We’ve created demand for The B2B Incubator using our podcast and LinkedIn from the ground up. It’s now delivering regular pipeline and revenue for us. But we want to prove that we can do it again, so we’re starting from scratch on YouTube!
In this episode we show you how we’re building our YouTube channel. We’re just getting started, so we’re sharing our results so far and our plan to grow.
Key to this episode is a framework for creating demand that you can apply to any channel. We talk about key principles like deeply understanding your customers, creating helpful content regularly, and how to scale it using internal and external resources.
Listen to the episode and learn:
- Why we chose YouTube
- Why it’s the right time for us to explore a new channel
- Our results so far
- Mistakes we’ve made so far
- How we’re using YouTube shorts and longer format videos
- How we’re improving our content creation and production to be more platform native
Tune in!
Watch The Episode
Transcript
[00:00:00]George: Welcome back to the B2B Playbook listeners, Kevin. [00:01:00] Today we’re talking about how you and I at the B2B Playbook, how we’re tackling YouTube as a new channel, and we’re doing it so our marketers, our listeners, can see our strategy, how we’re doing it, how we’re measuring its success, and the mistakes that we have made, so our listeners and viewers can avoid it.
Kevin, YouTube. Like we don’t normally talk about how to leverage particular platforms, but we’re making an exception today because what we’re gonna talk about today fits very nicely into our fourth B of our five B’s framework. Tell the listeners why is that.
Kev: Yes, George. That’s right. It fits really nicely into the fourth B of A five B’s framework, and that’s why we’re talking about it now, and that’s because at this stage we’re optimizing our workflow. Just like you listeners, if you get to the fourth B we’re at that point where we’re optimizing our workflow.
We’re trying to get more. Bang for our buck when it comes to the time that we invest into the playbook, the podcast, the incubator. [00:02:00] And now that we have those fundamentals in place that we talked about in the first three Bs, we started on LinkedIn, we have a podcast as our primary channels, we’re looking to expand into a new one, and that’s YouTube.
And that’s perfect for addressing NB better. the season we’ve talked about how to apply our framework to starting another new channel as you have a couple of channels already in place and you’re looking to add another channel to your workflow. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with YouTube and we want to show you guys how we’re doing it as a great example of what the framework looks like in practice.
And people might look at our followers on LinkedIn and think well, yeah. I’m starting from scratch. I don’t have that first channel or whatever it might be, but we started there too. And now we’re going to try and add again another new channel so listeners, don’t be disheartened if you need to start that first channel, go back through the framework.
We talk about how we started on LinkedIn. We talk about how we really use the podcast as that primary channel to. [00:03:00] Push out on LinkedIn, and now that we’re adding a new channel, this is really be better stage. So keep that in mind. Maybe don’t give yourself too much pressure to jump straight into YouTube.
This is definitely our second or third channel that we’re looking at.
George: Let me just reemphasize that Kevin, like when we started, maybe must be 18 months ago, we had barely any connections on LinkedIn. Certainly none that were in the B2B marketing world that were relevant. We had zero listeners to our podcast. We had zero traffic to our very bad website. And we started from absolute scratch and we’ve just been following our own playbook religiously for the next 18 months.
We’ve been doing it without really any budget to help accelerate it at all. And we’re getting really good results from our podcast, from our LinkedIn. People are coming and joining our B2B incubator program. They’re asking for more of our services, but we wanna show that we can do that again in a new channel.
Our YouTube Strategy in Practice
George: What we’re gonna show you on [00:04:00] YouTube today, it’s not gonna blow your mind. Listeners, you’re not gonna look at our activity over the last 28 days cause that’s about how long we’ve been at it for and go, oh my God, those results are incredible. But we are gonna show you what’s realistic if you jump into it and we’re are gonna show you the strategy that we are gonna follow religiously.
And it’s a strategy that we know that if we just keep executing it, we are gonna build something that’s very worth.
Kev: That’s it listeners. It’s built on hours of blood, sweat and tears and listening to George’s voice as I edit the podcasts. But if that doesn’t drive you crazy, hopefully you’ll get to where we are, which is adding another channel. And as George said no real paid stand behind that.
And you can do it, but you just need to apply a framework of some. Hopefully ours to save you a bit of time and apply it religiously. So I think George, the best place to start is maybe to look at why we selected YouTube as a channel.
George: Yeah. And listen carefully to this for listeners and viewers if you’re [00:05:00] watching, because as we said, we don’t like to talk about particular platforms because they tend to come and go and instead we like to get people to listen and. To and apply our framework, and then you can take that framework and apply it to your own circumstance.
