Watch This Episode of MwahTV About Brand Strategy Advice on YouTube
In this episode of Mwah TV, I'm sharing some expert brand strategy advice on YouTube. It's so easy to get focused on trying to build your channel by following certain keyword trends and whilst that's certainly a good tactic in some respects for growing your YouTube channel and getting more eyes on your content, one of the things that sometimes gets overlooked when people adopt this tactic is upholding their brand, upholding their business values. And you should use those behind all of your content creation efforts.
Let me show you how.
Feeling Like Another Imitation Channel?
If you fear that all of your channel content is just going to end up looking exactly the same as somebody else who does something similar to you, then by the end of this episode, with the help of my Mwah TV production team, I'm going to explain exactly how you go about creating unique content that backs up all of your brand values to support your business growth.
Starting with Creative Anchors
Before I share the expert tips from the different members of the Mwah TV team, I wanted to share some of the creative anchors that I've implemented that go on behind directing the creative of the show.
Then I want to dial it back a little bit and show you how this fits into my overarching brand values as a business beyond just YouTube.
What is A Creative Anchor?
A creative anchor is just a really easy-to-understand the point of reference.
When you use different creative anchors in the way that you're trying to articulate your brand or any creative message, for that matter, having proper creative anchors really helps with the effectiveness and the overall efficiency of explaining what it is you're trying to achieve when you're working with other creatives.
If you try and describe something that's unusual or very specific without using phrases like
"it's a bit like"
or
"it's absolutely the opposite of"
you can see very quickly there how having a creative anchor is really important and effective.
And as YouTube is all about video content, it was really important to me to gather up some different types of video content that I could show my team to explain what I was trying to achieve with the overall look and feel of the show.
ANCHOR 1 - Referencing Vintage Telly from 1958-1962
The first one is Vintage Telly.
A big part of my style as a person and through my brand is that I love living a vintage life. I take most of my inspiration behind living a vintage life from a very specific timeframe and that's the timeframe of 1954 to 1962. As this informs a lot of the inspiration in different touchpoints in my brand, it was really important to me that we draw inspiration from television created within this same timeframe.
The Betty White Show
The Rag Trade TV Show
PASSWORD TV Game Show
ANCHOR 2 - Referencing Leading Ladies of this Era
The next anchor is all-around strong women.
A key brand value that has always existed in Laura Pearman Creative is the theme of feminism and empowering younger girls to do better in the future. And this is actually something that we're starting to dial up in the behind the scenes part of my brand building, making things equal for women.
So with that same timeframe in mind, thinking about female figureheads and the louder female voices of that time period is where the two anchors start to cross over.
I Love Lucy TV Show
Fanny Craddock Cooking LIVE At The Royal Albert Hall
Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor Sparring in Suddenly Last Summer
And thinking about this in a much more macro sense, bearing reference to and subtly suggesting female figureheads who had loud and positive voices for the feminist movement is a great way to create a creative loop ready to inspire the future generations, which is all the point of the brand value, but doing it with that creative finesse is a way that I kind of nod my creative hat to that.
ANCHOR 3 - Referencing Kinesthetic Humour
The next anchor is kinesthetic humour. I've always learned best when there's movement and laughter involved. So, I remember being a kid trying to learn times tables. The only way I could really get it to stick into my brain ready for the test at school the next week was to like do a little dance and make up some silly jokes about the numbers. And as a lot of the content that we put out here on the show is instructional and quite heavily informative, it's important to me that anybody else who's like me who enjoys humour and kinesthetic learning can take what I'm sharing, but that it sticks into the grey matter of their brain.
So the thought of sitting here in like a grey suit with grey colours and not very good diagrams to explain what I'm telling you makes me think that, yeah, I'd just go past that channel 'cause that would be boring as hell to me. It would be unacceptable of me to expect that from you when this is a key part of how I learn and how I remember things.
and using movement
You'll notice when we do idents like this, there's a little bit of extra movement. That is absolutely deliberate. We also make a point of including all of the bloopers when we create them in the show and that is part of me being silly and trying to have a bit of laughter with things.
To De-Brief Correspondent Guests
When you think about these different principles and these different anchors that we've just powered through there, you can start to think about specific styles of video content from this era with these things in mind. Those are the things that we gathered up and that we refer back to as a production team.
I use this information to debrief every cocktail correspondent that comes on the show as well so they have a good understanding before we go into recording exactly what my expectation is from them as a guest and from a creative standpoint.
Sneak Peek of This
Let's take a look at this.
This is a dedicated page on my website that I give the link to any cocktail correspondent guest when we're still in the planning stage.
Here is a video at the top where I talk through the details.
