, the set-up aside, let’s jump ahead and get into more of the content strategy behind creating a company YouTube channel.
How to Develop a Company Content Strategy
Step 1: Identify what your viewers will GET with every video.
The strange thing we run into when advising companies around their YouTube channel is that they just want to SELL their product or service. Or, they just want to get their message out.
It’s all about me, me, me (or us, us, us).
Don’t let your company channel be a “content dump”.
They basically want to use their YouTube channel as some sort of “content dump”, or place to house their advertisements, promotional videos, and random interviews.
It’s just a pile of content with no theme or strategy behind them.
I point out to them that nobody wants to watch and subscribe to a channel full of commercials and sales pitches.
We then come to one of the crucial first questions:
“What value will you be giving to your audience with every video you upload?”
And this is where my job gets awkward.
The employee usually responds with something like, “Well, they’re just gonna love our company and what we do, and they’ll want to watch whatever we upload.”
No, brah. They won’t.
That’s a recipe for 14 views per video.
The company employee often struggles to answer the question, so I break it down for them into pieces. I ask which of the following three categories will their videos fall into?
Entertainment
Education
News
These are basically the top three categories of any YouTube channel, including those run by companies or brands. To expand on the above –
Are people going to watch for general entertainment value? To laugh, enjoy, or otherwise be swept away by the drama or stories?
Or, are they going to watch to learn something - like a new skill, or ability to fix a problem?
Or, are they going to watch to get some sort of news updating about your industry? For example, to hear what’s the latest in the financial markets.
Of course, there are some categories that are a blend of these, or don’t quite fit any of the three, but 99% of the time, channels fall into one of these three. Therefore it’s important to pick ONE as the top-level category of the value you will provide with every YouTube video.
From here, we start to draft the channel’s short value proposition.
Now that we know what category “continent” we’re going to live in, we start to break that down into a three to six word value proposition that we can use in our branding materials.
This all may seem overly corporate, but guess what? Some of the biggest creators on the platform use value propositions, like Marques Brownlee:
What do I get from this guy?
Quality tech videos.
Three words.
It can be that simple.
So, what is a possible value proposition for your company’s YouTube channel?
Step 2: Identify your ideal YouTube viewer.
The next exercise we take companies through is helping them get a sense of exactly who they want to reach with their videos. They often respond quickly with something like, “Yeah, we already know this - it’s our target customer, men ages 18-35.”
And that might work as your customer target, but that’s not focused enough for your ideal viewer on YouTube, because the algorithm is much more precise.
We’re looking for an exact physical and psychological profile .
If you had to target one single person, who exactly is it? This might include attributes like:
Gender
Exact age
Exact interests
Level of education achieved
Marital status
Wants and desires
Fears and worries
This works well because if you can identify your ideal viewer, you can tailor the voice and tone of each piece of content to match that person’s needs, and they will be more likely to come back again and again for more videos. This is important because –
If there’s anything the YouTube algorithm loves most, it’s –
People who watch a lot of video.
People who COME BACK and watch more, a.ka. returning viewers.
When the algorithm recognizes that your videos are bringing people back for more (and for more YouTube in general), your content gets more promotion.
The system basically rewards your channel for forming a habit in your viewers.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that other people won’t watch! They will.
But the more intentional we can be with our intended viewer, the more our videos will resonate with them, and the more they will come back for more. The “audience retention” of your videos will also be off the charts, as I discuss in this video –
PRO TIP: After you come up with this ideal viewer, give them a name, and use your favorite AI image creation tool to come up with what they look like. Post it on your wall near your desk as you or your team writes scripts and makes thumbnails.
Step 3: Choose a video format that supports your goals.
Shorts? Long-form videos? Podcasts? Community tab posts?
Which format is best for your company channel? Or should you do them all?
Don’t get overwhelmed here, and please don’t do them all. (That can actually prevent your channel from growing in a healthy way, despite what YouTube would like you to believe.)
Here’s the core question you need to answer to help you make this decision.:
Do you want brand awareness, or conversions?
If it’s brand awareness – basically just getting your company’s name or message out there – Shorts can be a fantastic option because they tend to rack up the views a much faster pace.
The reason is, since Shorts are under 60 seconds, viewers can consume them faster, and thus YouTube can surface them at a faster rate.
Example:
You’re a non-profit and you want viewers to learn about your mission.
If you have a very simple product where the value of it is instantly understandable, Shorts (and TikToks, Reels, etc.) can also be a great option, because you can demonstrate the product very quickly in those short formats.
Examples:
A clever new apple slicer
A genius new way to attach your smartphone to your car’s dashboard
If it’s conversions to a product or service that you’re after, you likely want your viewers to come to know, like, and trust your brand.
That was the case with our client Adam Taggart, who we partnered with to launch a new channel called Thoughtful Money. Case study here.
This of course takes time, and WATCH-TIME, to be specific. In other words, you want viewers to watch for as long as possible.
Yep, we’re talking long-form video here.
If a video-podcast would work what you’re trying to do, even better, since that format often drives more watch-time than any other. It also super charges the “know, like, and trust” factor.
Here’s another way to think about Shorts vs. Longs:
The great thing about conversions as your main goal is that you can monetize in a very effective way, even with low views, as I describe in this video –
How we can help:
Launching or rejuvenating a YouTube channel has turned into something akin to rocket science, especially when you’re faced with all the challenges around resourcing and company infrastructure.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, check out what we do at this page, where you can also book a live call at no charge.
We’d be happy to meet you, hear your challenges, and see if we can help!