Selecting YouTube: Audience Research and Business Goals Alignment
George: So why did we select YouTube? We didn’t select YouTube because everyone says you have to be on YouTube. That’s where everyone’s learning, that’s what everyone’s doing. We finally had some time to push out into another channel. So Kevin and I were doing the podcast, we’re on LinkedIn. That’s really where we dedicated most of our time.
And we got to a point where we streamlined that enough that we went, we actually have enough time in our day to add in another channel. I, my gut feeling Kev at that time was maybe TikTok but I didn’t know. So I just did what we would recommend all of our listeners do, what we recommend our customers do, which is talk to your dream customers.
And for us, that’s talking to B2B marketers and saying, Hey guys, where is it that you actually like to go and learn? What platforms is it that [00:06:00] you go to to go and learn in depth about things that are relevant to your work? I ran a poll on LinkedIn. We got a whole lot of feedback and it turned out to be YouTube, so that was confirmed by the poll, but it was also confirmed by customer interviews and listener interviews that we conducted over a few week period.
Kev: ness after the customer interviews and polls, which already pointed us towards YouTube which is that audience research piece. We also looked at our business goals again, so you might remember listeners from the framework that we talked about. When we add on another channel, we need to go back to business goals.
We need to go back to what we’re hoping to achieve here with a new channel and for us. It’s still very much educational content on a framework that’s very much evergreen, and it’s quite important. It’s an evergreen framework that needs to be in place for a while to come. And so if we look specifically at the choices we had at the time, YouTube versus TikTok, for example, YouTube was a much more evergreen medium.
The [00:07:00] content would stay there. We can then link to it and more easily resurface it when we need to. And it’s more likely to appear in things like crps. It’s more searchable. So that means, if someone types in a question that’s relevant to something that we’ve answered in our content. YouTube ranks well, so YouTube might come up first.
It doesn’t so much do that in TikTok. People do search in TikTok. Don’t get us wrong. We understand that and we know that it’s a very helpful learning medium as well. But for something that’s a bit more evergreen, like our framework, we wanted to have our content next in that medium that is more aligned to that business goal of having evergreen educational content that we can keep going back to and our listeners and our viewers can keep going back to as well.
George: well said Kev. It, it aligns with our way that we plan on being helpful. The first three fundamental bees of Be ready, be helpful, be seen. Our way of being helpful is by presenting this framework to you guys, and it is an evergreen framework, and as Kevin said, YouTube as a channel [00:08:00] really aligns with how we’re choosing to be helpful. It’s also so good, Kev, because I think it’s the platform that people go to to be educated in depth, like long form content, which is what you and I really specialize here in at the B2B playbook. Does really well on YouTube. People go there to learn. But I also love Kevin that they’ve introduced YouTube shorts as like their TikTok competitor and that also met our business objective of how can we reach more B2B market.
And I suppose for us, like this was a good way of simultaneously getting that long form content out there. And then with not so much effort of having to take on another whole new platform, we could also get those goals of expanding our reach with those B2B marketers with YouTube shorts.
Kev: That’s it listeners. So you can see that in applying our framework, we landed on YouTube for a variety of different reasons. One from the audience research side, but also the other one from an internal [00:09:00] perspective. It’s better aligned to our business goals and how we wanted to. Actually deliver out on those business goals.
And then the next consideration was why was it the right time for us to move to YouTube? And this is something that George already touched on, but as mentioned, we’ve created a lot of systems for the podcasts and for LinkedIn content as well. And for the engagement that George does on LinkedIn, we systemize a lot of the backend things over time and we do it piece by piece.
So it did take us, 18. 24 months to actually get to a point where we started getting some time back and as crazy lunatics as we are, we decided to jump right back in and invest that time into a new channel. But finally it was that time to launch a new channel where our dream customers were already hanging out.
That was more evergreen, that was more aligned or just as aligned as our primary channels with where our business goals are going and pointing towards. And. [00:10:00] Importantly collects views forever. Whereas LinkedIn Post disappear after a few days. We started to see that. Our primary channel of distributing content on LinkedIn is a great channel for nurturing.
It’s a great channel for engaging and re-engaging and sustaining those relationships that we have there in the network. But the content itself, it goes away fairly quickly. And we needed a better place to house the content for those who are more visual learners, for those who wanted to engage in a different.
George: Yeah, well said. Care. I mean, LinkedIn is a platform that is becoming more and more social by nature. When things are more social I guess people are less likely to trade that. Dopamine hit of constantly scrolling, going from post to post with giving you the attention that your content really deserves on the platform.