And then underneath, we have the exact same information that's in the video, but laid out in a text-based way with backlinks to the inspiration and mood links that we've looked at already today. This really gives an exact expectation and articulation of the style of how we want them to show up when they come on the show.
How Do You Fit This Back Into Your Brand?
You can see here in the way that we're pulling out from the inspirations I just showed you. We've got that vintage telly of the 1954 to 1962 era and we used this specifically to inform decisions around transitions, effects, and we try to do stylistic homages as much as possible.
Demeanour as well and sound, so those are very specific demeanour in the way that people were allowed to be on television and we're kind of playing with that in the way that we create the show.
The other inspiration and anchor that I've shared was strong women on television, so we're looking at characters and personalities. Because there weren't that many women on television, this kind of expands in the eras that we look at and you will have seen some different women from different time periods and they all helped to inform the type of presenter I want to show up as on the show.
And then learning style is a key creative anchor in that we try and find ways to explain things by doing. So what kind of movements can we attribute to the way that we're teaching and how can we make those movements silly and fun to make them more memorable?
In The Current Time
And then all of this is reimagined for the current time and it's reimagined for the Laura Pearman Creative brand message. I'm not a vintage lady showing up how to be a vintage lady, I'm a modern creative business. So there's that element of smashing and fusing those senses together and that is the way that we have the creative anchors for the show. But this actually dials back into my brand values.
And Loop with Your Values!
My brand values, which is something that I'm very open about and I've shared before on the show,
- Vintage Life,
- Suki the sassy Cat,
- Being a Modern Feminist,
- Creative Cocktails (as the way that I describe my particular style of creativity with frivolity and more is more, but also that sense of fusing things together that haven't necessarily been put together before),
- and then Deep Exploration. (This is actually a modified brand value as a result of COVID. So this value used to be called travelling the world and like wanderlust and I used to travel the world a lot, but then things have changed. So I think that there's an element around exploring the mind and being quite deep and intentional and soul led and that can feel very adventurous).
The key brand values for the entire business and the whole brand and they inform everything that we put out.
And Internal Operations
The key brand values for the entire business and the whole brand and they inform everything that we put out.
From an internal sense, which is a zoomed out version of what we were just looking at:
- My Content, so Mwah TV, and then how that feeds into the blog. All of my social posts are informed by these five values.
- Any promotional campaign I do has this foundation, email marketing.
- And then thinking about this externally as well. So this is how I like to show up as a brand. So if I'm doing any speaking or appearances, if I've been hired to deliver any workshops or masterclasses, if I'm invited to guest on other people's content, I will bring as much of my brand values to that opportunity to really evoke and explain the brand by doing.
Brand Strategy Advice on YouTube from Danielle Editing #MwahTV
Over to Danielle now. She is the lady behind the editing of the show.
Hi. I'm Danielle. My business is called "Videos Undifficulted" and I've been editing Mwah TV for a couple of years now.
Before I started working with Laura, I thought her brand was so interestingly unique.
It's clear that her personality and vintage style filters through all of her content and wherever you see her online, you instantly know that a post is hers because of this unique style of branding. When she asked me to join the Mwah TV production team, I was so pleased to discover the way she had everything organised.
Organisation on Dropbox
Using dedicated folders in Dropbox is essential to us getting every episode out on time. Everything needed for the episode is kept together, so scripts, initial recordings, voiceovers, images, everything. Then a separate folder is used for edits in progress, which means we always know we're looking at the latest version of an episode.
Commnication on Slack
Using Slack to communicate means we don't have to wade through endless emails to find tweaks that need completing. And this is especially important because I often work irregular hours due to the school holidays, for example, but every episode is always out on time because of this organisation.
Laura has a very clear vision of the style behind the show. Her way of articulating that to me when it comes to editing is incredibly detailed. I so often see the video playing in my head when I read what she's asking for, but she still leaves space for me to add my own flourish into things.
Mastering the Cockrel
I've learned many new techniques from wanting to make Laura's visions come to life. For example, Laura wanted the news bulletins published in 2020 to have their own Pathe style news intro with our own Cockrel and text that came out in a circle around it. This is not something that my usual video editing software can do, so I often push myself to learn new skills and be creative, but give her the confidence that what work is done is truly aligned to her business brand.
If you don't have clarity about your brand, then YouTube can end up working against you as it sends your potential viewers off to other pieces of content. Here are three common pitfalls to avoid.
3 Common Pitfalls Danielle Suggests You Avoid
- Not being objective about your video. You need to put your viewer first and not your desire to push your product or your service. For example, don't spend the first 15 seconds playing that fancy animated brand intro that you splashed out on. Instead, explain what is in it for your viewer if they stick around to watch your content.
- Don't avoid considering the audio element of your video. Sound is so important in conveying your brand, whether it's being consistent with the language you use in your video or the style of music that you choose.
