The 6-Step Guide to YouTube Content Strategy

As video marketing becomes the hottest trend to connect with customers, YouTube has become more saturated and competitive than ever for businesses across industries. How can your brand’s content stand out when over 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute? How should you be researching, planning and choosing topics without draining your budget?

48% of businesses are spending more budget on video marketing in 2022, but most companies find their content not reaching the expected impact. As per Wistia’s report, success in video marketing is linked to having a defined strategy. Developing a cohesive and targeted content strategy for YouTube is key to business growth. However, many marketers still struggle with where to start and how to implement it effectively.

The tubics guide walks you through 6 pivotal steps you can follow to develop an impactful content strategy that educates, entertains and engages with your desired audience. In this blog post, we will share the key insights from each stage. You can also download the infographic below as a summary of the 6 steps.

Step 1: Set Purpose

To anchor your video marketing strategy, first and foremost, you need to understand the driving force behind your content. Hence, setting the purpose of your brand’s YouTube channel serves as a solid foundation for you to create a sustainable content strategy for years to come. A helpful starting point to identify the purpose of your YouTube channel in relation to your brand value is considering Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle:

The Golden Circle is a powerful model that helps you address the most important questions to set values and intentions behind your content planning.

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Step 2: Identify Target Audience

One of the key elements to fostering a growing YouTube channel is to know who your audiences are. Once you’ve set the purpose of your video marketing strategy, you can leverage that one step further to identify your target audience.

1. Decide for whom you are creating video content:

This extends from the purpose of your YouTube channel and overlaps with your ideal customer demographic. In your overall marketing strategy, if you’ve already segmented buyer personas for your product and services, you can adapt the model to create specific viewer personas for your YouTube content.

2. Determine your brand’s area of expertise:

Since you are the expert on your brand expertise, you know best what values you can bring to your target audience. This is the value proposition of your brand and an opportunity to establish your brand as an authority in your industry, present your company as the thought leader on specific topics and establish credibility amongst your audience.

Answer these questions to figure out your specialty:

3. Identify the “Shared Passion” that bridges your brand’s expertise with your target audience’s interest:

Once you have a clearer understanding of who you are making videos for and what your brand best provides to solve problems or provide value, you can now identify the shared passion between your service/products, the function of your YouTube channel, and your target audience’s needs.

Step 3: Implement Frameworks

As you’ve identified the target audience and their shared passions with your brand, you now need the backbone to structure your content. Frameworks are useful and necessary for an enduring content plan because it helps to facilitate content creation, choose topics per content type, as well as schedule content accordingly.

Generally, the Help-Hub-Hero framework is the first consideration for brands on YouTube to begin thinking about your content creation:

Step 4: Find Your Niche

As 66% of consumers rely on video content to learn about a brand or product, it’s more important than ever to choose your niche on YouTube carefully. Knowing your niche not only paves a more precise direction for your content topics but also allows you to gain more knowledge about your intended audience.

Since you will need to come up with content for your channel regularly, it is important that the niche is specific but has the potential to be broadened up. That is why having a focused niche for your brand’s channel is crucial to creating a long-lasting content strategy.

The niche of your video content goes hand in hand with the purpose of your YouTube channel. It might be evident that your niche centers around the industry of your business, yet within the same industry, a brand could still have different niches depending on its business goals, brand image, and the communities it’s addressing. Defining your specific niche based on the intention of your YouTube channel helps you nurture a more connected community on YouTube.

Step 5: Research Topics

If you’ve followed the steps in this guide thus far, you’ve laid a strong foundation for your YouTube content strategy. Now comes the crucial step for you to build a discoverable content plan that can reach your intended audience. While this step of content planning can usually be labour-intensive and time-consuming, there are great tools to help you save time and effort while attaining your goals.

To begin, you need to figure out the current trending topics that represent the demand of your potential viewers. Generally, you want to know what type of content people are actively searching for and, more precisely, what keywords they are using to search for the content they need.

The traditional way to look for relevant topics includes gathering information from multiple search engine tools, such as Google Trends, YouTube Trend dashboard, and Google’s Keyword Planner.

In addition to using multiple sources that require exhausting work such as narrowing down trends, analyzing keywords, comparing relevancy, and going back and forth between tools to sort your findings, you can also use a one-stop video tool such as tubics to save time and effort and gain all the insight you need immediately.

Step 6: Know Your Competitors

After you’ve zoomed in on your potential audience’s desires and know what videos you need to create to catch their attention, it’s time to take a closer look at the channels of your competitors.

After all, video ranking and discoverability are all about standing out from the crowd. 

Usually, many video marketers skip the competitor research step. It’s already enough work just to research the topics and come up with a solid content plan. That’s true. However, knowing your competition on the YouTube landscape should be part of your content strategy planning because it informs you what content to create and how to rank better than others. 

What’s Next? (Conclusion)

We encourage you to implement the steps from the guide and if you have any questions or need support, feel free to reach out to us.

Our passion is to help brands drive organic YouTube growth so that you can take your business to the next level. Contact us to get data-based recommendations on your YouTube marketing. Let’s grow your channel together!