Straight to Video: How Do I Come Up with Compelling Video Topics?

Charlie Crespo - May 8, 2015

You’ve decided to make video part of your digital footprint. That’s great!

OK, so tell us more. What are the topics of those videos going to be? What ideas do you have so far? Oh … really? You haven’t been able to think of any yet? You’re not even sure where to start?

Don’t worry; we can help. Although coming up with video content ideas off the top of your head can be difficult, there are tools that your brand can use to give an idea of what the best types of topics might be for your audience.

Use Google Webmaster Tools.

Of course, you’ll want to create video that your customers will find valuable and compelling. In order to do that, you’ll need to have a good idea of both what they want to get from your content as well as what interests them.

With Google Webmaster Tools, you can review the most important pages on your site and review words that people searched in Google to find those pages, which can help you find out what content your users are most interested in. In addition though, you can also find out what the top queries — or phrases — were that led people to your site, which might give you an idea as to what they are looking to take away from your content.

In other words, if a hotel or resort sees that its gym and fitness center page is one of the pages that receives the most impressions and a phrase with a high click through rate is “best workout facilities,” a strong video topic for that hotel might be a tour of its impressive fitness amenities. By using Google Webmaster Tools in this manner, it will be easier for your brand to come up with strong video content ideas, rather than just trying to pull them from out of the blue. Once the video is complete, it can then be added to a page that already contains content about the hotel’s workout facilities.

Your blog can help, too.

You might not have realized it, but there are probably great video content ideas right under your nose. If you are already writing great content for your blog, it’s probably a good idea to repurpose some of those topics for video content. Before you do though, ask yourself a couple questions such as:

• What blog posts have received the most engagement and comments?
• Which have performed best on your brand’s social media channels?

By answering these, you can narrow the topics down to a few that your users have really found valuable, entertaining, or both. Start with these for possible video content and keep an eye on posts that perform particularly well down the road for other possible video content ideas.