Developed by YouTube, the hero, hub, help strategy recommends that brands create three types of content:
HERO – You’re ‘go big’ brand/campaign moments that happen once or twice a year.
HUB – Episodic content, in a repeatable format, uploaded on a set schedule. This should be 80-90% of your brand’s videos.
HELP – Answering consumer questions or participating in trends. (because YouTube is the second largest search engine). This commonly takes the form of ‘how to’ content.
But, why does this content strategy work? I break down the reasons.
WHY DOES HERO, HUB, HELP WORK?
For the sake of simplicity I think you can break it down into three main categories:
THE ALGORITHM
YouTube prioritizes new content above old.
As a result, there’s a demand on creators to publish content at a high frequency. This is something that Matt Gielen spent a lot of time deconstructing and explaining in his post – Reverse Engineering The YouTube Algorithm: Part II. In that post Gielen sites a paper from Google which explains why this is the case:
Many hours worth of videos are uploaded each second to YouTube. Recommending this recently uploaded (“fresh”) content is extremely important for YouTube as a product. We consistently observe that users prefer fresh content, though not at the expense of relevance.
The implications of this is simple – you need to make more content to keep your channel relevant.
What’s the best way to create content frequently? Using the ‘hub’ strategy, ie content that is “episodic, and something that’s easy to replicate.”
Another major factor to keep in mind is that YouTube looks at your watch and search history – YouTube is looking at the these behaviors and searching for patterns.
Essentially, every action you take is teaching YouTube who likes what content. If you’re a channel owner you want to use this knowledge to clearly define the viewer you want and create extremely consistent content so that YouTube knows exactly who wants to see your videos.
For example, if you you create videos around surfing and you get a bunch of 30 year old males who live in one California coastal town to tune in every video. It’s safe to assume that guys of the same age, same demographics, who live in the next town over will also like it.If one day, that channel posts a ‘My Little Pony’ video then it will result in that original demographic stop watching and new demographic coming into the channel – this is confusing for YouTube to reconcile.
Which demographic should the channel be promoted to? By creating content which appeals to varied audiences, YouTub e is not going to prioritize content from that channel.
YouTube is selling ads – they want to keep people on the site longer.
As a content creator, you want to tell them, by being as specific as possible with your content, who likes your channel. Once again – the best way to accomplish this is through the ‘hub’ style, episodic content.
THE VIEWER
Why does the hero, hub, help content strategy work from the viewer standpoint?
The answer is simple – there’s so much content you need to be clear what your channel stands for. There’s 500 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. And YouTube is just one site – you’re actually competing for competition against the entire internet – an infinite sea of content.
You’ve gotta be memorable to stand out, and the best way to accomplish that is to be simple and clear.
Ask yourself – What does my channel stand for? Am I uploading at the same days and times of week? Will a viewer know what my entire channel stands for if they watch one video?
If you can remove as many variables as possible, you’re going to make it much easier for people to keep coming back. Think about it this way – what if they don’t the see the subscribe notifications? If you are every single Wednesday at 2:00, they’re more likely remember that than if sometimes you upload Wednesday and other times you upload Saturdays or if you skip a week.
Like the saying goes K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple Stupid.
THE CREATOR
So why does the hero, hub, help model work so well for content creators?
Perhaps the biggest reason is that by apply hero, hub, help, where ‘hub’ is the majority of your content – you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Coming up with ideas is fucking hard. On top of that, coming up with new sets, new talents, new production crew, base on the creative, all these things, it over-complicates the process.
You really want to stick to a format that you can realistically do day in day out, whatever your schedule is.
The other reason hero, hub, help works so well for content creators is that YouTube tells you what works. By going into the creator dashboard you can see audience retention on individual videos and you can see for yourself exactly where people watch and lose interests – peaks align with people watching more of a video and troughs align with where they drop off.
As a result, you, the content creator can make incremental changes over time to improve your content.
I once saw a panel with Harley Morenstein of Epic Meal Time and he spoke to how he applied these learnings to his own channel. In his analytics he was seeing peaks every time they whipped out more bacon, so they just added more and more to the channel – now bacon is one of the things Epic Meal Time is best known for.
Oftentimes, brands and content creators want that ‘viral’ hit and the idea of making incremental changes seems unappealing. Although, it may not seem really sexy at first, over time it really adds up. The most powerful force is compound interest and that’s what these changes. Over the course of a year or two years, they make a big, big difference.
To recap why hero, hub, help works so well – you want to train YouTube and teach the platform who exactly likes your channel. The way to accomplish this is by creating ‘hub’/episodic content around a very specific topic in a consistent format. You want to make it easy for viewers to remember your channel by maintaining that consistency we discussed and posting on a set schedule. Lastly, you want to make these little changes over time and leverage the insights that YouTube provides and apply those insights to your hub series.
