5 Top Video Blogs using Thought Leadership Marketing

Video blogging or vlogging is creating content primarily in a video format chronicling your thoughts, opinions and interests. From travel to beauty, anyone can be a vlogger, and anyone can provide thought leadership. Thought leadership is sharing one’s thoughts and opinions for people to learn and grow from. Watch five top video blogs that use thought leadership marketing to grow and engage their audience.

Ultimately your videos have a job to do. For entertainers, it’s to tell a story. For educators, it’s to provide knowledge. For marketers, it’s both. Tell your story while providing relevant and consistent knowledge to your audience with video.—Direct Images Interactive

Amy Schmittauer—SavvySexySocial

Amy Schmittauer is a video practitioner who uses her YouTube channel to provide video and social media marketing tips for beginners and experts alike. Especially with her Beginner’s Guide to Vlogging playlist, she opens up about tips and tricks as well as her own hindrances and struggles with using video. For example, if you’re stuck in the “should I vlog” rut, learn how to stop with excuses and start using video as well as how she overcame this rut through her own vlogging journey in the following video:

Gary Vaynerchuk—Ask Gary Vee

Gary Vaynerchuk is a big name in the marketing world especially when it comes to social media marketing. Gary is all about content, content, content. And in order to get your brand out there for others to care about you, you have to provide relevant content on platforms that your audience is on even if you don’t know how to use it personally. From Facebook to Snapchat, it’s time to become practitioners by creating personalized messages in order to establish and nurture community engagement with your audience.

But what if you don’t know how to use Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube for your business? How can you possibly become a practitioner and ultimately a thought leader in your industry?

That’s where Gary Vee steps in, and more specifically, how he steps in. And that is through his videos. From YouTube to Facebook, Instagram to Twitter, Gary has nurtured his thought leadership position by addressing and solving the needs of his audience while providing other industry and personal insight through his show, Ask Gary Vee. The videos below are just a taste of the type of thought leadership content Gary and his team put out. But more specifically, the following videos focus on recycling old content, optimizing hashtags, and native video storytelling with Facebook:

Marie Forleo—Marie TV

Named by Oprah as a thought leader for the next generation, Marie Forleo is life coach and entrepreneur who is all about helping you create a business and a life that you love. Though she hosts courses like Copy Cure and B-School, she mainly provides her insight through her show, Marie TV.

On Marie TV, she hosts weekly Q&A Tuesdays, answering the hot button issues from her audience, and interviews with industry leaders and celebrities like Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Elizabeth Gilbert, and so much more. Her Q&As tend to be shorter videos in comparison to her long form interviews. However, seeing and hearing your favorite leader or celebrity provide answers to your deepest questions is definitely something worth tuning in. She also creates a tweetable within each Q&A video—using bite sized information as shareables for others to link back to. For tips on how to make your content relevant, personal and contagious, watch these videos:

Tim Schmoyer—Video Creators

If you really want to understand video marketing especially YouTube marketing, Tim Schmoyer is the man to help you out. Mainly through his YouTube channel, Video Creators, he aims to help video creators of all types, newbies and pros, to understand the ins and outs of YouTube video marketing: from production to SEO or search engine optimization to distribution and how to get more views within the first 24 hours that your video goes live. From interviews to his own industry insight, Tim has definitely provided consistent thought leadership content to his audience as shown by the following video:

Buzzfeed—Buzzfeed Tasty

Finally, if you haven’t heard of Buzzfeed, where have you been?

From their online quizzes, various niche specific blog posts and even online video, Buzzfeed may be the biggest brand benefiting from the use of video, social media and millennials. With over 5 channels on YouTube varying in different types of content, Buzzfeed establishes thought leadership through their channel Tasty. Tasty provides recipes and other cooking-related insight for its audience of a million and counting. From aspiring chefs to foodies, you just can’t help using these bite-sized pieces of insight in your own kitchen especially tips like these for the upcoming holiday season:

Key Takeaways from the 5 Thought Leaders

• Keep creating: Though it may seem rough starting out, keep creating your videos. The reason why you may want to give up is because you do not have a strong purpose. Establish a purpose for why you want to create videos and use it as your motivation for your video marketing journey.
• Recycle old content: Content can be transformed into any format like how a blog post can become a video script and vice versa. Whether you’re expanding on a topic or revisiting an old one and updating past insights, your content can still be used for future video ideas.
• Distribute everywhere: Break up and distribute your content using video. Create a teaser for social media. Or edit the outtakes into a behind-the-scenes video for your Instagram. Share your YouTube or Vimeo video link on Twitter or Facebook or upload it natively to Facebook. Simply put, wherever your audience is be sure that your content reaches them by doing your due diligence and getting it out there.
• Use your video description box wisely: Add links so that your viewers can watch more of your content. If you’ve made references to articles from your website or someone else’s website, add those links in there too. Add keywords that are relevant to the pain points of your audience. And make sure your audience knows your vlogging schedule by mentioning it in the description.
• Provide relevant insight: Ultimately, your videos have a job to do. For entertainers, it’s to tell a story. For educators, it’s to provide knowledge. For marketers, it’s both. Tell your story while providing relevant and consistent knowledge to your audience with video.

These are just a few top video blogs that are circulating the internet right now, but we know there are more out there. So share your favorite vlogging thought leader in the comments below or mention us @DirectImages on Twitter. And if you are a vlogging thought leader who has industry knowledge to spare, visit our In-Site Thought Hive and get featured by providing your insight.