In the past, we haven’t put much strategic thought into growing our YouTube channel. We’ve just produced the content that we wanted to produce – guided by our intuition and passion, as well as your feedback.
When we asked The Futur’s Matthew Encina how he selects topics for The Futur’s YouTube channel (which has over 520k subscribers), his answer was a bit more scientific. In this video, Matthew discusses a couple strategies he uses to create content he KNOWS people are looking for:
“One easy way to pre-vet an idea, or think about concepts you can make videos about, is to check first and make sure people are actually searching for those things,” says Matthew. He and The Futur team use a couple tools to check whether their ideas will actually speak to an audience.
“One is called vidIQ, and the other is called TubeBuddy,” says Matthew. “I like vidIQ a lot … because it gives you a very robust set of information and insights into what people are searching for.”
High Search Volume + Low Search Competition = $$$
For example, if you typed the keyword “branding” into vidIQ, the service would return a “should you make a video about this” score based on two key factors: search volume (the amount of people searching for the keyword) and search competition (how many other “branding” videos are on YouTube).
“If you find a term that has a high search volume and low search competition, that’s money,” says Matthew. “That mean’s no one’s talking about that thing or answering that question.”
Those considerations, as well as a video’s potential viewership numbers (estimated from the max views of other videos on the same topic), drive most of The Futur’s content creation decisions. But they don’t drive all of them.
“A lot of it is, I feel like we’ve figured out our niche,” says Matthew. “Which is business and creativity. Those are the things we’ve become known for, so we’ve doubled down on those things. But we’re also always looking to grow. Each year, we’re looking to reach more people and be a little more broad, in terms of the audience we can reach with our message.”
Research the Competition – and Note Their High-Performers
To do that, The Futur’s been researching their competition, and specifically stalking those channels’ most viewed videos. As they’ve done so, they’ve found that they need to produce more “low-hanging fruit” style content.
“Every year, for example, there are so many videos called ‘Graphic Design Trends – Whatever Year.’ And those are a lot of channels’ highest-performing videos, because people are searching for those things,” says Matthew. “I look at those things, and I look at us, and I think, ‘We have to produce those things.’ So even though those are longer projects that aren’t as exciting for us, I know those are things we have to put on our channel.”
If you liked hearing from Matthew, be sure to follow The Futur and The Futur Academy on YouTube. Then, be sure to stop by the Butler Branding channel to see our new and improved YouTube content strategy in action.
