Growing your business through video marketing? What should you make your videos about? Coming up with video titles that will work for your business and succeed on YouTube is a very challenging thing. So many business owners and marketers have made videos that they thought were gonna do really well, but unfortunately tanked. Today, we’re gonna share with you four triggers that you can use to generate better YouTube video ideas! They are designed to get your creativity flowing and start thinking in a way that will lead to better video topic ideas. 

#1. News headlines

First, a great way is to take the top trending articles and news events happening in mainstream culture and connect it to your business. This will generate huge traffic for you and you have a chance to convert that traffic into customers. 

Let me give you an example. What you could do if you’re a marketer is you could create a video that says “A Marketer Reacts to (Insert Video)” and in that video, you could talk about different camera angles, you could share some tips on body language and facial expressions and how to market your business with lessons learned from it. 

Or for example, you’re a health and wellness expert. You could take relatable health concerns and connect your business to one of those top trending topics! Or you can make a video called “A Health Expert Reacts to (Insert Candy Commercial)” and you could talk about the health effects of chocolate bars, candy bars, melted nougat, caramel and peanuts…… You get the gist. So pick three to five pop culture and media sites that you can begin following, and look for ways to connect your business! 

All that said, you shouldn’t just be doing trending topics. This is just one part of the strategy designed to bring larger traffic to your channel. You also wanna have different YouTube video ideas for people to engage with, which brings us to the next strategy. 

#2: The five Ws

Who, what, why, where, when and how? Okay, we know that those are actually six and they don’t all start with Ws. But the five Ws is way more marketable, so let’s go with us on this. 

Anyway, the five Ws is how you come up with content very, very quickly. Who – Who is X? Start thinking about the big name players in your industry that would attract your audience. If you’re in social media marketing, you might consider something along the lines of, who is Gary Vee and why is he important? If you’re in real estate, you might wanna do something like who is Grant Cardone and why does he matter? Follow this model until you run out of ideas and then move on to the next W. 

What is X? Start to answer some of the top questions that come out of your mind as they relate to your industry. If you’re a social media marketer, you might wanna do something like, What is the best way to get followers on Facebook? What is the best way to generate leads on social media? We’re taking these questions and using them to trigger our minds to start thinking about video titles that our audience would be interested in. Follow along this process from who, what, why, where, when and of course how to.

Now we have to say. The “How to” category is the easiest category to fill up. However you don’t wanna have a YouTube channel that is only a how-to channel! You wanna have a rich variety of YouTube video ideas that include some “Who is,” some “Where are,” some “What are,” so that your viewers have variety to choose from!

#3: Surveys

With surveys, you can ask your audience directly what type of videos they want to see. Not only do you get direct feedback from your customers, but when you make the video, you have a built-in audience who feels like they were a part of coming up with that content. And so you’re going to have a bigger view count on some of those videos!

We like to use surveymonkey.com to create our surveys but there’s tons of different free survey sites out there. You can also use polls on Instagram stories, inside of your Facebook groups or even on Twitter to get the same type of results. 

A problem we see business owners and marketers making when it comes to surveys is asking too many questions. You don’t wanna create this 10 question survey because nobody has time for that. What you wanna do is ask two very targeted questions. Question one, what videos would you like me to make next? Easy, simple, quick, right? Question number two, what are your biggest challenges in (Insert Industry/Area of Life)? If you can ask those two questions and then send that out to 10 people, 100 people or 100,000 people, you’ll get great results.

#4 Crowdsourcing

Now, you might be thinking, what if I don’t have a list? And I don’t have anyone that I can ask these questions to? Well, then you can crowdsource your information through Reddit, Quora or one of the other question answer sites out there! Reddit is a phenomenal tool to find out what’s trending, especially in the millennial and tech-savvy crowd. Quora is a website where people ask random questions and anyone can answer. So you can see what’s trending in those areas and make videos on those topics. It’s a great idea to go to Quora and see who’s asking what questions and try to come up with three to five ancillary questions that you could answer to make your video more exciting.

When you go to these third party websites to grab your content, you’re also tapping into built-in audience, built-in conversation and in some cases, (we’re not saying to do this every time) you can go back to the forum and post your video there as an answer to one of the questions. In some cases, if you do this in a non-spammy way, you can easily go viral with your video.

Using these four triggers, you’ll be able to come up with a large list of videos. What other topics around YouTube marketing would you like to see next? What other great ways do you have to help you come up with YouTube video ideas that we didn’t share? Share with us below!