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As the second-most visited website in the world, YouTube presents an open sea of opportunities and potential prospects for business owners.
No matter which industry you’re in, the fact is that your audience is spending time on YouTube and they’re not just watching funny cat videos.
In fact, 90% of people state that they find new businesses on YouTube, while 68% of users watch videos to help them make a purchase decision.
Marketers know this and it’s why 55% of them use YouTube as one of their primary marketing weapons.
However, with great opportunity comes great competition, and it doesn’t get much more competitive than YouTube.
With so much content currently on the platform (and more being uploaded each second), finding a way to break through the noise seems overwhelming.
That’s why you’ll need awesome YouTube video ideas.
To help you get inspiration for your next YouTube video, we talked to 40+ marketers and asked them to share the strategies/ ideation processes they rely on to come up with great YouTube video ideas.
Our respondents are: B2C Services or Products 46.34%, Agency / Consultant: Marketing, Digital or Media 34.15%, B2B Services or Products 19.51% – and all of them have YouTube channels.
Let’s dive in.
Before we get started with the YouTube video ideas, let’s take a quick detour and check out what running a business YouTube channel for marketing purposes actually looks like.
Even though YouTube started out as an entertainment platform, businesses have been harnessing its marketing powers for quite some time now, and most of our respondents have been using YouTube as a marketing channel for up to 3 years.
But, who’s in charge of the ideating, producing, and advertising YouTube content for most brands?
According to our survey, companies manage their YouTube content mostly by themselves – from ideas to production and advertising.
Only a small percentage of the brands surveyed hire individual agencies for video marketing or outsource elsewhere.
When asked about consistency, most of our respondents stated that they post new videos to their business YouTube channels on a weekly basis.
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, since consistency and punctuality with YouTube posting time can directly improve YouTube CTR.
In terms of views, for most of our respondents, videos have up to 5,000 views.
Even though this isn’t a crazy high number of views, SMB businesses don’t have to prioritize the number of views. Instead, they should focus on the quality of those views.
Meaning that a video with 5,000 views that generates 100 conversions is more valuable than a video with 50,000 views and 50 conversions.
Of course, the bigger audience the better, but building a loyal audience that’s interested in your products and services is much more important.
Lastly, if you were having any second thoughts about whether dipping your toes in the YouTube pool is worth it, you should know that most companies we surveyed think YouTube is extremely important as a channel.
And this isn’t just our research talking – with 2.1 billion users a month, the marketing potential is enormous.
To find out what types of video content perform best with your audience, you may track video engagement metrics such as watch time, number of views, likes and dislikes of each video individually using a variety of tools, including YouTube itself.
Now you can quickly monitor your video content performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our video marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for measuring your YouTube channel performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your YouTube account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Even though there are hundreds of different types of YouTube videos, finding the right ones to focus on that will resonate well with your audience can be very stressful.
That’s why we asked 40+ marketers to share their ideation processes and explain how these ideas helped them in their marketing endeavors.
Creating a video that revolves around a member of your staff is a great way to introduce the audience to your company’s talent pool.
This type of video is much narrower than the standard “meet the team” type, and it allows the viewers to both learn something new and develop a feeling of trust in your brand.
Jordan Figueredo of Online Optimism is one of the marketers that utilize this format.
Figueredo says that their “YouTube videos that perform the best are educational videos that highlight the expertise of our staff. The popular videos are “how good design can benefit your business” and short clips from our podcast, Online Offscript. The podcast shortcuts surpass 1,000 views, are significant in our channel’s overall impressions, and increase traffic to the full-length video and podcast channel.
Your main focus should be to showcase your employee’s skills and share something of value with the audience, just like Online Optimism’s Design Director (Juan Pablo Madrid) does in their most popular video.
Want to know what your audience is interested in watching? Listen to the questions they’re asking!
No matter if it’s over the phone, in person, by email, in the comments, or through your website – keep track of the questions your customers are asking and use them to fill up the video idea reservoir.
Madison Tong of Capitol Nutrition uses this strategy and recommends “really listening to your customers and seeing what questions they are asking about your company or the products you sell. We get a lot of our content ideas from our customers or what types of products are trending on Google. We collect and gather data from various sources to come up with content ideas.”