So if anything’s longer than like a minute or two, Kev unless it’s hyper relevant and just an incredible video, people aren’t gonna bother with it. So we had to [00:11:00] go to a platform like YouTube to post this really valuable long form. Well, Let’s dig into some of our results so far, Kevin.
Early YouTube Results Share and Early YouTube Wins
George: And We’re screen sharing now. For the people who are listening and not watching, hopefully we’re gonna look back on this one day, Kevin, and laugh at the results that we have so far. Hopefully this isn’t the ceiling for us but for those who are watching Kev just wanted, and I wanna be really upfront and really honest about where we’re at in our YouTube journey.
We’ve been at it for, I think, I don’t know, three weeks, maybe four weeks. And so far we’ve had 4,600 views, but that includes our YouTube shorts. So take that with a grain of salt, about 24 hours of watch time, meaning the amount of, time cumulatively people have spent watching our videos.
With a grand total of 37 subscribers. And what else do we have, Kev here? That’s really the key metrics that we have so far. What’s really exciting, Kev, is in the first two and a half to three weeks, we actually received [00:12:00] three applications for the B2B incubator that cited YouTube as where they first heard about us. I know for a fact that one of them went on to turn into revenue. They actually went ahead and bought our self serve program, and the other two are considering joining our cohort. Not a bad return for a little bit of investment into YouTube, and a real great sign for us that if we continue to invest in this channel and we keep doing what we’re doing, that’s going to continue.
So look, 37 subscribers doesn’t look great, but Kev already worth the investment.
Kev: Yeah, I think definitely for us it’s showing very positive signs and I think listeners, there’s a couple of things to call out here. As Josh said, we’ve only been at it for three, four weeks on YouTube. It’s very low numbers that’s how it looks after a month or two of. These kind of activities in a new channel don’t be phased.
If you’re not really getting traction as quickly as [00:13:00] something like paid ads or anything like that, if you’ve been through one channel already, which hopefully you have at this point, then you’ll know that the beginning is always slow, but you need to stick at it for it to really grow into something that’s really having a big impact on your business.
Network Effect of Adding Additional Channels: Quicker Signs of Success
Kev: And I think it’s important to call out as well. Even though the numbers are low, as George said, we are already seeing some results that’s making it pay off. But it’s important to note again that this is our second, third, maybe fourth channel if you count like email. So if you think about it in that sense, when you add another new channel later on in the Be Better stage, it is a bit easier to see those early signs of success because there’s a network effect around that.
People might be coming in from other channels. They might have heard the incubator first on YouTube, but maybe they’re already listening to the podcast or maybe they’ve seen posts from George before and that’s what made them go and watch something on YouTube by us as well. So it’s [00:14:00] important to.
It might be even slower in your first channel, but when you get to these other channels, things can be a little quicker to kick off. And as George said, hopefully we go from there.
Quality vs Quantity: Starting New Channels Right
Kev: But much like our podcast, much like our LinkedIn, we’re really focused on quality rather than quantity. The quantity comes later.
Even though this, these numbers are small, it’s obviously hitting the right people. It’s obviously hitting. The right audience who this content is resonating with, and that’s more important. And the science for that is, we are getting those metrics of success coming up already. But it’s important to realize that’s what you should be focused on when you drive new channels.
It’s not just about these metrics that we’re showing you, it’s more about is there alignment with your audience? What are the signals for that that quality in your content, that quality and engagement with your.
George: Spot on Kev, and it comes back to, again, aligning with your business goals. We probably could have got more views, Kev. We probably could have got more subscribers if we [00:15:00] talked about marketing trends, if we talked about. We did a whole bunch of YouTube shorts about how to use ai and yes, we did an episode on ai, but we did it within our framework.
But we have really aligned what we’re doing on YouTube with what our business goals are and our business goals are to drive more people to the B2B incubator to get more people through our program. The B2B incubator is all about our five B’s. And so guess what, that’s what we share on the, on YouTube, on our YouTube channel, is we’re sharing our five Bs framework.
So yes, the volume is low, but the quality is high. And the reason the quality is high is because it ties back to our business goals, ties back to our final outcome. We’re not just trying to get attention for the sake of attention.
Mistakes with YouTube to Avoid: Starting Too Early and Neglecting Goals
Kev: it, George. And I think listeners right now, it might be interesting for us to look at, we’ve looked at some of the things that’s been going well or, at least the trend of what they’re currently tracking towards. But maybe we can talk about what are some of the mistakes that we made when we first approached YouTube.[00:16:00]
And it’s something that George can talk to more because he’s more in the day-to-day of looking after YouTube and making sure everything is working well. Answering any rude comments with a like-minded manner. No, just kidding. But I think the first one to point out most importantly is that, We actually looked at YouTube much earlier on in the piece.
