GM Marketers ☕🧇

One thing we’re incredibly good at as professionals is either being creative, or data-driven.

For many, there is no in-between. Some of us are geniuses who can do both, but the likelihood is, you end up in a specialised role doing one or the other.

But…

Some of the biggest brand opportunities lay between those two very schools of thought.

Now I’ve worked with plenty of organisations who are serious corporations. Some may say their brand guidelines and existence perpetuate around having their heads firmly up their own… yeah.

So when it comes to breaking down the idea of “X can also be used for Y”, it can cause conflict, but sometimes intrigue.

One business I’ve worked with just could not understand how they could improve their video content, and get more of the right people viewing it consistently.

So that’s where the simplest crossover of skillsets came in.

“How about we really push the SEO side of your YouTube channel?”

Bemused faces ensued, but we were given a crack at it.

The merits of this idea were:

• Evergreen video content can continue to get views every day for years to come. The average video halflife seems to be around 5 years, so even 1 relevant view per day works out at over 1,800 views.

• We could piggyback on the blogs they were already ranking really well for. Google suggests videos in results too, so we could double-up the virtual real estate this business had on the first page of Google.

   

• Having a series of interlinking videos meant every bit of content in this experiment could subsequently benefit the other videos. Hopefully, we’d generate an infinite positive feedback loop… okay, maybe not infinite, but a few thousand people devouring every minute of content would be a big win.

• We knew people were searching for these products, solutions and queries around them en masse, and that it was a unique audience looking for this.

Give or take a few weeks, and we finally had a series of videos adequately titled, keyworded up, and live. So how did it go over the following 6 months without any paid promotion or social linking?

Well, across a 5 video cross-section, we generated over 5,000 video views, and averaged a 45% viewing retention rate. Now that retention rate isn’t amazing, but it’s a significant improvement from the aimless corporate content there since day 1.

And to this day, the daily views are accelerating. 50+ passive daily views (90% of that is gained through search), increased subscribers, engagement, and growing, is a nice little win for an organisation that had 90% of their views come from 1 video that was 10 years old. Now, 30% of the daily views are stemming from a small project that’s helping to cross-pollinate with other content too.

This may not blow many of your minds, but sometimes when you talk to fellow marketers, you have to strip it all the way back to get that buy-in to new projects and approaches. And if you’re on the other side of the fence, let people have a go at new approaches. It may give you significantly overweight positive results.

Just try stuff!