Tips for an Effective Video Marketing Strategy

To succeed with video marketing, you have to start with the basics. You can’t just automatically assume— I know how to make videos and I know what my audience members want to see, so let me just get to the good stuff and tell me where to distribute my videos.

If that’s how you define video marketing, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You really are. You have to understand that effective video marketing starts at the root. In other words, you have to start at the beginning and the beginning of marketing of course is niche selection.

Which market are you going to target? What kind of problems are you going to address? What kind of industry are you going to be in? You have to start with the basics and most people do this in the worst way possible. How? Well, they read a book that says you should be marketing this niche.

They have no clue what the niche is about, but since the book that got them excited about video marketing talks about that niche, they jump all over it, or they have a friend who is successful in a particular niche so they just copy and paste their friend’s business.

What do you think happened to these people? That’s right. The vast majority of them failed. You have to find your own way. You have to be systematic and methodical in selecting your niche from the beginning. Otherwise, you are probably not going to make it. You have to take ownership of this process.

You have to build your business from the beginning. You can’t just copy and paste certain sections. That’s just not going to help you all that much.

How to do video niche selection

Here’s the step-by-step that is very actionable. You can do it right here, right now.

Step#1

List down all your personal interests. These are the topics that you yourself would love to talk about even if you’re not getting paid. That’s how passionate you are about them. This is a stream of consciousness exercise so just write down everything and anything that comes to your mind, but don’t edit yourself, don’t second guess, and just write it down. Just come up with a huge long list, as long as you are truly and sincerely interested in those topics.

Step#2

Step number two, identify the niche behind the topics. Looking at the topics that you have, identify them. Are they insurance related? Are they related to the finance industry? Are they related to marital products? Are they related to health and fitness? Whatever the case may be, come up with the niche categorization for what you’re interested in.

Next, you go to Clickbank, JVZoo, MoreNiche, CJ.com, and other affiliate marketing platforms. Look for those categories. Are there lots of offers for those categories? This is very important because you don’t want to create tons of video targeting a niche that has very few products in it or the affiliate offers don’t really pay all that well.

So, once you see that there are offers for some of the niches and not others, cross out the niches that don’t have much affiliate program interest.

Step#3

Filter your list based on commercial value. Now that you have a fairly clear idea of what niches you’re interested in and you’ve filtered out ones that don’t have any affiliate interest, use Google AdWords’ keyword planner tool. Type in the niches one by one. Look at their keywords and most importantly, look at the CPC or cost per click value of the keywords.

On average, how much do advertisers pay for clicks on keywords related to these niches? Cross off on your list the niches that pay too little. This tells you that the commercial value is on the low side.

Step#4

Find the search volume for your niches. Again, using Google keyword planner. Just plug in the niche related keywords for the niches that are still on your list. Your list should be shorter by now.

Once you see the estimated traffic volume, delete niches that are too low and delete niches that are too high. Why? You don’t want niches that are too competitive. In other words, everybody is targeting those niches. This is the first step for demand determination.

The next step is to enter your keywords into YouTube as well as Google Search. What are the numbers coming in? Are there too many videos targeting that niche? Now “too many” here is relative. Depending on your niche, “too many” can be a hundred thousand or it can be ten million.

Whatever the case may be, it’s all relative so again, take off the items from your list that have too much competition.

Step#5

The final step is to do a trend analysis. Now that you have a clear idea of the niches that you want to target, enter their keywords into Google Trends. Do you see the demand or interest for this going up over time or do you see it flat lining or even declining? Cross out niches that have flat-lined or have declining trend patterns.

By this point, your niche list should be very, very short. In fact, there should be only one or two left. Once you have filtered down your list, go to YouTube and enter the keywords related to those remaining niches.

Reverse engineer your competitors and create better videos

After you’ve looked up your niche competitors’ videos on YouTube, you should view as many of their videos as possible. What do they have in common? What do they talk about? How do they present the information? These commonalities give you a head start. You’re going to do the same. You’re not going to come out of left field talking about something completely different.

Instead, you’re going to be talking about what they all have in common. However, you’re going to create better videos. This is the key. I’m going to cover this in further detail in Chapter 3, but I just want to give you a quick heads up. You’re going to come up with whatever it is your competitors are doing on average, but you’re going to create better videos.

The bottom line

Your mindset should be clear when it comes to niche video marketing. You’re either going to dominate or you shouldn’t do it at all. That should be your mindset. The key here is victory or death.

Because if you’re not going to play this game to dominate, then it’s not worth playing at all because let me tell you, you’re going to suffer from low return on effort. You’ve put in all this time and just get very little in return. You probably would be better off investing your time doing something else.