Brand /Channel Strategy, Creative + Content Direction, Production

Work done as: Social Media Manager @ The Ohio State University

Original Publication: Ohio State University Marketing

Many brands underestimate the potential influence of a YouTube presence. The reality is, even if you are not maintaining an owned YouTube channel, there are likely influencers on the platform who are shaping perceptions of your brand. Launched as a video hosting social platform in 2005 and purchased by Google in 2006, YouTube has steadily become a titan of online video. Not to mention, it is one of the most visited websites in the history of the internet. All of this in mind and armed with research in hand, it was time to bring new life to the Ohio State University’s YouTube channel.

A FRESH APPROACH

For the university, YouTube historically has served as a central repository of our video content. We recognized the potential in optimizing our channel to better align with our target audience and the channel expectations. We were primed to take a fresh audience-centric approach to this channel, with prospective students as the primary audience.

IDENTIFYING THE AUDIENCE

The key to an audience-centric channel is, of course, identifying your primary audience. Our social and analytics teams extensively researched search trends, channel behaviors, user reports, competitors and more to solidify our audience. As we planned to completely redesign an entire channel, it was incredibly important to be certain that we identified the correct primary audience. Knowing that prospective students are using YouTube as their primary social platform to research colleges made it clear who our target audience would be.

Here are a few key stats to help paint the picture:

95% of Gen Z is on YouTube.
70% of prospective students use search engines.
46% specifically seek out videos posted by colleges on YouTube, more than double any other social media channel.

IDENTIFYING GOALS

With the primary audience well defined, the next step was to outline our goals and further shape the new strategy. We sought to build a channel that represents our brand in a way that communicates our core values and speaks directly to our primary audience. Keeping audience and platform expectations front of mind, we built strategic goals to drive choice and build brand reputation.

Goals:

Reach prospective students at key intersections in their journey through audience-centric content
Curate cohesive look and feel on YouTube for series increasing views and user experience by meeting platform expectations
Elevate Ohio State channel through quality new content, and optimize SEO for existing and new content

NEW STRATEGY IN ACTION

With an audience defined and goals outlined, it was time to hit the ground running. While the journey to fully optimize a new channel is a long and patient one, here are a few of the first steps we have taken to optimize our channel:

Cleaned up channel (hiding nearly 300 outdated videos)
Organized relevant content into audience-centric playlists
Redesigned entire look and feel of the channel by updating thumbnails and layout
Continually identifying opportunities to create new content to speak to our target audience

This new audience-centric approach is allowing us to create new content for a platform that was previously underutilized. In turn, this is leading to more interactions with prospective students in a key point of the journey.

Results

81% increase in views.
38% increase in engagement.
159% increase in subscriptions added in the first two months.