We were actually thinking about doing YouTube instead of the podcast when we first began trying to share the B2B playbook. I don’t know if you remembered George, but we had that discussion very early on. We even recorded a few episodes. We might have mentioned that on the podcast before. But I think we realized pretty early on that we’re not actually applying the framework.
As we’ve talked about it, we are not going into enough depth on looking at our business goals, on looking to our dream customers and what they need and what they’re asking for. And we quickly pivoted into podcasts in the early days. But I think that is a very important lesson. [00:17:00] First off, to learn from our mistake listeners.
Don’t just dive head in into what you think will work. What you assume is what the audience is after. Make sure you back it up with looking at your business goals, tying it back to your business goals, tying it back to actual customer research or potential customers. Feedback on what you’re hoping to do, and using that information to guide you on where to go.
George: I remember that first video was a disaster. I remember when we went to your place, Kevin, I remember you cooked me a beautiful pasta and uh, by the time. We were done procrastinating. We finally sat down and we said, okay, let’s go ahead and record this. And I think you and I just had this realization when we watched it back that we were like, oh my God, it looks like we’re just reading off a screen.
And we’re like, I don’t know how we’re gonna do this. How we’re gonna commit to this? We had no system in place. We had no confidence at all. And so then we went for probably the format that was gonna be easiest for us to tackle something that didn’t [00:18:00] have video, something where we could be a little bit more prepared until we were super comfortable with just talking ad lib and talking about our framework.
That’s why the podcast suited us so well. And it’s really only now that we’re, I think, really ready for YouTube, Kevin. The five B’s framework is so ingrained in us. We’ve had so much practice speaking about it. We’re true subject matter experts in it. And so we can add a bit of video and it’s not gonna hurt us too much.
Yeah.
Kev: that’s it. And over the time of building the podcast, we’ve been able to build a bit of a community particularly yourself, George, and we’ve been able to get that feedback around. Would you actually like to see some of our content on YouTube? Is it or any other channel that you would like?
Is this now the right time to go on another channel? Is the demand out there? And once we got to that point, then we let the audience guide us as to which channel and when to go after that channel.
Mistake 2: Repurposing Content for New Channels
George: Kev, one other mistake that we’ve made was even just more recently, I think it was the last few months [00:19:00] of 2022, Kev, last year when I was saying to you, I really think we should get on YouTube based on what our dream listeners are saying to us based on this poll. I’m gonna put together some original content.
I thought I had to really create some original content to make it worth it for YouTube, because we’re not just competing against other B2B marketers or other vendors for attention like we are on LinkedIn. We are really competing against the whole entertainment category of YouTube. And I just thought that I had to create like whiteboard sessions that were really interactive that were really entertaining.
And I even made a handful of videos and I just remember coming to you, Kev, and I was pretty stressed and I was like, Don’t see how I’m gonna be able to continue this with everything that we’re doing. Like we’re running an agency, we’re running the B2B incubator, we’re doing all the work for the B2B playbook.
How on earth I’m gonna throw an extra couple of videos in the mix a month, like it’s just not sustainable.
Kev: Oh, I remember that. And I think it’s a, [00:20:00] it’s an important one that we learned and got some confirmation and reinforcement recently in our interview with Jess Cook. Is that, You can just repurpose a lot of your content, and that’s what we’re doing. We’re following our framework as well in repurposing content in a sustainable way where we just look at the same content.
We have that pillar piece of content that we would chop down into different pieces and share it in different mediums. And in this particular case, YouTube, which we already record audio. We are looking at each other anyways when we do these recordings for the podcast. So why don’t we add video to the mix very easily in that respect, and then we can just repurpose that pillar piece of content.
And there that’s how we started that process of creating content for YouTube. And obviously George has worked still put in a lot of time to make it tailored . With different overlays, with different formats, intros, outros, things like that, [00:21:00] and cutting things together. But it’s much more manageable than coming up with original content because really that pillar piece of content is what we’re trying to share.
That is the point of YouTube. That is the point of our podcast. That is the point of, or our written content as well. Let’s share it again. Let’s share it in a different format that people who aren’t as comfortable with podcasts or aren’t as comfortable with blogs, they want to consume it in a different way.
Let’s do that in a video format on YouTube. And I think that was how we started that process for getting YouTube content.
