SBM 044 : Dominating YouTube and Staying Ahead of Competition with Freddy Lansky

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How to Dominate in YouTube

YouTube is arguably the most popular website and video sharing platform right now. As a social media site, it can also hold a candle with sites like Twitter and Facebook with its sizeable community and a robust set of features perfect for content creation and marketing.

But, of course, this begs the question: If this is one of the most popular online platforms, can you still make your own brand stand out in YouTube? The answer is yes. Remember that the biggest names there right now like Smosh and Pewdiepie started out with nothing and yet are raking in views by the billions in recent years.

As to how you can do that, just read on and find out.

What Kind of Content Should I Produce?

Since this is YouTube, it is kind of a no-brainer as to what kind of content you should produce there which are videos. The more pertinent question, however, is this:

“What kind of YouTube Videos should YOU Make?”

There is exactly no straightforward answer to this but the best kind of content found in YouTube, specifically those made with to push a brand in mind, hits a sweet spot between two different
factions: Your Brand and Your Audience.

• The Brand
  
  Ask yourself this, what makes your own brand potentially stand out from the rest of the market? What does it have that makes it competitive? What does it stand for?

  A quick look at your business’s vision as well as its model will give you a good idea as to what gives your brand its unique identity. The point here is to come up with a handful of qualities that can give your content marketing strategy a direction to follow.

  Aside from whatever inherent quality it has, you should also find out what makes your brand ownable to the audience. What makes it resonate with your target market the most? What do you think will make it appealing to your market?

• The Audience
  
  This is basically your target audience. It’s easy to identify who your target audience in YouTube is because, basically, they’re the same people that form your target market. If your brand, for example, targets teens and young adults in real life, then your YouTube audience should be filled with those same kind of people.

  Once you’ve found out who your audiences are, the next thing to discover is the reason why they would ever want to visit your YouTube Channel in the first place. This requires you to determine their intent.

  For example, if you own a travel agency, then it goes without saying that viewers of your video are watching it with the intent to learn something travel related. If you own a handyman business, then the general intent of viewers going to your channel is to learn a new skill or discover tips and tricks on how to perform certain DIY projects.

  Or perhaps your target audience are not looking for something tangible like products or skills but just want to feel good about themselves. Self-gratification and entertainment can also be a major reason why people head on to certain channels and are the main reasons why a lot of channels in YouTube like Pewdiepie and Markiplier are successful right now.

  If you can understand what makes your target audience tick, then you should have no problems determining what kind of content you should produce. From that point on, all you need to do is plan how you should go about producing your content.

How Do I Feed Demand There?

Here’s a little secret that you should really know about content marketing in YouTube: There is no way that you can actually satisfy the demand of your target market in one go. There is just no time to do it and you can certainly bet that you don’t have the resources to pull that off.

The trick here to gradually build engagement over your brand through a steadily growing library of content with varying themes, messages, and layouts. This can be a rather daunting task but only if you are using a traditional production scheme. To be really successful in YouTube will require you to redraw your production plan which, for the sake of this discussion, should cover three Cs.

• Create
  
  This is basically the content you make for your brand. It’s the type of content that is made by the brand, feels like the brand, and captures every inspiring quality of the brand. It can be entertaining, informative, inspiring, or emotionally evocative. Simply put, it’ the content made by you for your brand.

  The goal at this phase is to be as consistent as possible with whatever goals you have set in mind with your content marketing campaign. Big companies often do this with their marketing campaigns which can span multiple videos but share the same message. Even movie studios do this in the months prior to releasing a new film, constantly bombarding you with teasers, trailers, and short clips the closer the film is going to be released.

• Collaborate
  
  You should also understand that you are part of a community when it comes to YouTube. If you have the resources (and the connections) you can start doing collaborations with other content creators on the site and promote that content in tandem. The goal here is to extend the reach of your channel to broaden your brand’s relevance and tap into a new fanbase.

  YouTube creators often do this with Flula Borg showing up in shows like Conan, the Fine Brothers bringing up other celebrities to react to videos, and Channel Awesome with their various producer team-up videos. Of course, there are those big companies like Pepsi and Mountain Dew teaming p with smaller channels to create videos that are both for entertainment and marketing purposes.

• Curate
  
  Now that you have more than a handful of videos on your channel, what else are you going to do with it? In most cases, you would want to delete them after a few weeks but this is where audience participation might come into play.

  Say, for example, that you have a video that covers new developments in a certain story. You can provide a call-to-action in the middle of a video to direct your viewers to a previous video of yours that details a similar topic in more detail. This is what is called curating your content which is simply linking all of your published videos to funnel considerable traffic in all of them.