]]>As a brand why should we develop our own YouTube channel? What should we do to grow? Why aren’t we growing subscribers?
WHY YOUTUBE MATTERS
It’s the largest social network in US & has more millennials than any cable network.
WHY MOST BRANDS ARE STRUGGLING
YouTube is the ultimate litmus test for brands.
You can’t buy (perceived) success on YouTube in the same way you can on Facebook and Twitter. There are only six major brands/media entities in the top 100 most subscribed channels on YouTube vs 16 on Twitter and 41 on Facebook.
On YouTube you can buy views but not engagement or a community like you can on Facebook and Twitter (with promoted posts and accounts, etc). A lot of brands are approaching YouTube from a traditional advertising framework/process. Brands have their creative and media agencies, traditional production processes, and they see content through the lens of a campaign. On YouTube this doesn’t necessarily work. If your brand changes with each campaign how will anyone know what you are and what you stand for?
THE FOUR KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL BRAND CHANNEL
1) Best Practices
It’s important you optimize your channels (ie use the youtube brand playbook). Make sure you’re tagging and titling content appropriately as well as using end cards and welcome videos. No amount of optimization is going to make a bad channel great, but its going to be critical in converting viewers to subscribers and generating earned views, in fact:
-Metadata & thumbnails drive of organic growth
-50% of views comes through related videos
-10-20% CTR on end cards
2) Go With What People Know
Don’t overcomplicate the channel.
Lot’s of brands use channel gadgets (here’s an example of one). These gadgets are apps in an iframe on the Youtube channel. It interrupts the user experience and forces viewers to interact with the brand in a manner that they’re unfamiliar with. As a result there is a ton of dropoff (50% fewer viewers convert to subscribers, and there are 15% fewer shares than brand channels without gadgets).
Also, many brands are talking to themselves, using jargon, such as campaign hashtags that is meaningless to the average viewer or that no one is already searching. It’s important that if someone came across a video they’d be able to understand what it is in plain language. For example, I don’t know what ‘#TheTechYouWant Cyber Event Announcement with Trey Songz‘ means. It’s a terrible title and I would never click on it. Why not say ‘Trey Songz Announces Our Gadget Sale’?
3) Focus on a Human Connection
The most subscribed channels are overwhelmingly built around individuals (or a handful of individuals). The homegrown Youtube creators never had big budgets or resources when they started out, and ‘quality’ production isn’t as important as the ability to have people communicating with other people.
Successful brand channels such as Nintendo have started to do adapt to Youtube’s ‘hero, hub, help’ strategy – they’re creating shows like ‘nintendo minute.’ It’s a show, its consistent, its got the same hosts, and the format is more or less the same each time. It’s also doing very well (for a brand show). Engagement is exceptionally high (1.7k likes, 585 comments).
Now compare the Nintendo content with something like Toyota’s channel. Their second most viewed video has over 3mm views but far fewer comments and likes. Toyota clearly bought the views – but did it translate to anything meaningful? It certainly didn’t help grow their channel.
4) Iterate Like hell
The majority of all the successful channels post regularly, and are telling the same story over and over again. If you watch one episode of Epic Meal Time you’ve more or less seen them all. However, that doesn’t make each episode any less entertaining – it is still funny.
By replicating a specific format each time its clear to the viewer what you can expect from your channel. It also allows the brand to iterate on the concept and make it more and more engaging over time. The brand can apply YouTube insights and learnings to each episode (ie audience likes more bacon, let’s add more bacon and watch views and engagement go up). People go to a channel and subscribe to a channel because they know what to expect and they like what it stands for.
Building upon fewer ideas is incredibly important when you think about this in the context of what’s happening across the web at large – there are so many distractions. YouTube has over 100 hours of content uploaded each minute, and there are 500 million tweets each day, 4.75 billion items shared on Facebook. By repeating your message over and over you have a chance at being remembered. Many brands don’t do this and instead change the content with each campaign.
IN CONCLUSION
Ultimately the keys to success means connecting to people in a human way, that they’d understand, ie don’t ‘speak campaign’.
Emotions matter more than production – glossy TV style content doesn’t work on YouTube.
It’s also critical to maintain focus. Brands that do well build out a style of content and/or series of content that is very consistent. You’ll see channels like Red Bull have several ‘shows’, many of which are in their 4th or 5th season. They’re repeating the same format because they understand they’re viewers like this content, and in repeating it they can iterate and make it better and better each time.
A campaign driven approach means creating a whole new style of content and creating bursts of activity that give potential subscribers mixed messages. Even if they like the first campaign – they may not like the next. What incentive is there for me, as a viewer, to stick around if you show me something totally different than the content that brought me into the channel?
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