Launching your social media video campaign feels exhausting and time consuming, but it’s not the most difficult part of the process. Instead, being able to continue to create enough high-quality, interesting videos is the toughest challenge most businesses will face.
Whether you’re using YouTube or distributing your videos natively across multiple platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there’s no doubt about it: you’ll need to continually create unique content to keep users engaged. One viral video is great, but without more fantastic content following behind, your momentum will drop off and die.
Fortunately, it’s possible to beat writer’s block and find inspiration even when you’re feeling creatively drained. You just have to have a system in place to help you do so. In this post, we’re going to look at several different ways to generate video ideas that are unique, even when you’re feeling stumped.
Get Really Specific
If you go to any marketing site, you’ll almost definitely see an article or a video (or both) along the lines of “How to Sell with Facebook Ads” on almost all of them. While this is a very helpful topic, it’s broad, and it’s not unique. Everyone else can—and has—done it.
Instead of staying broad, look at a single subject as a book, and each of the subtopics as different parts and chapters within that book. Instead of just “selling more with Facebook Ads,” you can create videos like “How to Generate Leads with Facebook Lead Ads” and “How to Install the Facebook Tracking Pixel On Your Site.”
Not only will your content be more unique, there’s another great perk, too: your highly-specified content will require detailed content, increasing its value.
Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is a vital part of marketing campaigns, including video marketing. YouTube is the second largest search engine, and even Google can send you viewers who are searching for content like yours if they’re able to actually find the content first.
Not only will keyword research help you rank higher in search engines and get more views, it can also give you incredible ideas for new content. When you go to a site like SEMrush or Moz and enter in a single keyword, they’ll spit out plenty of great related keywords, both long-tail and short-tail.
Even if some of these related keywords aren’t incredibly high ranking on their own, they can still be great inspiration for new social media videos.
Let’s look at an example. Hypothetically, you run an air conditioning company, and you’re looking for ideas for new videos. If you type “air conditioning problems” into the Moz, you’ll see it spit out related keywords like “air conditioning troubleshooting chart” and “why is my ac outside unit not turning on.”
These are needs and questions customers are entering into Google, and your video can be the answer to those questions.
Search the Forums
Keyword research can give you some great insight into what users are searching for, but if you have access to industry forums that users engage with, that’s your true goldmine. Users are on these forums to interact with ask questions, connect, and gain and share knowledge. If you see the same topic or question pop up over and over again (whether it’s exactly the same or a slight variation), you could have a fantastic topic on your hands.
In some cases, businesses and marketers will try to jumpstart conversation on their own already-existing videos, like a little mini forum. Not only does this get the videos plenty of engagement, you can easily keep an eye on what your audience is discussing right there. An example of a video that does this can be viewed here:
If people are searching forums, after all, it means that Google may have not been able to provide them with the answers they need. Why can’t you?
Ask Your Audience What They Want to See
I’m a big fan of blunt, straight-forward transparency, and sometimes the best solution is also the most obvious one. If you’re trying to generate video ideas that are both unique and interesting to your audience, ask them outright what they’d like to see. Everyone loves sharing their opinion, and there’s a good chance that they’ll actually tell you.
Check Out Your Competition
I know, when you want to create a unique, awe-inspiring video, it doesn’t make sense at first glance to go check out what your competitor is already doing. I’m guilty of this line of thought sometimes—I want to come up with my own ideas, I don’t want to accidentally rip off someone else!
When you’re looking at your competitor’s videos, though, in the video idea generation process, you aren’t looking for ideas to copy. Instead, you want to see what they’re missing. What follow-up questions are users leaving in the comments? Did you have any questions or tidbits of insight you would have shared during a certain section? Find those small crevices of opportunity, and create your own video from the branched-off topic. This will set you not only apart, but ahead.
Final Thoughts
No one wants to be a one-hit-wonder, and especially not when it comes to your social media content. While continually finding inspiration to create high-engaging video after video after video feels overwhelming and can be draining, having a system in place to generate new ideas when the well runs dry is always a good plan. These are some of the best ways to not to generate ideas for videos, but for most other types of content, too.
What do you think? How do you come up with new ideas for unique social media videos? Which strategies and sources of inspiration do you rely on? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!