George: That’s it, Kevin. You gotta have a process for taking that pillar piece of content and turning it into whatever it needs to be. Maybe we should share more about our own approach, Kev. And our project we’re taking to YouTube. We’ve already spoken about it a little bit so far, but just as a reminder, listeners and viewers, our goal is really to educate and entertain, and that should be the goal of all your be helpful material.
[00:22:00] It’s gotta start with that. Dream customer first. And the best way to build a relationship with them is to educate them and to entertain them. We spoke about how I had that freak out where I was like, oh my God, Kevin, I’ve gotta create all this original content for YouTube. And then we just realized that we didn’t because we already had a show that had heaps of value and we could just repurpose our existing video podcast into YouTube.And now if we take these recordings that we. And they’re normally about 40 minutes, and we turn it into a 30 minute YouTube video, and then we normally get eight to 10 YouTube shorts per week. So that gives us one YouTube video and eight to 10 YouTube shorts per week to post. Now YouTube shorts give us a lot more reach and the long form.
YouTube gives us that depth to build those relationships with those dream customers. The YouTube shorts probably really help us for reach a new audience. And again, the longer form video is where we [00:23:00] really develop that relationship. And I think there’s something very powerful, Kev, about video because people really get to see your face.
We’re sharing our screens, we’re sharing our process. It’s very intimate and I think that’s why despite only having 37 subscribers, we had, three things in our pipeline from YouTube.
Kev: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And it’s something that took a bit of convincing listeners for George to get me on. I’m a naturally more shy person, don’t like to be seen or even heard for that matter. So the podcast was already a stretch, but yeah, I obviously once George showed me the demand that was there, once George showed me, the sort of connections that you can make with this different medium.
It’s like a no-brainer and we really have to jump on it if nothing else, but for the demand that our dream customers and our existing community already have for something like this
Taking Baby Steps with Your Process
Kev: else you can learn from our approach listeners is to take baby steps with your process particularly as you’re getting started. So you can see with us [00:24:00] we had those freak out moments as well. We had to get through different hurdles to get started, but it’s all about taking baby steps to get going.
It doesn’t have to be incredible from the first video. Processes are built over time and optimized over. Go back to the first episode of our podcast and you’ll see how far we come, how bad that first edit was, both in terms of like quality of edit and just sound and everything like that, and how we presented the information.
I’m sure we’ll look back at these first few YouTube videos in the same way very soon and feel like, oh, what were we doing then? But that’s okay. That’s part of the learning process. That’s part of building a process that you need to really get. And we are. In that process right now, we’re upgrading the production over time as we take those baby steps, one after another to be more suited to YouTube.
So that means using more hooks, different intros and outros, and changing scenes between different points that we’re making and having drawings on the screen now [00:25:00] that George does and I’m sure one day we’ll have much more attractive thumbnails for the clickthrough rate on YouTube.
So all those different channel nuances that will come through over time as we start to develop that more deeper understanding of particular channels and how people are using it so we can best communicate what we want through that channel as
George: Kev, just to come back to that whole thing of it’s okay if your first couple of episodes aren’t that great. I think that’s how every entertaining or educational content, media brand, whatever starts, like you just have to get started. I don’t know if you’ve watched the first few episodes of Seinfeld.
They’re like not that great. It had a really lackluster reception. Elaine wasn’t even part of the first handful of episodes, and the show just gets better and better as they realize what parts work, what parts did the audience respond to. But it just gives you a base to continue to build on so you don’t have to get everything right from the [00:26:00] beginning.
The most important thing is that it’s founded on something that you know that your dream customers will find interest. And then just develop from there.
But getting back to our approach and our process, Kevin I think we have, we shared this, I think we might have shared this in an episode or two before.
Kev: I think we
George: Yeah. But I’m just sharing again, listeners our process of how we. From our video podcast, and then we go to YouTube and we release the short form videos on YouTube and the long format on YouTube.
And then from there we take the transcript, we turn that into LinkedIn posts, into carousels for LinkedIn. It gives us about three article ideas. For every episode that we do, and we’ve also just noted some of the tools that we have along the way. And the really crucial thing here, ke, is with this approach is other than the video podcast, this part right here where you and I sit down with each other, despite you being on the other side of the world, [00:27:00] and this part right here where we’re talking to each other, this is the only part that can’t be outsourced.
Everything else post-production can be outsourced to someone because it’s just repurposing what is already. Created, and that’s really Kev, how we’re going to scale this process. We can’t really scale our one to one interactions, but we can scale the repurposing of what happens after. And that’s how we turn our one pillar piece of content into something that gets viewed 20 times the amount as if we had just released that pillar piece of content.
So that’s our process of how we go from our recording to YouTube.
