You know it, I know it—YouTube is the future of marketing.

It’s kind of a big deal when it comes to marketing your online course.

Why?

Advertisement costs are skyrocketing.

On the other hand, running Facebook ads isn’t feasible for most coaches and consultants.

In this post, I’ll share a framework—a guide to maximize your business with YouTube—largest video platform.

Let’s dive in and unlock the potential of video marketing together!

Note on uploading YouTube videos

When publishing videos on your YouTube channel, always keep your ideal customer avatar in mind.

You need to avoid uploading random videos on your YouTube channel.

⚠️ For instance, if you are a business owner with a YouTube channel and you want to publish a travel video from a trip to Vietnam, remember that this might attract the wrong audience, further hurting engagement with your business-related videos.

So, you need to ensure that every video upload is intentional and directly targeted at your potential customers.

Types of video content

Shorts

Short video content is here to stay as long as the attention economy is here.

In order to gather a large amount of eyeballs, you need to create short content on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.

It’s the best way to create awareness about your personal brand and reach a broader audience.

It’s like casting a wide net across the sea and seeing which one sticks.

Let’s consider Ali Abdaal as an example. He’s a productivity expert and shares productivity hacks and other relevant stuff in his YouTube shorts.

Now, you might be curious about how you can resonate with people in a 30-second or 1-minute time frame.

The key is to use suitable words and the right kind of messaging to attract followers and keep them engaged.

Long-form videos (top-of-the-funnel content)

The aim of your short-form content is to drive people to your long-form content using retargeting or link-in-bio strategies.

👉 Obviously, you can’t convert a person just by letting them watch a short-form video. You need to make them watch a long-form video to connect with you and understand you as a person deeply.

Here are some tips you can consider:

• Build awareness: Create comprehensive understanding of your personality and values using long-form content.
• Focus on broader topics: You need to create a piece of content around broader topics that allow for exploration and engagement.
• Use storytelling techniques: Use really good storytelling techniques to make the content more relatable.
• Raise awareness: Create awareness about the product or the solution you’re promoting.

For example, consider Iman Gadzhi’s video on “How to build wealth from nothing”.

It’s a one-hour video where he explains how wealth is created through products and services, how to scale these to create a digital agency, ultimately promoting his program on agency acceleration.

Remarkably, this video is like an hour-long webinar, except he doesn’t need to be live, and it will be evergreen. Despite the generic title, the video has gathered around 472000 views (at the time of writing this).

💡 When people watch your generic top-of-the-funnel videos and are convinced that your solution is indeed what they want, you can direct them to watch some of your bottom-of-the-content videos.

Long-form videos (bottom-of-the-funnel content)

Let’s consider the same Iman Gadzhi as an example.

He has produced a series of videos around how to start a social media marketing agency. So, these videos are quite specific to agency-related stuff.

He can drive traffic from his top-of-the-funnel awareness videos to these action videos. These bunch of videos will create further interest and consideration for people to buy into the vehicle that is promoting, that is, starting an agency.

Because these videos are quite specific, he can further nurture and persuade the target audience to join this program.

🧠 You can see how this strategic approach involves guiding people from your short videos to long-form broader videos and eventually to bottom-of-the-funnel long-form videos, where you can more specifically educate and influence.

Community

Apart from selling your training programs, especially in the long-form content that you offer, it’s crucial to promote your community at all stages.

Unless you are hiding below the rock, you may already know that communities are here to stay and represent the future of digital marketing.

So, you need to build your community of super fans who can relate to you and resonate with you and who have some pain-pressing problems that your unique skills and unfair advantages can help overcome.

You can utilize online community platforms for the same.

Start and grow your community

You can encourage people to join your community, maybe a free community to expand content’s reach. Because you don’t want to restrict the top-of-the-funnel in all your videos.

👉 When they join your community, you can have a pre-qualification process. Here, people will fill out a form, and based on their responses, they will get exclusive access to either a free or private community.

This creates the feeling of exclusivity, making the community more engaging.

Once they are part of the community, you need to promote interaction between community members by organizing weekly calls and hangouts.

And you, as a community owner, should just be an orchestrator, right?

You need to make people in the community connect with each other, and that’s what creates a community fabric wherein the community self-sustains in the long run.

Then, you can step out of the equation and just orchestrate it and drive results to the community members.

Once your community discussions and dynamics are established, then you can consider monetizing your community.

There are 2 steps to monetization:

1. Identify recurring pain problems: You just need to analyze common questions and areas where people are struggling.
2. Develop coaching programs: Document and audit your observations to create a coaching program based on these needs.

It’s essential to tailor your offers based on community needs, especially when starting out.

If you already have an established brand with loyal customers, you can start a community and just host your courses in it, without needing a lot of groundwork.

My community platform recommendation

The best platform that I’ve found for hosting your community is Skool.

I’ve been contemplating for a long time whether to go with Skool or Circle for my community hosting needs, as both are backed by really experienced people.

But eventually, I opted for Skool because it is backed by Sam Ovens and Alex Hormozi, who are the OGs when it comes to coaching and consulting business.

With this platform, they share their valuable knowledge about growth hacking any online business.

For example, Skool is making proper use of concepts like network effect. The more communities get started in Skool, the more popular it becomes, and it will be the go-to destination for community hosting.

Again, I have my community and also courses hosted on Skool, and it is what I recommend.

If you have already chosen Skool for hosting your community, you might want to learn how to rapidly grow your community.

I believe in every industry, one winner takes it all, and in this case with communities, I think the winner would be Skool.