An estimated 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Getting noticed amongst all that footage is tricky. Which is why you’ll need to be highly creative to make your business stand out. Help is at hand, however, with Render Perfect Productions as we look at some of the top YouTube video ideas for businesses that want to be seen on the world’s second largest social media platform.
Behind the Scenes
Giving your viewers a sneak preview of how your business operates is a great way to build more views and engagement. Taking them behind the scenes with a privileged tour of the inner workings of your business will reveal your brand’s relatable human side. Which encourages your audience to become more invested in your offer. Even if you’re a small team that relies on remote working and coffee shop meet-ups, like Ugly Drinks, you can still provide a fascinating inside view of how your business operates with this creative YouTube video idea.
Recruitment Video
Are you searching for an ‘agile’, ‘value-added’ candidate who can ‘reach out’ to your clients? No? Good. Instead, why not ‘park’ the business jargon in favor of an inspirational recruitment video that really illustrates your business’ core values? A great recruitment video can even tackle big issues like gender equality. Business software giants, SAP, used an animated recruitment video to effect in their efforts to position their workplace as somewhere that actively encourages women to aim higher.
Company Culture
Another good YouTube video idea if you’re vlogging for business is to make a video that highlights your company’s culture. Unpacking your business’ goals, values and reason for being is a great way to show what makes your organization tick. Your video doesn’t have to be stuffy or overly corporate either.
Meet the Team
As we know, it’s the people behind the brand that invariably drive a company’s success. Giving your audience a glimpse of the faces and personalities of those responsible for creating your products or delivering your services is a great way to foster a stronger personal connection with your customers. It’s captivating to see how a diverse workforce can pull together for a common cause. More often than not, your personnel can become your company’s most vocal mascots.
Product Showcase
A product video is an excellent YouTube video idea for businesses planning to show the features and benefits of their must-have invention. Research shows that 84% of people have been swayed to buy a product or service after watching a brand’s video.
New Product Announcement
When the time comes to launch a brand-new product, an announcement video gives you the opportunity to wax lyrical about its advantages. More in-depth than a product showcase, this type of YouTube video idea can even feature a comparison of predecessor or competitor products to show how your new product has grown. If you can show your prospective customers how your product works and why it can benefit them.
Special Events Announcement
Another great YouTube video technique to keep your audience engaged is to create some hype around an upcoming special event. Promoting a one-off event that really captures the imagination and taps into the current zeitgeist can be a really effective way to generate buzz around your brand.
Explainer Video
Explainer videos are perfect for illustrating how a product or service business works. Ideal for simplifying complex features or theories, explainer videos are far more illuminating and immediate than words can ever hope to be. In fact, studies have shown that 69% of people would choose video over text to learn about a product or service.
Employee Profile Video
Profiling an individual employee working at your company can be a great way to give your audience a one-to-one introduction to your talent pool. Adopting a narrower focus than a ‘meet the team’ video, employee profiles typically involve a brief interview that uncovers your interviewee’s background, skills and contribution to your business.
How to/Tutorials
If you don’t know how to do something, where’s the first place you go? YouTube, right? The video giant is awash with tutorial videos and it’s a genre that you can tap into. The point of this YouTube video idea is to share actionable knowledge for your viewers to learn from. You’re an expert in your field, so why not underline that fact by offering handy hints and tips to your audience?
Product/Service/App Tutorial
An excellent technique for gaining exposure to your product or service is making a tutorial video. You can walk your audience through the intricacies of whatever you’re selling and share valuable insights into the best ways to use it.
Webinar
If you’ve hosted an educational webinar, you can post the recorded footage of your event on YouTube for those who couldn’t attend your event the first time around or to generate traction with a whole new audience. Webinars are interactive and those interactions translate extremely well into video format.
Live Stream
There’s a sense of excitement and anticipation about witnessing a live event. If you’re planning a special event or launch, then why not stream it live? You can use your social channels to generate interest well in advance and build up a groundswell of excitement.
Ask Me Anything
Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussions have been popularized on Reddit and Twitter, but translate perfectly to video. This type of YouTube idea can either take the form of a live stream or a recorded event where you collate your audience’s questions in advance and pose them to an expert in your business. AMA videos can often reveal surprises.
Interview Someone Interesting
Put that little black book to work and invite an interesting or authoritative figure from your industry to appear in an interview video. This is an opportunity for some valuable reciprocal exposure and is useful if you can make it a collaborative effort, whereby your video is shared on each other’s channels.
Testimonials
If you’ve received positive feedback from your customers or clients, why not ask them to come in and film a testimonial video? As far as actionable YouTube video ideas go, this is right up there with the best of them. Testimonial videos are a great way to evidence “social proof” and offer an independent perspective on your products or services. You could even ask customers to send you webcam testimonials to save time and money.
Whiteboard Videos
Whiteboard videos are an engaging way to explain complex ideas with a highly visual narrative. The traditional approach is to film an expert by deconstructing a theory on a whiteboard. However, latterly the growing trend is for digital whiteboard videos featuring an animated illustrator who draws a story as the narrator tells it.
Competition or Contest
Competition or contest videos are an excellent way to get your audience involved in your video content. If you can encourage your viewers to develop their own mini-videos as part of your wider competition, then not only are you ramping up the engagement, but you’re also going to benefit from original content with very little effort required on your behalf.
List Videos
We all love a good list. You’re reading this article, right?! Lists are powerful because they tap into what psychologists call “schemata” – the mental maps we build up from experience – and provide digestible, bite-size snippets of information. If you’re breaking down techniques or top-ranked products, then a list video can work wonders.
Top Tips
Another way to enrich your viewer’s lives is by providing tips that subtly promote your brand, product, or expertise. If you can provide actionable tips on a topic that you’re knowledgeable about, then you’ll foster a level of trust that should see your audience visit you again to glean more insights and buy into your products or services.
Case Studies
Taking the customer testimonials YouTube idea, a step further, case study videos are the perfect way to illustrate how your products or services have benefitted particular customers. This type of collaboration can give you relatable content that brings your product offering to the fore.
About Render Perfect Productions:
Render Perfect has been built from the ground up to service growing businesses and help them realize their full visual storytelling and digital marketing potential. We’ve created a service offering and skill-set that spans video production, post-production, motion graphic design, 3D animation, web development, and video marketing strategy. Our insight and experience allow us to help clients make better planning decisions and get more out of their video production effort.