  You can even flip this scheme over its head and give your viewers the chance to dictate the next part of the story according to how they will react to your content. For example, if this video gets this amount of shares you would release ending 1 but if this video gets this amount of likes, then ending 2 is going to be released.

  Curating content is a good way of keeping your audiences engaged, especially if you give them a say as to how the story should go. It’s also an economic move on your end, optimizing the flow of traffic through each of your video, keeping them relevant, while producing new ones regularly.

Clickbait: How Do I Avoid It?

You might have come across a video whose title is so obnoxious like “OMG! You Won’t Believe What Happens Next…..” or “Top 10 Anime Betrayals! Number 7 will Surprise You”. This is what is called clickbait and, as far as YouTube is concerned, is an egregious way of funneling views to your channels. In short, YouTube right now hates it if you do that and will penalize you for it.

As for why YouTube hates it, the reason is simple. There has been a strong push to regulate revenue in the site right now which means that YouTube is encouraging content creators to increase the viewership of their videos in the most natural way possible.

Every click on that link is revenue which is why a lot of content creators used to title their videos in a way that creates unwarranted interest. The more clicks and comments they get, the more relevant the video will be. It’s the online equivalent of casting the flashiest lure in your fishing kit to attract the most fish.

If YouTube is now pushing for more authentic click-through rates, it goes without saying that you should follow their policies when it comes to clickbait i.e. you should avoid doing it. Here’s how.

1. 1. Be Honest
   
   The worst kind of clickbait out there are those titles that promise one thing and offer another. This is a bait and switch technique that is so misleading that this is one of the major reasons why YouTube started a crackdown on Clickbait in the mid-2010s.

   Take the age-old tip in journalism and always create a headline that is factual, neutral, and informative. If the video is about the Top 10 Countertop Materials under $100, then the title should say the same. If the video is about the history of the anime, then it should be reflected on the title. Nothing more, nothing less.

2. 2. Mind the Hyperbole
   
   Advertisers like hyperbole because it gives signals to the brain to do. accept the offer of the titles but it can also be harmful to your brand. Words like “best”, “top”, and ‘greatest” are okay as they are purely subjective, On the other hand, phrases like “OMG! My Jaw Just Dropped!”, “Faith in Humanity Restored!” or “The Best (Insert Topic Here) Ever!” just scream of desperation. It is like that you don’t have enough faith that your content is going to reel in viewers for you that you have to go for grossly overblown titles.

   The lesson here is this: let your video do the talking. The title is just there to give your viewers a point of reference as to what the video is going to talk about.

3. 3. Avoid Bangorreah
   
   By definition, Bangorreah is the overuse of exclamation points and other punctuations to make the subject even more dramatic than it should be. Titles like “Don’t Do This!!!!!!!!” or “Is This Guy Serious? Lolololololol!!!!!!!!!” just scream of amateur writing and a clear lack of faith over your content.

   If possible, avoid every other punctuation out there from commas to semicolons to periods. As for the question mark, you can use this for your headline if only for the fact that Google loves question-type search queries right now. As for the rest, stay away.

   Clickbait used to be effective during the mid-2010s but they all fell out of favor once many viewers started complaining that they were duped into clicking through videos that did not deliver on what the title promised.

   It then all boils down to this: have your videos titled to encourage people to click through but never, in any case, be deceitful about it.

Surviving YouTube

In a platform that is as ever-changing (and fickle) as YouTube, you might find your brand struggling to even become relevant. Simply put, there are just too many content creators on the platform right now (which is not exactly a bad thing) and this can seriously affect the exposure you are going to get.

There are even cases when YouTube will turn the tables in your favor. A recent algorithm change caused many videos to become demonetized, triggering an event known famously as the “YouTube Adpocalypse”. Seemingly, major companies pulled their ads from the site after being paired with seemingly violent and offensive content, causing YouTube to mass-demonetize channels and creators.

This was not the first major shakeup in YouTube nor will it be the last. However, there is always a key to surviving in this platform: always play by the rules.

Make it a point to keep yourself updated with whatever the higher-ups of the platform are going to implement and how this is going to affect your channel. If you can quickly adjust to these changes, your brand will not suffer the worst effects of any change in the platform even if they can be quite severe to others.

Of course, with your channel’s survival comes the enjoyment of keeping the platform a viable channel for your marketing campaigns, The longer you play by YouTube’s rules, the longer your stay will be comfortable (and profitable) there will be.

Have you encountered other problems in YouTube not covered in this article? What other strategies have you used to maintain a competitive presence there? The comments section below is open for discussions.

References:

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