Imagine how much easier it is for your target market to trust that your product or service can solve their problems when they already trust your brand.
You can foster that kind of trust with an amazing video series.
Why?
Because you’re already offering them value.
How do you know what your target market will find valuable?
How do you meet their needs?
How do you get them to see your videos?
Those are all awesome questions.
I’m going to cover those and more in 5 simple steps.
Ready? Good. Let’s dive right in.
Step One –What the heck is your series about?
What kind of value are you going to offer in your video series?
Let’s say you are going to do five videos for your series.
It’s important that they tie together somehow with a common theme.
For instance, we did a series on 5 Video Hacks for a Knockout Marketing Campaign.
You need to find a theme that your audience is actually interested in, not something you just think they want to see.
You may already know some questions that your market has.
Even if you don’t, these methods will help you find a fantastic topic that is something your audience is actively looking to learn about
Option 1 – Buzz Sumo
Buzz Sumo lets you see the most popular content related to a keyword or from a specific site.
Once you’ve searched for a topic or site, it will list content that matches your parameters as well as how many social shares it has on individual social media sites and overall.
Here are some things to keep in mind while searching on Buzz Sumo:
- Start by searching for your industry, product, or service.
- If you are searching for a phrase that’s longer than 1 word, use quotation marks to get an exact search. I.e. “Wedding Photography”.
- Also, try searching for your competitor’s sites and other popular sites in your industry.
- You are likely to get a lot of news articles as those are shared often, especially if they are bizarre or shocking.
- You may be able to create a topic around why these pieces are so newsworthy, but most likely you will want to get rid of them. Filter them out by:
- Using the filter option to remove content from news URLS.
- If you see a particular story clogging up your results use negative keywords in your search that will filter out that story. This can be done by entering the “-“ sign before the word you want to be filtered out within the search bar. In the example below, I was getting several unfortunate news pieces when I searched for “Facebook Live Video”, so I added several filters to remove them from my search.
- Other filter options include filtering by how recently the content was published, what language the content is in, what kind of content it is, and the area of origin.
- Focus on filtering by more recent results to see what is fresh, but make sure to look at the older content for more evergreen ideas as well.
Here are the results I get for my filtered “Facebook Live Video” search.
I set my search parameters to content that was published within the past month.
Let’s focus on the top few results since those are the ones that received the most love on social networks.
Just within the first four results, there are over 5,000 shares.
Before I filtered out the news options, there were over 100,000.
That shows me that people are really interested in content that has to do with live video on Facebook.
Ok, I know what you are thinking- What if your industry is less viral or you are a small, local business?
Smaller niches won’t have such viral content, but that doesn’t mean this method can’t work for you.
Even when the numbers are smaller, you can get an idea of what is being talked about and can compare to see what is the most popular, even if it’s not “viral.”
Let’s do another search. This time, we’ll pick “charter schools”.
As I mentioned before, nearly all of the results for “Charter Schools” are news pieces.
If this happens, you may need to widen your filter to content published within a year.
Sometimes, you can still find inspiration in the news pieces.
In this instance, the piece on illegal policies in charter schools might inspire you to talk about your school’s policies – this would help assuage any fears parents might have after reading that piece.
Try running a handful of different keywords through Buzz Sumo.
Use topics that relate to questions your customers ask or features of your product or service.
See what the buzz is in your industry.
Option 2- Google’s Keyword Planner
Another tool to use is Google’s Keyword Planner.
While this is typically meant for Adwords data, it also has other benefits.
One of those is search volume.
Let’s take a look at the same two topics.
For our “Facebook live video” search, I’ve also entered in a keyword filter in my search parameters to make sure I’m only getting results with “Facebook live”.
This will help weed out all of the other keywords that have nothing to do with the live function.
As you can see, we have over 9,900 searches a month for “Facebook Live video” and over 22,000 for “Facebook Live Stream.”
Clearly, this is a pretty popular topic at the moment and it would be a good idea to try a video series on Facebook’s new feature.
Now let’s look at charter schools.
As you can see, this is another topic that has a lot of monthly search volume.
This isn’t really surprising, since education is such a controversial issue right now and many parents are looking for alternatives for their kids.
You can continue to scroll through the keyword ideas tab to see if anything pops out at you, or you can switch over to the ad groups idea.
Ad groups is great because it lumps several sub-topics underneath the main topic.
This may help you find not only the overall topic of your series but the individual video topics as well.
Using Google Keyword Planner is a great way to see some alternative keywords and topics, as well.
If your industry or business is smaller, you may have difficulties finding keywords with high search volume.
That’s ok.
It may take more intuition as well as trial and error, but the Keyword Planner can still put you on a good path to finding what is out there.
Let’s move on to the next step.
Step Two – Individual video titles
Now things are getting interesting, right?
This is the section that is going to help you design the content for your individual videos.
We want to know what people are talking about.
What are their pain points, what are they asking questions about?
You have options here, but I’m going to focus on the ones that will bring you the best results.
It can get easy to get overwhelmed if you have too many choices to make.
How long does it take you to figure out where to go for dinner?
For me, I know we won’t go hungry if you specifically ask what Italian restaurant I want to go to.
Mmm, lasagna.
Ready? Here we go.
In this example, we’re going to stick to the overall theme of Facebook Live Video.
There are two Google tricks you can use here to get great titles.
One is auto-suggest.
This is where you see the recommended search phrases as you type.
