Do you know what’s the second most popular search engine after Google?
If you answered YouTube, you’re wrong. 🙂
It’s actually Google Images, by a large difference.
However, I still decided to choose YouTube as the marketing channel for our business.
I’m delivering a presentation about this to the company tomorrow, as I mentioned yesterday. Here’s the exploration of the same presentation.
There’s a more general question that I wish to answer here. That question is how do you recognize an opportunity for growth, and take advantage of that opportunity in the best possible way. (You can grab an opportunity and still f%$^ it up).
Content marketing tries to get organic traffic through content efforts. This traffic should at one point or another translate into users, and eventually revenue.
If you look at the overall activity of the content department, you see a wide range of content types that are produced.
So, why not just stick to Google search and blog traffic?
The answer touches upon the first challenge we’ll talk about: ranking is hard!
Our blog was launched last August, and is already producing traffic and users, starting to get those high search engine rankings.
However, ranking on Google, especially for high competition keywords, is very hard.
Let’s take a relevant search term: “how to write a blog post”.
If you search Google, you will find top brands appearing in the SERPs. Among them are HubSpot, Wordstream, Smartblogger and Masterclass. These are brands with thousands of blog post, which took years in the making. They also have a very strong brand. Competing over their ranking, even with high quality content, is indeed a challenge.
A second challenge is the challenge of Gen Z. This generation, currently aged 18-24, is our products biggest age group.
It so happens that YouTube is their preferred way of learning, much more than for millennials.
Moreover, you can also see this preference in a 2022 UK report by BrandVue. YouTube is the second most loved brand for Gen Z.
Now that we understand the challenges, let’s move on the opportunity.
Opportunity
There are several reasons that make YouTube a great opportunity for us.
First of all, YouTube has approximately 122 million daily active users, based all over the world. We already stated that Gen Z prefer YouTube, so that’s another plus.
Besides the traffic you can get from YouTube, having YouTube videos also gives you the chance to rank your pages for Google Search snippets. For those snippets, 4.6% are videos.
We can also use this content for repurposing on social media
Having a successful YouTube channel is a huge step towards building a loved brand, and a community. You publish, get comments, and can better communicate with users.
Morover, we can embed these videos in the site, raising average duration time and boosting SEO
There are many examples of brands like Ahrefs and HubSpot who managed to grow a large following on YouTube.
For Youtube, as opposed to written blog content, success depends on execution. You need to get everything right, and truly differentiate your videos from what’s out there.
For us, this includes three main differentiators:
- Point of view
- Look and feel
- Content
Point of view
- YouTube allows us to spread a wide net. Targeting both students and young professionals, with topics that relate to both.
- While everyone needs to write, no one has the time to learn.
- People wanting to improve reading and writing skills are looking for ways for their learning to coincide with work, they can’t sit and read an English book. Their not going to learn grammar rules or manuals.
Look and feel
I can’t share this quite yet, but we wanted our videos to give the professional, yet personal look. We took care of the composition and colorful language. We managed to showcase the brand in a noticeable but refined way, so the content can stay in focus. We’re making sure everything fits together into one graphic packaging.
Content
We wanted to make it applicable to both school and work situations. To make it applicable and actionable, any tips we share take into account how likely is the audience to use the tips.
We wanted to show, not just tell. This second goal is done by giving real examples.
So, for example, our first video is about “top writing exercises”.
To implement the first guideline, we chose exercises that didn’t involve taking time off from work or school assignments and doing an exercise, but exercises that helped with assignments. For example, making a topic tree is an exercise that actually helps you brainstorm a writing assignment.
To show, and not just tell, Nili presents her own writing assignment, and implements each exercise on that assignment.
We want to be opinionated and with a point of view. To be opinionated, we gave a final verdict on each exercise.
