- One of the most important
elements of growing your channel
that I think a lot of creators overlook,
that they haven't overlooked, is branding.
This is Stephen Sharer and Grace
and they grew their channel
to over four and a half million
subscribers in two years,
they're sharing all behind
the scenes tip, tricks
and tactics that got them
there so you can do the same,
and today we're gonna
talk about what they did
with branding, it's coming up.
Hey guys my name is Tim Schmoyer,
welcome to Video Creators,
we're all about helping you
grow your YouTube audience,
so you can spread a message
that reaches people,
changes their lives, they're
all about share the love
and we should really dig into that,
that's like a branding thing,
that's a branding thing even,
so talk about that, it sounds
like it was intentional
for you, wasn't like a
hmm what should we like,
tell us about that process.
- This share the love
brand kinda came to be,
actually right from the start,
I came from a branding background,
I did digital advertising for
Adobe and the big thing there
was I worked with brands on how to create
a brand around themselves,
brand awareness,
and so kind of I new going into YouTube,
well how can we differentiate
ourselves from other
viral content videos, how
can we make people come back
for the brand that you're
creating versus just
each individual video that
may be viral or might not
be viral, so how can we
get a reoccurring audience.
My brother Carter and I
sat down and we said okay,
our last name's Sharer can we
make that into anything cool?
And I always used to do like
"yo share the love, peace"
- Share the love, peace.
- And so Carter was like oh that's cool
but what if we created a hand symbol,
something that can be done with one hand,
something that everyone can
do, so everyone does peace sign
but what's more original
than a peace sign,
so we came up with this,
which is sign language symbol for love.
- I love you, yeah so like I-love-you.
- We kinda put that all
together and we started
incorporating into every
single video and we have
our shirts now, we have an
actual clothing line now,
and every single video we say,
"stay awesome, share the love, peace"
and that's kind of encapsulated
everything we stand for,
you know we create awesome
family friendly vlogs,
it gives everyone something
to look forward to,
something positive to do,
something for their whole family
to watch, and that's just kind
of how our brand came about.
- Well I like what you're saying,
as when most people think of branding,
they're actually thinking
like what's my channel art
going to be or my channel icon,
is that part of it for you?
- No, because the channel
icon and the channel,
the channel icon to me,
like the profile picture,
is somewhat significant
because people know,
oh that's the channel I wanna click on,
the channel banner I never
really paid much attention
to the channel banner on YouTube,
just because on different devices
it's displayed differently
and also when people are
scrolling through the search tab
the channel banner's not on there,
unless on your specific channel,
they're not ever going to see that banner,
so I said okay the profile
picture's important,
I made that my face so
people can recognize my face,
but probably what's more
important than that is the actual
thumbnail, the actual title
and thumbnail of your video
is super important, so
they're clicking on that,
then they're starting to watch your video,
and then within your video if
you're doing actual branding,
such as we always wear our shirts,
we're always saying our slogans,
"stay awesome, share the love",
that's branding within
the video and when viewers
come to YouTube, they're
not searching around
and looking at each individual
channel, it's not like
a Facebook or anything, it's
literally viewing content,
so that's why within every
video we always do branding.
- So you're talking
about branding in terms,
and this is like my language
not yours, but in terms of,
this is what we want people
to associate with us,
and you're taking your channel
and associating it with
actually a belief, like it's a creed,
it's like we believe
that this is important,
whenever you wrap your
brand around a creed,
or a mission or something like that,
it's always so much stronger
than if it's just like
"hey guys, subscribe to my
channel because I do daily vlogs"
right yeah, like okay you and
how many other people right?
But when it's like, this
is about sharing the love
and you guys, you can see
that in your relationship
and yours and your brothers
relationship and through that
you're not just, like
you're having fun together,
you're sharing the love
together and at the end
you say share the love and it leaves,
like my kids when they watch
it and they're especially like
oh yeah, I wanna share the
love, it's an actionable thing.
The other thing apart, is about this too,
is the strongest communities,
online and offline,
they don't actually revolve
around common interest,
they always revolve around shared beliefs,
and so people who share that
belief with you'll be like
"yes!" and they're in on
that channel as opposed to
people who are like "ah no I'm
not gonna spread any love",
not that there's a type of
people who are like that.
The other thing that's
important about this is that
it's integrated throughout
your whole content,
it's not like this little,
just a slogan you throw in
the end, but you guys collectively
are doing this together,
and I think that makes it a lot easier
for the audience to get on board with that
'cause you can tell it's
not just a fake thing.
How important do you think
it is for everyone to be
involved, 'cause I notice
everyone's doing it but it's not
just Stephen, how important,
that's intentional I assume?
- Yeah, so our goal is to
get everyone to be doing it,
so it's very important that
we show that the viewers
can do it too and they'll
post videos of them doing it
and tag us and we'll reply
back, and anyone in our videos,
we'll end the video doing that as well,
and we'll just always
post on other platforms
that we're doing it too,
to get the whole world,
anybody that wants to do it can do it.
- Share the love around the world.
- Share the love, yeah, and
it's a creed but it's also
a ritual that people
grow to love and expect
and is repeated in a
reaction that people love,
and that really re-enforces
the brand so super smart,
I guess I've thought this for a long time
but that's really good.
Branding's huge, but also
is how we actually craft
the videos people are going to watch
so that they keep watching
and wanna watch more,
coming up next we're gonna dive into that
and their storytelling and
editing process and how they
craft their videos to keep
people like my sons addicted.
Click the video on you screen
and we'll see you guys in that next video.