To find out what customers are asking related to your business, you can also utilize your Google Search Console to find out the most frequent search queries visitors are typing in to find your site.
Another good idea is to check out the most frequent questions in general that are related to your industry and then create YouTube videos with detailed answers.
Madison does this with products: “We also will do videos about new products that we know will be popular and help our site/YouTube channel to rank higher when someone searches for the product. A lot of our videos that are based on our customer’s questions do the best for our channel because that is what they are looking for. They are looking for answers and if we can give it to them, then our video will be a success!”
Product videos are a great way for businesses to introduce their products, promote a new feature, and display which benefits the product brings.
By creating an informative product video, your audience will have a clear idea of how the product can help them and they’ll have an easier time deciding whether they should purchase it.
It can be the little push potential prospects need to convert.
One more great thing about this idea is that product videos are generally simple to make – you just need your own product and someone explaining how it works.
Chelsea Cohen of SoStocked says that informative product videos have been one of their most effective approaches to YouTube strategies.
“As a SaaS company, we can’t really create generic content and expect our audience to like it. Instead, we pivoted to (mostly) creating informative, guide videos about our products, and our audience loves those. If there’s anything you need to know about our product, you can always just type it in on YouTube and see a guide about it, and that’s what makes it so great.”
Below, you can see an example of a webinar Cohen did for SoStocked’s YouTube channel. Cohen adds, “Sure, it does not have a lot of views, but 2000 views are more than enough for our business, and it’s one of our best performing videos.”
This last part correlates with what we mentioned earlier about the views – sometimes, 2,000 views can bring much more value than 20,000. The point is to make sure you’re attracting the right crowd and building a loyal following.
Launched in 2021 as a counterpunch to TikTok and Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts are bite-sized, short-form videos capped at 60 seconds max.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen that videos don’t necessarily have to be lengthy in order to drive conversions. In fact, short-form videos have the highest ROI of any social marketing channel.
Even though YouTube shorts are still relatively new, they can play a crucial part in your YouTube video strategy.
They still have less competition than lengthy YouTube videos, which means you have a better chance of getting noticed by your audience.
What’s more, all types of companies can leverage YouTube shorts, regardless of their industry.
Because TikTok is mostly filled with younger audiences and Gen Z, B2B companies (for example) can have much more success with YT Shorts in terms of driving awareness and traffic due to the already-massive user base.
Cooking channels are also ones that are taking advantage of YouTube shorts since they can quickly showcase delicious meals and drive more traffic to their original content.
Corrie Duffy of Corrie Cooks does just that: “We take the original video that we want to drive traffic to, edit it a bit and create the same video as a short. That way, we get traction from users who are interested in the subject, which leads to views and comments in the original long video as well. YouTube gives shorts much more exposure these days, so creating a short video for your regular content is a great way to increase traffic to your channel.”
Surprise and delight YouTube videos can be extremely powerful in attracting more customers, building loyalty, and increasing overall customer engagement.
This marketing campaign refers to surprising someone by offering them unexpected rewards.
By capturing their delight, you get high-quality video content that appeals to potential prospects and raises brand awareness.
Jas Banwait Gill of SwagMagic agrees with this and says, “Surprises make people feel special. And surprise & delight videos keep people watching longer—sometimes, repeatedly. Capturing a real-life moment is an excellent way to connect with audiences on a personal level and generate excitement about your brand.”
The surprise can be anything from a bottle of water to a piece of technology (e.g. headphones) – anything that makes people feel special.
Jas explains how they create these videos: “So, as everybody loves these feel-good stories—and a free treat, we hit the streets in New York City in our YouTube series “Gifting the World,” where we share the love of gifting snacks and swag with random strangers. This series effectively demonstrates the pure joy people experience when receiving and unboxing one of our unique and customizable gift boxes. Sharing customers’ delight is a powerful tool for attracting customers, promoting loyalty, and increasing customer engagement. People love watching other people experience happiness. After all, it’s what makes so many videos go viral on social media. “
Teaching your potential customer something and providing value is a time-proof strategy for growing your YouTube business presence.
