This morning, while I was looking through my briefings on AndersPink to find some content worthy articles to post for our followers on our social media channels, I came across this interesting article by Uzair Zharawala talking about his experience running a 90-day video marketing challenge.
The original idea behind the challenge was to grow their YouTube channel, get free traffic, reach 1,000 subscribers and get engagement, likes, and comments; good or bad!
Probably because of the timing of the post, the article really resonated with me. First because a few days ago, Instagram launched their IGTV which has triggered many conversations in the office as to how we were going to adapt our video production to create verticle videos for the platform; and second, because we were also trying to figure out how to grow our YouTube subscriber base.
It’s weird: Turbo Marketing was one of the first company in the automotive world to leverage videos to help dealers sell more cars. It’s been more than a decade now that we help car dealers create YouTube channels and the videos we generated for our dealers have collectively reached millions of views. We even had the privilege of collaborating with the King of Cars himself a few months after his show was on A&E primetime!
(Talk about learning from the best in the business!!)
But our YouTube subscriber count is horrible. As of the time of this blog, we are at 224.
Boooooo…
Our videos do generate quite some views, but we don’t seem to be able to get even close to the 1,000 subscriber mark. Not sure why? We have thousands of people following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn; but growing our YouTube subscriber base has been a mystery that eluded us up to this day.
Well, all that said, I think we’re going to embark on the 90-Day Video Challenge.
This afternoon, we’re creating the new editorial video calendar where we’re going to pick the subjects, topics and the keywords we’re going after for each video we will produce during the 90 days of the challenge.
We didn’t have to put together a list of equipment to produce the videos since this is already a core activity for us here at Turbo, but if you wanted to follow-us and do your own 90-Day challenge to grow your audience on YouTube or the new IGTV, I recommend you get:
I small tripod to hold your smartphone;
A Lavalier microphone to improve the quality of the sound;
Some lighting kit
And a green screen
All these items can be purchased on Amazon for less than $200 altogether.
If you need a tool to research your keywords, I recommend Moz.com.
If you don’t have Photoshop to create images or thumbnails for your videos, you can use Canva.com
And finally, to get the transcript of your videos so you can add these to the description to maximise the indexing of your videos, use a service like GoTrancript.com. It’s cheap, you’ll get the script within 24 hours, and all you have to send them is the link to your video.
Some of the questions we’re still juggling with at this point are the weekends. Are we going to focus our efforts on Mondays through Fridays, or will we come up with a plan to also shoot something on weekends? Not sure yet. But we’ll keep you in the loop as we find answers.
To be honest, I think I’m both excited and anxious about the challenge. It took us more than 18 months to build the habits to post diligently every day on all platforms. We’re now curating content twice daily on 30 Days To Sell Cars and Secret Car Marketing Tactics plus all our social media channels, but adding to the mix the production of one new video every day is overwhelming at this point in my mind.
I will make sure to keep you in the loop of our progress, successes and failures. I don’t know how many videos we’ll be able to produce during our 90-Day Challenge but one thing I am certain of, we’re going to learn a ton during the experiment.
If you’re also considering the challenge, let me know. I’d love to have a few accountability partners in the loop with me. I’m sure we can all learn from each other throughout the video challenge.
Well, let the games begin!
Sean Cassy is the Digital Marketing Specialist and Co-Owner of Turbo Marketing Solutions. You can contact him by email here or reach him by phone every weekday at Turbo Marketing’s head office