Kev: Yeah, and I think listeners, it’s actually pretty interesting to point out that. Before we started YouTube, we didn’t get the transcript as easily with our tools that we edited podcast with. So doing those LinkedIn posts, doing those articles, it was actually harder without the transcript. It’s actually improved our whole process now.[00:28:00]
Doing YouTube. So you’ll find along the way, listeners, these different synergies that you can actually pull out from adding new channels as well. But just make sure you keep working on your processes. Don’t sleep on that. There’s old processes that can feed into new ones, new ones that improve.
Old ones. Make sure to review the whole process of content creation.
Building on New Processes and Improving Them
George: And Kev, something that we’re doing to refine our approach. It started that we’ve actually never really got before, but YouTube gives you retention and that just shows you over time what percentage of your audience drops off while they’re watching your video. As you can imagine, it’s a pretty tough environment to operate in on YouTube.
I’ve just pulled up an example of a YouTube short. The video’s 45 seconds long. Our average of you duration on this particular one o only 13 seconds. Kev. And so we can see on the graph here that a lot of people tend to drop off around that ten second mark. A handful, like 15% seem to watch through till the end, but then we can then take that data and go what happened?
Like, [00:29:00] why did people drop off after 10 seconds? Were we too boring? Did we not change the scenes fast enough? Was the content of what we were saying boring at that stage? Were we not delivering enough? And then we can work that back into our process. Like maybe when we go and write our show notes, Kev, or our notes that we’re gonna refer to when we do these videos, maybe we need to make it a little bit more snappy.
Maybe we need to write more hooks. Maybe we need to edit it better after so it flows faster and faster. Like the rest of, YouTube shorts do. So it’s great to. That feedback for retention, and it gives us so much more insight as to what it is that’s really capturing people’s attention.
Combining Data and Insights for Audience Alignment
Kev: Well, Listeners, like everything else when it comes to data, make sure you talk to your dream customers as well. I’m pretty sure George is doing this already. But we’re going out and talking to the people who hopefully are viewing our videos. Even the shorts,
and seeing what their version is of that, why are they dropping off? We’re not just relying on the data and guessing at it by looking at it. [00:30:00] We’re checking in with that qualitative data to make sure we’re on the right path.
George: And Kev, look, like, it’s still early days for us, right? So those retention graphs, they could indicate that maybe only 15% of our audience is relevant at the moment. And maybe, the 70, 80% that’s swiped away, maybe they’re just not into B2B marketing, because that’s the reality with YouTube as well, is it’s more up to the algorithm as to who sees your content.
Optimizing SEO in YouTube Show Notes
George: But there are things that you can do to optimize your content. And you can do seo and we do that with our show notes, Kevin. So in our show notes, and again, we’re just showing this for our viewers, we’re showing you exactly what our show notes look like. We have an introduction as to what the topic is about.
We put our real keywords in there. We have chapters because chapters are also surfaced in Google results too. So it’s easy to navigate for us and for Google, which Google loves. We also, in every video, Kev, talk about the B2B incubator. We have a little section in our description about the B2B incubator, which links to our page and says, are you a [00:31:00] B2B marketer in a small team?
We’ve got this program that gives you the strategy, the tools, the templates to build your demand engine. And we, of course, use some relevant hashtags like b2b, B2B marketing, demand generation, and so on. So just a little bit. Into our process and yeah, how we’re optimizing everything that we’re doing so it finds the right people.
Kev: That’s it, listeners, but all this is based on having that pillar piece of content. So if you don’t have pillar content, just go back to starting with deeply understanding your customers. Go back to those earlier episodes where we talk about what are those questions that you need to put to your dream customers?
And find out what those pain points are that you can help them with, and answer those questions and ask them what format they want that content in. And that begins to form the basis of your pillar piece of content. Some things you can try here is go to other influential people
That Your dream customers are already following and see what questions they’re asking in the comments section, whether that’s on LinkedIn or TikTok or [00:32:00] YouTube or wherever that might be. Write down some of the most popular ones if you’re struggling to get that contact with your dream customers right off the bat and start making videos by answering them to demonstrate your expertise, because with that initial push, you can then refine your understanding over time as well.
Hang Out Where Your Dream Customers Are
George: That’s it. Go and hang out where your dream customers are already. You will learn a ton and just try and be helpful. That’s as simple as we can keep it. Okay, Kev tools that we’re using, again, if we don’t normally discuss tools, but I think it’s worth sharing for any listeners right now who are trying to build the demand engine.
