Niche marketing opportunities on YouTube.com (the world’s second-largest search engine)

August 10, 2016: Much has been written in the past couple of months about “Peak Content,” a crisis reached when too many marketers chase a finite group of prospects with undifferentiated messaging. The result is a collective “yawn” from the marketplace, low site traffic, and wasted effort.

We’ve seen this coming for a long time. In fact, we suggested that a “content winter” was approaching more than two years ago. Our position – and battle cry – is that need to work harder to create content that’s actually useful to people. This means knowing your audience, knowing their pain points, what keeps them up at night, and wracking your brain to provide them answers that will make their lives easier. It means using your imagination and thinking about creating content that’s more than garden variety listicles or 500 word “how tos.”

Yes – content marketing is hard, SEO visibility isn’t what it used to be – especially after Google eliminated right-rail real estate on SERPs – and social media platforms all seem to be on a track to eliminate organic reach in favor of paid spend.

At the same time, however, it’s clear that many marketers – especially B2Bs — are overlooking an extremely powerful audience acquisition mechanism: YouTube.  For certain business-oriented categories, there’s almost zero clutter – which means that if you’re wily, resourceful, and willing to create timely, data-driven content, you might just be successful.

For example, consider the following search, made on YouTube this morning (we chose the term SEO because it’s a highly competitive term with lots of authors writing against it).

Finding marketing opportunities on YouTube

 

Let’s try the popular search term: SEO. Right now, the most popular item right now happens to be “SEO For Dummies: How to Rank in Google by an individual going by the nickname “Lazy Ass Stoner,” published in 2014, with about  240,000 views. The second-ranked item is “SEO for startups in under 10 minutes,” published by Google in 2013, with 541,860 views. These two top-ranked entries have held this position for several months, and will be difficult to dethrone.

Where things get interesting is when you apply a date filter to look at more recent content. For example, how much SEO content was published to YouTube in the past week? Only two items (the rest deal with a singer named “Yeon Seo” who has nothing to do with search optimization)! This is very light competition for anyone publishing SEO content: much lighter than the competition for visibility within Google’s News or Web tabs!

How about the search term “public relations firms” (whose price on Keyword planner is a modest but not unrespectable $5.98 per click)? Well, there’s modest competition when you ignore the date, but not when you impose a 1-week date filter. In fact, there appear to be ZERO videos uploaded in the past week relating to “public relations firms.” Obviously, there’s an opportunity here for a nimble PR firm who wants to get some YouTube eyeshare!

Caveats

Some YouTube content categories are saturated. For example, the terms “social media” and even “content marketing” are so crowded that it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to gain any traction there: these subjects are just too frequently written about by too many people. You’ll need to get more granular to get any visibility: for example, by creating a video that would target “social media strategy on Snapchat” or “social media tactics for Facebook,” neither of which have seen any uploads in the past week. (Of course, you’re not going to be getting the high number video counts that more general videos get, but you’re using YouTube as a lead acquisition vehicle, so that’s not your objective anyway.)

Remember, folks. YouTube is the second-most popular search engine in the world. People searching for answers use it every day, and many marketers seem to be overlooking its potential.

In a crowded world where the threat of “Peak Content” looms over everyone’s heads, YouTube is an “undiscovered country” worth exploring it, so take your business-driving keywords, check out the competition on YouTube, and see whether there are hidden opportunities you can exploit.