If you’re an SMB business, you can leverage educational videos to position yourself as a helpful resource to potential prospects.
These videos can be anything from choosing the perfect clothing fit, how to replace a sink, or what mortgage rates are.
What’s more, educational videos are simple to make since you’ll be relying on your own expertise and knowledge in the field.
If you also have a blog or newsletter, you can use your existing content and repurpose it in the form of a YouTube video.
Jeff Moriarty of Moriraty’s Gem Art says that “educational videos have been the most important to our business. Customers have told us over and over again that these types of videos helped them to trust us more which in turn made it easier to purchase from us. For example, one educational video we did went viral, resulting in over 6,000,000 views. To this day, we continue to get sales from people watching it.
The video in question showcases the faceting process of a glowing gemstone called Hyalite Opal.
These videos can even help you position yourself as an industry expert if you have a very specific target audience.
Emily Faracca of Arbeit explains how this idea helped them grow their audience: “We serve an extremely niche industry and our audience can be hard to find. In 2017, we started a video series that mimics a college course – we called it Arbeit U – to answer some of the most commonly asked questions we hear from our clients. Although we work in our products when it makes sense to, we didn’t want this series to *only* talk about our products and brand. Instead, we wanted it to be a go-to resource for our industry when they searched for answers to their questions. In the 5 years since we started posting videos, we’ve grown to over 2k subscribers, averaging 1k views per month.”
But what else can you do aside from offering your expertise?
Emily shares the tactics they combined that turned out as a success: “The most successful video on our channel, which now sits at over 26k views, was achieved by:
This recommendation came from Tony Mastri of Park Place Technologies, who said that “creating YouTube videos that are SEO-influenced is an impactful marketing element for our business. Our ideation comes from customer FAQs that are subsequently researched and prioritized by the search volume.”
Just like with Google, SEO plays a huge role in YouTube marketing as well, which isn’t surprising considering that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
The main thing you should do when optimizing YouTube videos is to focus on the video’s metadata.
Metadata is everything that provides users with information about the video, including the title, description, category, tags, thumbnail, etc.
You need to make sure you’re adding the right information so YouTube can index the video properly and suggest it to viewers that might be interested in watching it.
If you’re not sure which topic to focus on, you can use keyword tools to check out customer FAQs and then optimize those videos for better reach.
Mastri offers more advice: “Once we create the video, we include the video script in the description (with a link to a page on our website that also embeds the video), closed captions, and up to 16 keywords in the “tags” section of the video editor. Using this strategy empowers our team to create videos that address common customer questions and can be shared via email and organic social for one-time use. The SEO component of our videos ensures that they are attracting inbound visitors for the long haul (via Google web search in the video carousel, Google video search, and YouTube search). It also helps the related web page on our website rank well, which can attract traffic in its own right. Only about 20% of viewers found this video via our direct email and social posting, while the remainder found it through YouTube search and related inbound channels.”
Having great YouTube video ideas is a must if you want to grow your channel and attract more customers to your brand.
But, you’ll need much more than that to make your channel a success and establish dominance on the platform.
Casually noticing that your YouTube videos are performing well and actually tracking their performance are two separate things.
To stay on top of your channel’s performance and grow it even further, you’ll have to monitor and analyze essential channel performance metrics like views, shares, CTR, average watch time, and more.
However, YouTube doesn’t really make this part easy on the marketers.
All of these metrics are scattered in different reports and YouTube Studio’s lack of extensiveness doesn’t help either.
Luckily, Databox offers the tools you need to simplify this process.
Once you connect your YouTube account, you just have to pick which metrics you want to include, drag and drop them into the dashboard, and then visualize them with one click.
That’s literally the entire process.
No matter where you are, you’ll be able to take a quick glance at how your videos are performing, monitor the crucial metrics, and measure productivity – all in one dashboard.
Aside from spending way less time on analysis, our dashboards help you quickly pinpoint problem areas that need improvement.
Want to spend more time transforming your ideas into engaging YouTube videos and less time on ‘boring’ analyses? Sign up for a free trial and experience the benefits first-hand.
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Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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