You’ve got a YouTube channel. Great start… Now it’s time to start making content! But… pump the breaks – strategy comes first.
Bringing “outside-in” to your YouTube experience
Always keeping an outside-in perspective on how we serve our customers/prospects, one key consideration should always be identifying the types of consumers of video watchers, and how your content can create the most value possible. In addition to this, we also need to make sure we’re creating the right content that will help us rank and that will add context and value to our other channels, too – social media and our blogs.
Keeping this in mind we want to make sure that our YouTube channels are filled with plenty of long form videos, and even more short form video content. And your playlists are a perfect place to keep all of your short form video stored in an organized, easy-to-access repository, categorized for easy browsing. In addition, short-form playlist content derived from your long form videos gives you an opportunity to quickly create a more robust, searchable YouTube channel.
Let’s start from the top: Long form video.
The Switchr model for scaling content always begins in the studio – we suggest a marketing team’s first priority when planning content starts by recording valuable long form video content most of the time as a first course of action. This includes:
- Thought leadership interviews
- Full-length product demos
- Presentations
Going straight to the source of truth, Google defines long form video as anything over 10 minutes in length. Long form video really gives a brand an opportunity to deliver content that’s truly rich in value. The hidden benefit, and the greatest opportunity that long-form video gives us is the ability to extract a lot of shorter-form content that draws in our audience with more specific nuggets of consumable information. Short form video also has other benefits, like improving certain metrics that help your channel to rank higher, and also for diversifying your channel with more to look at. So let’s dive into the value of short-form playlist content!
1. Short form video is the easiest content to create.
There are two ways to create short form video content, and both are an incredibly easy way to hit those video production goals that we should all have for our channel.
The first and easiest way to quickly add a whole library of short form video content is to start with the long-form video you’ve already created! If you’re doing it right, you’ve planned your long-form video so that you have a handful of key takeaways. Your interviews should follow even a general story arch that touches on specific highlights or learning points throughout your conversations or presentations. It’s important to identify them within your longform video, identify the starting and ending points for each, from a quick 30-second power statement, to a 4-6 minute segment.
Simply clip those sections out in post production, add a special playlist intro/outro, lower thirds graphics and up to three other overlays, and in a matter of post-minutes you can pull a valuable short form video. As a rule, each 45 minute interview should give you at least 5 strong short-form video segments.
Doing the math, if you have 10 long form videos on your YouTube channel today, there’s no reason you can’t scale it out to upwards of 50 total videos after pulling your short form clips.
The second way to get more short form video is to simply plan them out. Maybe you have a thought or a perspective that you’d like to share on any given topic that’s relevant to your industry. Get into your studio, turn on the mics, camera, and lights and record your thoughts. Don’t overthink it. Just make sure you have out-side in value in mind. In a recent blog post, I challenged myself (and you) to try to record one short video every morning. I completed this challenge myself, and it was incredibly easy.
If you own a business or are in charge of digital marketing for your organization, there’s no excuse for having a dry YouTube channel!
2. Short form playlist content gives your audience a burst of short, consumable value
Anyone who follows The Joe Rogan Experience podcast might have discovered that watching Joe’s interviews are just as entertaining as listening to the podcast, and in my opinion, I enjoy watching them even more. But when his interviews last for 3-4 hours at times, sometimes I just want to get straight to the good stuff before I have the opportunity to give the full episode my attention. Joe’s team always picks out the best 5-10 moments from each episode, cuts out a 2-4 minute clip, gives it a clever or entertaining title, and loads them into his YouTube Channel. My only criticism is that more playlists would help me to find the kind of content I’m looking for, faster (i.e. “comedians”; “athletes”; “health experts”; “conspiracy theorists”, etc.).
3. Playlists help your viewers to find exactly what they’re looking for, easier.
But Joe’s not a professional marketer, and he’s not working for a B2B business. This is where we as marketing content creators need to take things to the next level.
Remember, our obligation as marketers is to create content from an outside-in perspective, both in the content we deliver and the experience we bring. Too many marketing teams are posting their content to YouTube without thinking about the viewer’s experience. It’s important to always ask ourselves these questions every time we publish anything to our channel:
- Is this content valuable to our audience? If we don’t know the answer, we need to put in the work to learn more about them.
- Can google index this content? Are you thinking about naming conventions and descriptions?
- Do you have a place for this video? Have you established a categorized playlist for it? If so, put it there.
- If this is long-form video, have you either broken it up into chapters and/or have you cut out smaller 2-6 minute short videos for your other playlists?
If we can follow these simple rules, you’ll please your audience by helping them to get the specific value they’re looking for, faster. This means they’ll stick around longer, watch more videos, help your channel to rank higher and ultimately become closer to your brand.
BONUS: Playlists allow you to break down the primary values that your brand delivers.
As marketers, we’re always challenged to simplify our value proposition to our prospects and customers. Keeping it simple is challenging, when we know that or brand/products deliver so much value in so many different ways.
Building a diverse set of YouTube playlists are one way to really offer a glimpse into your full set of value. As a starting point, every brand should have playlists for every type of videos you build: webinars, demos, announcements, whiteboard sessions, etc…
Even better, think about categorizing your videos as well. Take some time to identify your products’ top 10 customer benefits. Create a playlist for each. This presents your viewers with a dashboard that showcases everything you offer and gives them the ability to quickly find content that resonates with their biggest pain points and interests. Further, having these playlists in place keeps your teams motivated and focused on creating more content that inspires prospects.
Hopefully this post has inspired you as well – to get out there and start focusing on organizing your video content properly to give your audience the same great experience that they’ll get as paying customers!
Switchr helps businesses to rethink their video strategies. We’re always happy to have a conversation with anyone about how they can improve their content efficiency. Fill out our contact form, and we’ll schedule a call.