Quality over Quantity: A Guide to Creating Impactful YouTube Content

Are you missing out on a valuable opportunity to reach your target audience?

When creating content for YouTube, targeting popular search terms and hoping to gain traction through SEO is no longer enough.In today’s competitive online space, viewers demand content that is not only informative, but also engaging and of the highest quality.

Rather than focusing on the quantity of content you produce, it’s important to shift your focus to the quality of the content you create. You don’t need to create many videos to succeed on YouTube, but the ones you create must be exceptionally good.

While production value can be helpful, having a high-quality camera or equipment is unnecessary to produce great content. Most popular videos on YouTube have relatively low production value, yet they resonate with their audience and provide valuable information.

Before creating content specifically for the YouTube platform, take a step back and consider your brand and the topics you’re passionate about. Creating content that inspires you makes you more likely to create impactful content that resonates with your target audience.

YouTube rewards high-quality content that keeps viewers engaged and inspires interaction. By focusing on creating content that resonates with your audience, you’ll be more likely to receive high retention rates, likes, comments, and subscribers.

 

 

Watch the whole interview on YouTube where Tom shares his ADUCATE framework for creating high-converting videos that inform and sell simultaneously. Through this framework, Tom emphasises the importance of aiming, showcasing difficulty, enhancing understanding, building credibility, creating an action plan, earning trust, and implementing a smooth exit strategy.

Tips to keep your business moving

As we all enter new phases of restrictions, businesses have to reconsider their operations in light of new needs. This new standard will look different for everyone, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to returning to business. But whether you’re a small business right up to a global corporation, video is a vital part of staying operational right now. 

Here are five tips on how to keep your business going right now.

1. Be willing to pivot

It’s always important as a business to be adaptive in uncertain times, and in these times, it’s more crucial than ever to think acutely about your audience and customer needs. Make sure you’re offering services and products that are most useful to them — even if you are running a limited operation at the moment.

If you are planning a few more months of staying remote, use video to announce your latest venture, thought leadership insights, or communicate your new policies for safe transactions. Let your audience know how you are adapting to the ‘new normal’. 

2. Engage with your audience

This is a perfect time to let your audience lead and let your business tactics follow. Use this opportunity to poll your customers and find out what questions you might be able to answer right now. Or even create and send them a personal video message.

3. Give status updates

Whether you’re preparing to reopen or still building out your virtual presence, it’s crucial to let your audience know where you stand. If you’re gearing up for a brick and mortar reopening, consider making a video made for sharing what steps you’re taking to keep your customers safe, and let them know what to expect when they return. 

4. Learn video marketing basics 

When it comes to video marketing, even the smallest strategic steps can make a difference. Know your peak posting times — Thursday and Friday afternoons are best for Facebook sharing while hitting Twitter on Monday mornings should give your content the best chance at grabbing maximum eyeballs. 

5. Just get started

I get it — starting a new venture or changing up your practices during this time is daunting. “A lot of people are going to suffer from paralysis analysis — they’re going to overthink it,” says Clayshare co-founder Kevin Phillips. “Don’t worry about trying to make it perfect. Just get on there and do something to provide benefit to your audience. They’re going to appreciate the fact that you did this for them to help them through this situation.”

Share your knowledge with your customer base and provide them with videos to help make them succeed right now, whether that’s sharing tips on how to reopen or helping your people to stay sane and healthy. It doesn’t matter if you’re thinking about holding a virtual event or just want to share a quick social media post, video can help you keep things in motion while you figure out the rest. 

Thank you Aubrey Page from Vimeo for the inspiration of this blog post. 

The Power of Now

The Power of Now

Each Sunday for my video challenge, I am doing a book review, focusing on a book which has made an impact on my life and business. Today’s is not an exception – The Power of Now.

This book as sold millions and I have read it at least three times. This short review will not do the book justice as there is so much it in.

There are so many points in this book. If you read it, you’ll find that some resonate more with you than maybe me but let’s hear three things that I’ve taken away from it.

1. There is no such thing as time. It’s all made up.
2. The past and the future don’t happen. The past is gone; there’s nothing we can do about it. The future is something that we often create in our head.
3. The ego makes us overthink things. If we could stop thinking, I think we’d probably all feel a lot better for it.

The book is about The Now. The only thing we have is the present. I think if we realise that the mind is a superb instrument, it is very powerful but also it can very destructive in the way that we tend to overthink things.

Reading this book has opened my mind onto how I think and how the ego can control the way you do things and how the only thing you can do is be in the present. So I’d like to end on this quote, “Realise deeply that the present moment “is all you ever have. “Make now the primary focus on your life.” I highly recommend this book.

“Realise deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the now the primary focus of your life” – Eckhart Tolle.

Has video become a tick box exercise

Has video become a tick box exercise

I’m just wondering if video has become a tick box exercise? I understand as busy business people, video is just one of many things to be done if you are launching a new website or champaign. So when it comes to video, there is more to just finding a video production company and tick it’s all done. Follow me today as I travel into London as I visit a digital agency to see if this is true. Day 21 of my video challenge.

Rather than looking at video from a strategic point of view, it needs to be seen in how it integrates into the whole marketing and business plan.
Put some thought into how you are going to distribute and market the video to make sure that you get a return of investment. There seems to be a missing link here between the, what I call the pre-pre-production, the strategy part, and the promotion and distribution of the content. Then there is no following up and checking on the metrics and measuring it to make sure it worked. Video is so much more than another item on a list to be ticked off.

I Blame Kevin Costner

I blame Kevin Costner! Do you remember the film ‘Field of Dreams’ starring Kevin Costner where he hears a voice when walking through his cornfield which says “If you build it, he will come”.

I often think of this analogy when clients make ‘build’ a video, upload it to the website or plonk it on YouTube and expect people ‘he’ to come and watch it. This might have worked in the past, but not anymore.

If you think about it, we live in a noisy content world. Look at the facts, over 300 hours per minute of video content is uploaded to YouTube. Five hundred million Instagram stories are posted per day. It’s getting tough to get your content seen by your audience. And even if you have a warm audience, they’re very likely to miss what you’re trying to show them.

Social media channels make their money through advertising. You may of heard the phrase “Pay to Play” and, like it or not, this is the world that we live in as marketers, and we need to see this as an opportunity. See this age of video ads as a Goldmine Era. What I am referring to is that you can reach a wide audience and not pay a lot of money at the moment, but this won’t last forever. All the social media platforms are offering video ads, which can be very highly targeted. But before you rush out there, there are a few things to consider to make this campaign effective.

The first, have clear goals. Do you want this to be a brand awareness campaign? Or do you want people to consider one of your products? Or you want a conversion and sales? This will shape what your video content will be.

The second consideration is to have a budget in mind. Now, you can spend just a couple of dollars, obviously, right up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, it depends on the size of the target audience and also their geographic location. But if you’re niche and know exactly who and where your audience is, you can run a very effective campaign for not a lot of money.

The third, measuring the results, and having an online campaign like this, will give you great metrics. So you need to consider what goals you want:

  • Do you want just purely views?
  • Do you want to promote people sharing and engaging with your content?
  • Do you want people to click through to a landing page?
  • Do you want to go straight for conversions?

Now, each platform has a slightly different setup, depending on these goals that you want to achieve. We are nearly halfway through 2019. The digital landscape is changing all the time. I would recommend you at least test some paid promotion for your video content. It’ll give you an unfair advantage over your competition. And believe you me, a lot of businesses are not doing this.