Tools We’re Currently Using for YouTube
George: What we are using, we use riverside.fm to record. It’s really high quality in terms of recording audio and video. That then gets dumped into Descript for Kevin to go ahead and edit. To make life easier, we’ve actually built templates for each platform that we repurpose that video podcast to.
So I’m just screen sharing again for our viewers, but I’m just showing them exactly [00:33:00] what our templates look like within Descript.
So we went through and we created a bunch of scenes For LinkedIn, video for YouTube, short for TikTok, and for our long format YouTube video. It allows us to create engaging videos without having to reinvent the wheel every time. It’s just like any production, right?
There’s a limited number of overlays, camera angles, whatever it is that you can apply to whatever action is happening for us as. No, it was actually six very basic scenes. So one scene is like a multi-camera view of Kevin and I speaking to each other, another scene, which is just Kevin or myself, just by themselves.
Another one where there’s a quote, another one where there’s like a question that we’re answering and talking about. And one more, which is an introductory video where Kevin and I’s faces just appear on the screen and it’s a little bit more fun. The point is you can go through and create these templates, so this process can become way faster and again, become something that [00:34:00] you can outsource and you don’t have to find an expert video person to outsource this too.
Kev: Kudos to you, George, for putting all those together. They’re looking very nice, and I’m sure it took a bit of time to put together, but as you said, it’s one of those process things that makes it much faster going forward. And just one more note on Riverside before we move on as well. It has that great feature of once the recording is done, the recordings are done locally.
So if someone has. Shaky internet connection on a particular day or particular location. They can upload that later at a different time by going back into browser window link. So very important for those of us who are recording across continents, time zones different locations and different degrees of uh, internet connection, most importantly.
George: then Kev we use Canva for a bunch of things to create our YouTube video thumbnails. We use it for that. In terms of equipment that we use to record, Kevin, I just use my iPhone. I’ve used the Riverside app. I’ve got it turned around and [00:35:00] facing me. That’s as cheap as it gets, because I already needed an iPhone.
Perhaps not as cheap if you have to buy the iPhone first. But it, look, the quality is terrific. Kev, what are you using?
Kev: I’m just using my laptop computer camera. So the webcam on there, it’s slightly newer, so it’s a bit better. It’s one of the new newer MacBook Ads, but, the camera isn’t anything out of this world. I think it’s well known that the cameras are a bit lacking in the max but it still pumps out great.
George: And then in terms of microphones, Kev I don’t even know what mine is, but it was like a hundred bucks or something and it sounds perfectly fine. Descript also has an AI voice enhancer. To get rid of some of the echo because my room is definitely not optimized for a sound studio.
Remember how echoy those first episodes were? They were terrible. I was trying to put like pillows up against the window. I was hiding on the blankets. It was impossible to try and find decent audio. You apply a bit of this AI voice stuff to it and it sounds [00:36:00] pretty decent.
Kev: yeah, that’s right. George. Remember when you were in a fort and I was in a closet? And look how far we’ve come.
George: And then in terms of keeping track of, everything we do when we record what the process is beyond it, we just use Google Sheets. We don’t pay for anything. I know Notion is free. People use notion. We just keep it super simple. We have our schedule of when we record, when things are edited, when we post things, we manage it all in a Google sheet, and we just write our podcast notes in a shared Google.
Keep it simple, keep it cheap, and make sure you can just stick to it.
Kev: And importantly listeners as you be better, keep improving those processes. Document what you’re doing, document and improve those processes so that down the track, when you have more resources, you can in fact outsource it or insource it.
Next Step: Outsourcing the YouTube Editing Process
George: right, Kev. The next steps for us in a YouTube journey is probably looking at starting to outsource some of this editing process. Now we’ve got the templates down. Really anyone can do it. The editing process is a lot of copying and [00:37:00] pasting. You don’t have to be a professional video expert to to do a good job of editing it.
So we’re probably gonna look to outsource. We also need to create some interstitial in the longer form video care to talk about the B2B incubator program and educate people on it, right? Like we link to it in our description, but most people aren’t gonna read the description. It’s mostly Google’s algorithm that’s reading your description, but to raise more awareness of our actual product.
Probably like a minute and a half. In, maybe a little bit longer in, we’ll have a cutaway, just like other programs do for an ad break. We’re actually gonna talk about the B2B incubator, who it’s for, who’s benefiting from it, and have a call to action there.
Kev: Yeah, I think listeners, when you do these sort of things, it’s to keep in mind that you’re still being helpful. So we’re putting it early on to make sure that people who aren’t interested move away fairly quickly. They can easily skip over that or move away from the video if it’s not relevant to them.
