With more than a billion unique visitors every month, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. And, when it comes to content campaigns, there are various types of video content strategies that you can create.
The content creation strategy we favour the most however is the Hero, Hub and Hygiene model. This model allows you to easily distinguish how much time you should be spending on the type of content you want to create.
This blog post walks you through the three H’s to help you create a strong content strategy to increase awareness of your brand and engage your target audience.
Hero content
Hero content grabs attention. This content should be the central part of your campaign, as it’s designed to attract a large volume of viewers. Hero content is often used to drive sales or build brand awareness around a big event, such as a new product launch or Black Friday.
Effectively, a hero video is a large-scale production intended to reach the masses. You want your hero content to make a big splash, so you’ll need to invest a lot of time and resource into the creation of this video.
Hero content often works best as part of a multi-channel campaign, as this allows you to reach more potential customers; the more they see of your ad, the more likely they are to sit up and take notice of your brand. This means incorporating content marketing and earned media elements into your overall strategy, alongside paid media, across both online and offline channels.
Your hero content should have a strong, lasting impact on your target audience. When done well, hero content on YouTube should even convince those outside of your target audience that they should be buying your products or engaging with your brand too.
One fine example of effective hero content is the John Lewis Christmas advert. This annual television spectacle is memorable, shareable, appeals to all age groups and evokes strong emotions from viewers, including those who don’t ordinarily shop at the store too.
Hub content
While hero content is designed to attract the masses, there’s no guarantee that the viewers who watched your content will feel invested enough to come back. The purpose of hub content is to engage your audience and give them a reason to keep watching. This is often done by scheduling videos at regular intervals and aligning the content with the interests of your audience. The reason to keep watching could come in the form of a cliffhanger, or a feeling of familiarity through a compelling story.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mctcALQe5wY)
When it comes to hub content, the objective is to get people to take an action, be it sharing your video, adding a comment or subscribing to your channel. This content should also increase brand awareness and deepen your audience’s relationship with your brand.
An important thing to note here is that hub content is geared towards those who already know about your brand, so that you can nurture that relationship and demonstrate your value to those customers.
Hub content should always be pushed toward your target audience and capture their interests. Think about what your ideal customer cares about. What do they talk about with their friends? What stimulates their thoughts? Questions like this should form the basis of your hub strategy.
The finished result could take many different forms, including:
- Tutorial videos
- The announcement of product launches
- Behind-the-scenes, sneak peek videos that show insight into what it’s like at your business HQ
Hygiene content
You might also hear this one referred to as ‘help content’. Its purpose is to educate those looking for answers to specific questions related to your industry. For example, if your audience is searching for “cheap London attractions” and you work in the tourism industry, then your video should be answering that query.
This video content should draw in new visitors, which means it needs to be shareable and pushed out through social channels. It shouldn’t be a promotional piece; rather, it should be informative and genuinely useful to your audience.
Hygiene content also needs to be optimised for search so that it answers your users’ questions. This means paying close attention to your metadata, video title and thumbnail to ensure they all match the relevant search queries and can easily be indexed by search engines.
Instructional videos can also help to build up brand awareness and establish your business as an industry leader.
In conclusion
The main challenge with video advertising is that standing out in such a crowded environment is hard work. With more than 300 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every second and almost five billion videos being watched on YouTube every single day, getting your videos noticed requires a well executed content strategy.
Lucky for you, we’ve covered everything your business needs to know on how to get started with video advertising. Download our Power of Video Guide for everything you need to know to set up a successful video campaign, just like the one we created for Robinsons Brewery!