We work with tons of creators and we see this problem all the time. You feel like you made the perfect video, but it just falls flat. It was perfect! What happened?! Well, the problem is, you can be really good at getting information across without making any personal connection. And without making your viewer feel SOMETHING, they probably won’t care enough to subscribe or buy something from you. Today, we are going to talk about how to fix that.

Emotional connection is so important. Harvard Biz School came out with a study stating that connected employees are 87% less likely to leave their organization. I have found this to be true in my work environments, but it’s just as important on YouTube. An engaged and emotionally connected audience is going to keep coming back for more.

Creator Spotlight

But first I want to introduce you to Samantha Lopez & Amitha Verma and their channel, . Before they started VL, they felt like they were having the creativity sucked out of them. They would vaguely brainstorm content for the channel, film for hours and edit for so many more hours. Then, they would get so caught up in SEO and just feel like they were completely wiped out trying to make a thumbnail and the title. Now, they have a completely new view of how to organize the content creation process and they feel like it maximizes their creativity. They are now excited about continuing their channel.

Keeping the Life in your Videos

We find so many creators work so hard on perfecting their videos that they inadvertently cut out all the “life” in their video. I know it’s hard! We get the comments all the time – “cut out the personal stuff! Get to the point!” – And we get it, to some degree. Rambling will never help your content. But, if all you are doing is presenting bullet point information and revealing anything of who YOU are, you will be forgettable.

So how do you become memorable without being boring? How do you get viewers to engage with your video, want to watch out more, and potentially subscribe? The key is primal branding

Practical Primal Branding

If you’ve been around for more than a minute, you’ve heard us talk about , the 7 elements that are present whenever people quickly fall in love with a brand/content creator.

  1. Creation Story – Who are you? Where did you come from?
  2. Creed – What do you believe and why does this matter?
  3. Rituals – Repeated interactions that people grow to love and respect
  4. Leader – Who embodies this creed, performs the rituals, etc.
  5. Non-believers – The people you say that you are not
  6. Icons – Visual representations that remind us of this brand
  7. Sacred Words – Words/Phrases that you use with your brand that people recognize that make them feel included

First of all, this whole list can seem super overwhelming. I would suggest just figuring what these things are for your channel first. And then slowly start working some of these things in. Not every one of these is going to be in every video. You can force it. But allow these things to shine as they come naturally. Beliefs and rituals is a good place to start.

The problem is that if we are editing our videos, we will often edit some of these out because they are not necessary for the storyline of the video. An example of this is if you are explaining how to fix a car and you go thru step one, step two and then you mention oh and then step three. You might say off the cuff, “I hate this step because one time I did this and I ended up hurting my hand when I ….” When you might rewatch that, your thought might be to edit it out in attempts to make the video more concise, but that story is going to connect with people. Maybe they can relate. And showing your personality in your story is a huge connection and can prompt people to engage.

Increasing Engagement

After that emotional connection is established, your audience will be FAR more likely to engage in your channel. But there are things that we can do that encourages our connected audience to engage.

One example of this is to hype up the comment section. – NO ONE will “Like, comment, and subscribe” just because you told them to. Instead you can say something like, “This is what I did in this situation, but I’d love to hear from you guys. What you would do in the same situation? I know you guys have so many ideas. Every time I read the comment section I learn so much from you guys. Thank you so much for sharing your insights.” Asking a specific question to answer in the comments work so much better than just asking people to comment. And if your question is connected to your creed, you’re going to have an even better response.

Audience Satisfaction

Now that we have viewers emotional connected and engaged, what can we do to keep them coming back for more?

First, of all you need to make good content. If people don’t like your content, they aren’t going to share it or come back and watch more – no matter what else you do. There’s no getting around that.

Another tip is to stay in front of your audience as much as you can. You can utilize community posts, YouTube stories, shorts, Instagram, or TikTok. Wherever you can continue to share yourself and have those connections is going to help you. Now, don’t think you have to do all these things! You can only give so much. Figure out where most of your audience is and maximize it. We figured out that most of our sales were coming from our podcast so we streamlined and just focused on that. Now, we may make an appearance on other social media platforms here and there, but most of our time and energy is going to the podcast because that’s what we can best execute and that’s what’s serving us best anyway. You have to figure out where that is for you. It’s better to be in front of 100 of the right people than 10,000 of the wrong people. So figure out what are the most profitable avenues for your content and maximize on them.

But practically it doesn’t have to be super hard. Community posts can be scheduled, which make them easier to do. You can use the stories to give a sneak peak of your videos while you’re filming. This kills two birds with one stone. And sharing a sneak peak can actually turn into a ritual when your audience starts to expect it.

We’d love to do an entire podcast about how you get engagement on your channel. So share what you do! and let us know what you do to increase engagement. Maybe you’ll be featured in an upcoming episode.

Power Tip

! Now, I know that changes can be annoying when we expect to have a button in a certain place and now it’s not. But they didn’t do this on a whim. They held a user study with over 20,000 users and asked them what they wanted for users to have a more immersive experience.

The most noticeable change has been the change to the subscriber button. It’s no longer red, but black. (GASP!) A lot of people are pretty up in arms about this. But a helpful change is that after people have subscribed to a channel it changes to subscribed. Another pro is that it is more prominent, closer to channel name on desktop and higher up on mobile.

The buttons & thumbnails are more rounded as well to try to modernize the look. But we do need to take this into account when you make your thumbnails. If you have a border around your thumbnail this is going to affect it.

Another change is to the long blue URLS in your video descriptions. They will now be formatted as clickable buttons that are composed of a YouTube favicon. This will apply to all YouTube video titles, channel names, and playlists with the goal of making YouTube links more easily recognizable.

Playlists will have other design changes as well to improve the look and feel of the playlist page. Video playlists will adopt a similar dynamic color sampling treatment as ambient mode and will now show more details about each playlist so viewers can easily jump right in.

The goal is for it to come together in a subtle way for a cleaner, refreshed design for creators and viewers alike.

Keep Changing Lives!

Tim Schmoyer

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