I get the following suggestions when I type in “Facebook Live Video”:
- Facebook live video camera
- Facebook live stream
- Facebook live video download
- Facebook live video desktop
- Facebook live video length
I recognize “Facebook live stream” from working in the Google Keyword Planner.
When you see overlaps like this, try to look at the suggestions given for that keyword as well.
For the phrase “Facebook live stream” I get the following suggested searches:
- Facebook live stream iPhone
- Facebook live stream not working
- Facebook live stream from computer
- Facebook live stream camera
- Facebook live stream for Android
So if I were going to design a video series of five videos, I have plenty here to choose from.
There are a few that really stand out to me here right off the bat.
One is length. People likely want to know what the best length is for Facebook live streams.
If you’ve done a few, you can certainly write up what your results have been or if you poll other people who are using Facebook Live you can get a better overall idea to share.
Another one is “not working”. Now this one is tricky.
But if you have done your own troubleshooting or research and can offer tips, that would be a great one to use.
I also see results for “computer”, “iPhone”, and “Android”, which tells me people are trying to figure out if and how they can use Facebook live video on different devices.
Maybe that’s the focus for your series as a whole.
The other part of Google you want to pay attention to is the new section they added on “People also ask”.
You may not see this in every search result.
And finally, when you scroll all the way to the bottom of the search results page, you will see related searches.
Some of these will be the same as what you saw in the auto-suggest, but you may find some good inspiration as well.
Gotta love Google and all the help they give you :).
Let’s go back to our example for Charter Schools now and see what we can find.
When I search Charter Schools, Google thinks I am looking for charter schools near me and I get a lot of geo-targeted results.
You can avoid this by switching to Incognito.
Now I see:
- Charter schools vs public schools
- Charter schools pros and cons
- Charter schools near me
- Charter schools application
Not a lot to choose from here so let’s see what the related searches look like.
I do see the same as the auto-suggestions but also a few more:
- Why are charter schools bad
- Magnet schools
- Charter school jobs
- Are charters schools good
At this point, I’d say I have three potential titles here:
- Charter schools vs public schools
- Charter schools pros and cons (this also works for the good and bad ideas above)
- What’s the difference between a magnet school and a charter school
Even though we have plenty to choose from here, I want to look at another source- Quora.
What I love about Quora is this is a forum where people are interacting, asking questions, getting answers, and connecting.
You can see how many people are following a question as well.
Here’s a pretty interesting one that I found with a search on Facebook Live.
Notice there are 1300 views since June 3rd.
That shows a lot of interest, so I would consider adding that to my series.
Whew! We’re really making some headway here, aren’t we?
Anyone hungry after all that?
I’ve got pasta on the brain now.
No time for noodles, though.
We’re just getting to the good stuff.
Step Three: Your script
This can be the scary part.
What do we put in our scripts?
We can break this down into four basic sections:
- Grab their attention in the first few seconds. Without that, it doesn’t matter what the rest of your video is about because the only one that will watch it is you and your best friend (maybe). Here’s where you make the promise of what they can expect to get out of the video.
- Add a little branding in with a logo intro and title slide.
- Deliver on what you promised. Explain how this info will help them. Why is that content important? What problem are you solving?
- You MUST add a call to action.
The value you add in your content is what will make your audience like you, but if your opening statement and call to action aren’t strong enough (or if you forget them altogether) your videos won’t help your business at all.
Here are a couple of examples of call to action slides:
Ok moving right along.
You’re still with me, right?
I didn’t get you thinking about cheesy garlic bread or a glass of Chianti, did I?
Make sure to share if you have some.
Step Four: Marketing Your Videos
Let’s talk about uploading your videos to YouTube first.
You want to make sure you fill out all the data- Specifically the title, description, and tags.
This is super important.
Here’s what you need.
- An enticing title that includes your keyword.
- A great description with a link to your website or your download offer.
- You want to use http:// in your link – don’t just start with www. Otherwise, it will stay as a plain text URL and not a hyperlink to your site.
- Links to your other social media channels.
- Relevant tags, with a specific tag that remains consistent for your entire series.
- If you were doing a series on Facebook Live Video Streaming, then add that exact tag to all five of those videos. This can help those videos show up in the related videos that YouTube offers up to you after the video you were just watching.
Ready for the home stretch?
Step Five: Let everyone know about your video series
This one might seem like a no-brainer and that’s ok. You’ve spent a lot of time going through all of this, so it’s good to end on a lighter note.
You want to send your video links to your email list.
You want to let all your social media followers know, too.
With Facebook, you are likely to get more views if you upload your video directly to their site instead of just linking to it on YouTube.
Try uploading the first video in the series to YouTube and adding a link to the second one in the same post.
And there’s nothing wrong with mixing it up.
You can also add the link to your YouTube video and let your Facebook fans know that you’re doing a series and they can come to check that out and subscribe to your channel.
Also make sure you share your video to Twitter, LinkedIn, and anywhere else your business connects online.
Ask your connections to like, comment, and share your video.
By getting more views and engagement on your videos, it will strengthen your series.
There you have it, 5 steps to creating the perfect video series for your business.
- Choose a theme for your series
- Choose topics for your individual videos
- Write your script
- Market your video
- Get social
With the methods I’ve shared in this blog post, you’re certain to find some great opportunities to use video to boost your business.
If you want to stay up-to-date on all the ways that video can bring you more business, subscribe to our YouTube channel and never miss out.