But if it is, then they can get their help quite early on. And yeah, it’s just about aligning again [00:38:00] with being helpful with your business goals and what you’re trying to achieve in a particular channel.
Measuring YouTube Success: Revenue, Subscribers, Traffic, and Retention
George: Alright, Kev, how we’re measuring success. How do we know if YouTube’s a channel that we should continue investing in? And there’s a few metrics that we’re gonna look at, and I think ultimately the most important one is revenue and opportunities. Again, if you were just starting out on this helpful content journey, this is more of a lagging metric, because we put the work into other channels, we did see revenue and opportunities come from YouTube quite quickly. Again, it’s unlikely that you will if you’re just getting started on this helpful content journey. Another important metric for us, Kevin, is subscribers. Ultimately people subscribing to you.
It’s an indicator that they want to continue and follow. Along with your content, if they don’t wanna miss what you have next. I don’t really take it to heart, Kevin, because I know that there’s a lot of people that I follow that I just for some reason haven’t bothered hitting that subscribe button to but you do want to on aggregate, see that [00:39:00] subscriber number climbing in the right direction.
Kev: Yeah, I think George on revenue again, you know, Advocate for marketers, demand gen marketers, any sort of marketers really take responsibility for revenue and for revenue impact and pipeline impact , and all things to do with the bottom line. But at the same time, as George said, you have to be realistic with when that accountability comes in , with how much weight you put to that at different stages of your growth when you’re just starting out, particularly in your first channel.
It’s really unrealistic. To look at that because you’ll always logically kill it before it really gets somewhere that you need it to go. So keep that in mind. Go back to the episode where we talk about the different stages of growth and the sort of metrics that you need to look at for different stages.
If you want some more guidance on that, but. Definitely agree with George. At some point it needs to go back to revenue opportunities, and as George said, if we’re looking at that subscribers, it’s almost a vanity metric. But it can be a good [00:40:00] indicator at different points in that journey of the growth that you’re seeing from the channel, whether it’s moving in the right direction.
And then there’s also halo traffic to the website and podcast listens that you can have a look at as. Is your trends in traffic to the website and podcast listeners and subscribers growing? If it is, then great. That means potentially YouTube is having an impact. If you’re doing mostly the same things in other channels, that’s worth looking at to see if there’s a halo knock on effect because these things don’t work in silos.
As you will know, they all work together, so you do have to take into account knock on effects. There are important indicators of whether this new channel is working as well.
George: And care all that halo traffic, we just had our biggest month ever in terms of podcast listens. We had about 30% more than we’ve ever had before, and we’ve also just done our first month of YouTube content. Is it Correla? Is it just correlation? I don’t really know exactly what it is, but [00:41:00] as you said, these channels don’t operate in a silo.
It’s a marketing mix. People are gonna come across you probably with multiple touchpoints in their journey. And I do think that we are seeing a halo effect already from.
Kev: And finally listeners, I think George went through the retention graph before, but that’s a new piece of information that we can look at to measure success as well. Whether we’re maintaining interest we actually. Delivering on the entertainment side of things as well as the education side.
And are we retaining people as we go through our content? Because that’s important. People need to hear the content, need to really get value from the content all the way through. For us to see it as a success. And we can use that same information to optimize the podcast back as.
George: Beautiful. Alright, Kevin, the key takeaways listeners, the first one, When you take on a new channel like YouTube, make sure you do it with that. Be helpful mindset. Don’t freak out because it’s a new channel. Just work through the [00:42:00] playbook again. The second key takeaway is you don’t have to be perfect from the beginning.
Kevin and I certainly weren’t when we starting with the podcast, we’re definitely not now with YouTube, but just take those baby steps initially and build in processes over time. The important thing is to pick a cadence for creating and posting videos and make sure that you’re sticking to it and constantly refining it.
And finally, The ultimate goal of any channel should be to assist in building trust and creating pipeline, but make sure that you’re tracking leading indicators of success to know that you’re on the right track, because pipeline revenue aren’t going to show up from the very beginning.
Kev: Nice one, George. All right, listeners, that is an episode on how we’re going in our YouTube journey so far, how you can practically look at adding a new channel to your marketing process. As always, we’re absolutely stoked that more and more of you are joining us every Monday by listening to the podcast [00:43:00] or checking out our new YouTube channel and the videos there.
If we can ask one thing, it will be to please pass on the show to someone who might enjoy it and get value from it, or leave us a short review on whatever platform you listen on or watch on.
It’s an amazing help to us, our future listeners, and we really, really appreciate it. Thank you, George. Thank you listeners. See you, next week.
George: Thank you, Kev. Thank you, listeners. Catch you next week.
