9 YouTube Video Ideas to Inspire Your Brand’s YouTube Channel [+ Examples]

Nowadays, almost every brand has a YouTube channel. However, almost no brand can boast a flourishing one.

Building a thriving YouTube channel is one of the most ambitious achievements a marketer can pursue. Not only do you have to spend time scripting, producing, and editing videos, but you also have to make sure your content actually resonates with your target audience.

To help inspire you, we’ve put together a list of video ideas that HubSpot has experienced success with on our own YouTube channel. Read on to get the creative juices flowing.

1. About Us

Your “About Us” video’s main job is to introduce your brand to future customers and make a good first impression with them. Before you put pen to paper, though, you must remember that people don’t just want to know what your company does and how you do it. They also want to know why you do it. Put simply, your brand’s purpose is what actually resonates with your audience and inspires them to follow you.

So when you’re scripting your video, make sure you spotlight why your organization exists, the values you truly believe in, and, ultimately, the reason people should care about your brand. Only then should you cover what your product or service is and how you build or develop it.

2. Culture

As I approach my one-year anniversary as a college graduate, reality has officially sunk into my bones. As adults, we spend the majority of our lives working -- and not hanging out with our friends like we did during the glory days.

However, I’ve also realized that if you love your job and company, work isn’t some dreadful chore that you check off your to-do list everyday. It’s actually a blessing and something you can’t imagine living your life without.

In order to build a company that your employees love working for, cultivating an authentic, people-first culture is a crucial first step. Once you do this, consider creating a video that highlights your culture and your employees’ genuine praises about your company. Not only will it persuade elite talent to apply to your open roles, but it’ll make potential customers think more highly of your brand.

3. Ask Me Anything

Since your executives’ public perception directly impacts people’s sentiment toward your brand, like Elon Musk and Tesla, they’re essentially the face of your company. And with all the status, attention, and aura surrounding them, your knee-jerk reaction might be to polish their interactions with the public as much as possible.

However, most people can spot a walking press releases faster than they can exit out of pop-up ad. So it’s actually better to set your executives free and allow them to genuinely interact with the public.

Breaking down the barriers between your executives and audience also makes your fans feel like they actually know your leaders on a personal level -- and this’ll develop a more intimate and loyal relationship between your company and your potential customers.

One of the best ways to connect your executives with your audience is by setting up Ask Me Anything or Q&A sessions, where people can ask your executives any question they want and your executives agree to honestly answer as many of their questions as they can.

4. Comedy

Even in 2019, most companies still stuff their YouTube channels with formulaic corporate videos that are scripted in jargonese. Trying to capture people’s attention with these boilerplate videos is nearly impossible. That said, what’s the best strategy for standing out from the crowd?

Well, according to Psychology Today, humans associate the same personality traits to brands as they do with people, so, just like how we choose the people we spend our lives with, we engage with the brands that can evoke warm feelings in us, especially feelings of humor.

So before you green-light another talking head video, think about spicing it up and adding some humor. You’ll inject more color and personality into your brand, which consumers desperately crave when they interact with businesses.

5. Shows

In the neuroscience field, researchers have proven that storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention, bake information into their memories, and resonate emotionally with them. The human brain is programmed to crave, seek out, and respond to well-crafted narrative -- that’ll never change.

So just like your favorite Netflix show, creating shows can entire your viewers to watch entire seasons of your series, subscribe to your channel, and get more excited for your show’s newest season than they currently are for the final season of Game of Thrones.

Most brands also produce their content disparately, severing them from any thematic anchor, so tying your stories to a unique angle and telling them in an episodic fashion can help separate your videos from the rest of the pack.

6. Explainers

Whether it’s an exciting new trend or difficult-to-grasp technology, your audience wants to learn about your industry’s innovations to stay ahead of the curve. In order to fill their curiosity gaps, consider creating explainer videos about your industry’s latest trends and technology.

However, don’t just make a talking head video of someone droning on about the topic of discussion. People crave a variety of stimulus when they consume content, so get creative and complement your video’s narration and text with a diverse mix of dynamic graphics, popular movie scenes, and footage of real people.

Visual storytelling also helps people grasp concepts and data easily, so each time your narrator expands on a concept or some data, your viewers can listen to the information and watch a visual representation of it, helping them form a concrete understanding of your video’s central idea.

7. Tutorials

It doesn’t matter if they’re guitar lessons, beauty lessons, or how-to videos about making a fire with a lemon, people love learning how to improve their lives. So if you can cover topics that people are passionate about and teach them how to get better at them, they’ll be able to live better lives, which will help grow your channel’s brand loyalty and sentiment, retain your viewers’ attention, and attract their friends’ attention by way of word-of-mouth marketing.

Just like your explainers, make sure you diversify your tutorials’ visual stimuli. Because, contrary to the rest of the types of videos on this list, the best tutorials are actually talking head videos, but they also have engaging visuals that make them more distinct and gripping.

8. Customer Case Studies

Social proof and word-of-mouth are some of the most potent tactics at your disposal. Humans evolved to follow the crowd and assume the majority is always right, so the more testimonials you have, the more credible and trustworthy your brand will seem.

Your case studies are also some of the most persuasive types of sales enablement content, so make sure your sales reps and potential customers can easily find them on your YouTube channel.

When scripting your case studies, you want to place your potential customers’ in your current customers’ shoes, so focus on how your customer faced a specific problem, what they initially did to try and solve it, how they discovered your solution, the experience of using your solution to solve their problem, and the results they produced with your solution.

9. Product Promos

Tailored for potential customers who are further along the buyer’s journey, product promos are videos that spotlight your product’s top features and tangible benefits. This type of video is powerful because it can convince potential customers to move on to the final stage of the buyer’s journey and seriously consider purchasing your product or service.

If you want to learn how to create compelling product videos, check out one of Meghan Keaney Anderson ’s blog posts about 7 of the Best Promotional Product Videos Ever Made.

In her post, the VP of Marketing at HubSpot says remarkable product videos all share four elements: engaging dialogue and narration, a comprehensive yet concise explanation of the product and its benefits, professionalism, and empathy and relatability. To see one of these videos in action, check out this product promo about HubSpot’s Growth Stack.