- Not thinking mobile-first. Over 70% of YouTube views are from mobile devices, so considering how your video looks on a small screen is vital. For example, is your onscreen text readable and do you have captions for those who are listening with the sound off?
People can't buy from you if they don't know you exist, so if you need help getting your brand more visible with video, then come and find me on Instagram at "Videos Undifficulted."
Struggling with your Brand Themes?
You might be struggling with getting a handle on what your 5 main branding themes or values are. Without these, it can be a royal pain in the ass to come up with the right creative anchors to use in directing your content creation efforts.
I made this quick template to start organising your thoughts on this.
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A Quick ReCap On Colour
I want to introduce you to Carrie next. She's the lady behind my thumbnail designs. But before I do that, here's a quick recap of the colourway behind my branding. You need to know this before Carrie shares her clever wisdom.
So in 2016, I invested in getting a professional graphic designer to help me with a precise colourway. Now, at that time, I was just offering brand photography, so it was really important to me that there was plenty of colour space for my photography to be showcased. So I went into that creative project thinking I need to get something really plain. And after a few meetings with my designer, they give me feedback that my personality and style of working were so bold, so we negotiated and added in a single pop colour of this hot pink red here.
I want to introduce you to Carrie next. She's the lady behind my thumbnail designs. But before I do that, here's a quick recap in the colourway behind my branding. You need to know this before Carrie shares her clever wisdom.
Addition Experiments That Failed
Over time, I noticed that this colourway this sparse way of doing things from a branding point of view had its limitations for me. And as I was creating a lot more content, I wanted to add some different colours.
So I started experimenting with complementary colours at this point, but I'm not a professional colour psychologist and I'm not a graphic designer, so what I was creating just wasn't really hitting the mark for me.
Then, in 2020, I invested again in a new creative project with a new professional graphic designer and we landed on this colourway. And this was heavily inspired by the Kate Spade 2011 collection. And you can see I've got different things of these colours from that specific era that we've already talked about in today's show.
Now that you're up to date with this, here's Carrie.
Brand Strategy Advice on YouTube from Carrie Designing Thumbnails for #MwahTV
Hello. I'm Carrie and I do the thumbnails from Mwah TV. I'm the designer. The name of my business is "Social Mint" and other than doing YouTube thumbnails for video creators, I also help small businesses develop their design confidence through tips, tutorials, and guidance.
When Laura and I first started working together in 2020, she was looking to get better results from her thumbnails on her channel Mwah TV and this is the palette that she had established. You can see the colours that are there and that was the palette she had in 2020 and those are some of the graphic elements that she used in her marketing materials and in her videos. So when I started working with her, I used that palette and those graphic elements to continue the brand that she'd already developed and then just take it up to another level so that we could get that performance.
Results
And it worked and we were very happy about that.
The click-through rates for the channel are doing well. You can see the upper projection. And this chart is from April of 2020 to December of 2021 and it also shows a few of the thumbnails that we did along the way. You can also see a little bit of a stylistic difference and about when the colours changed for the new brand. And this brings us to 2022, the end of 2021.
This is the vision board and some of the verbiage that Laura had provided in regards to her new colour palette So you can see the images over there were her inspiration, some of the text there is the words that she used to describe the feeling that she wanted people to get from her content, and this is what I took into the new thumbnails for end of 2021 and into 2022. And this is the new palette, the new font selection, and the new custom graphics that we will be going forward with or we started in late 2021 and we will continue to go forward with to bring attraction to the videos on Mwah TV and implement them into the thumbnails and into supporting graphics.
Timestamps for this Episode of #MwahTV
00:00 – Episode Starts
01:30 - What is a Creative Anchor?
02:24 - Vintage Telly - Anchor 1
04:14 - Strong Women - Anchor 2
04:49 - What is a Creative Loop?
05:12 - Kinesthetic Humour & Learning
07:18 - Debriefing Guests AKA Cocktail Correspondents
09:26 - How it all fits back into the brand
11:38 - Meet Danielle the Editing Expert
13:50 - Danielle's Top 3 Tips
15:19 - A Quick re-cap on Brand Colour
16:43 - Meet Carrie the Thumbnail Expert
17:55 - Carrie's Success Rate
Are you finding it Hard To Get the Best Out Of Your Creative Suppliers?
It might be that you jumped into this for your business too soon, or you missed out on some crucial steps in doing this. I get it, when this goes wrong on an operational level you can really start to question what was the point in even trying to delegate the creative stuff in the first place.
Here is some of my support based on my years of creatively directing crews and creative teams. It's not like your typical management stuff.
If you've enjoyed getting some brand advice for your YouTube strategy this week, then you're going to absolutely enjoy these episodes up next.
I'll see you next time. Mwah!
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