How to be a community Hub

Get to the hub of your brand

Whether your audience found you through your show-stopping Hero campaign or your informative Help content, you’ll need to stop them from moving on and forgetting you by turning that initial interest into a passion for your brand.

Hub content gives your audience a reason to visit your channel or website on a regular basis. Where Hero and Help are ‘pull’ content that draws people to your website or channel, Hub content cultivates an engaged community through scheduled ‘push’ content targeted to your prime audience.

Hub content can be anything that incentivises people to ‘subscribe, like and follow’, including blog articles, live streams, Q&A sessions, behind-the-scenes footage and pop-up events, centred on shared interests, new product launches and your Hero messages.

A great example of successful Hub video content (and a personal favourite) is Blendtec’s Will It Blend? Series. The small Utah-based manufacturer proved that you don’t need a huge budget to make an impact with Hub content. By blending items such as iPhones, marbles and golf balls, they raised their brand awareness and created a YouTube following. This resulted in real-life payoff, with increased sales to 500% in 2008 and up to 700% in 2009.

Other notable examples of Hub content include IMDb Live (IMDb’s live-streaming companion show to award shows such as the Oscars) and the hugely popular Etsy blog. Both appeal strongly to the brand’s core users, are relevant to their interests and create opportunities for engagement.

How to get started

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel and spend a lot to produce Hub content. Cost-effective distribution systems and affordable production technology mean that you can begin creating Hub content now. It just has to be regularly scheduled and relevant to your audience.

The YouTube Brand Playlist, which pioneered the Hero, Hub, Help strategy, also emphasises the importance of consistency for Hub content success:

• Create an editorial voice with a distinctive style.
• Consider casting a single identifiable personality to be the focal point across all your content (like Tom Dickson in Will It Blend?).
• Maintain a consistent visual language.
• Communicate a regular and clear release schedule in channel art, descriptions, calls to action in your videos and digital collateral.
• Develop an active promotion strategy that includes social media, cross-promotions and incentives for subscribers to share your videos.
• Consistency compels your audience to return again and again to what they like and is familiar with. Creating a structured format that will prevent you from having to reinvent every video.
• This makes planning for costs, means of production and creative resources much more straightforward.

We can help you produce the content that makes your brand the hub of your community. Get in touch to start the conversation.