YouTube Citation Surges 414 Percent in AI Overviews

0:00YouTube citations surges 414 % in AI overviews. through uber says we scrape a lot of keywords and serp data we've been seeing a huge increase not just in ai overviews but specifically youtube in the ai overviews and you're starting to see it for everything from like how to videos maybe if something is like uh how to tie a tie but you know It just goes to show that if you're not creating content for social media right now, you're not going to be placed in the AA overviews as much compared to if you were, especially for how-to queries, which is a good chunk of searches. I'm telling you guys, I mean, YouTube, I think, is the biggest opportunity for the next decade.

0:49And I've been saying that for a while. And we've talked about this before. But if I can have an enterprise lead watching one of my videos while taking a dump, YouTube is serious business, right? No matter where you are in the world. Eric should probably clarify that comment right there. Not while I was taking a dump, while they were taking a dump. And then they actually closed very quickly too. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. But yeah, you really need to go out there and publish more content on YouTube. Most people look at YouTube as a social network. I don't really see it as a social network. I see it as a streaming platform.

1:21It's a broadcast network to me. Yes, exactly. Because do you really interact with friends on YouTube like you would with... No. Instagram. I usually don't even respond, but recently when people troll me, I troll them back in the comments. And so that's the only entertainment I get out of it from the community aspect. Yeah. And when it comes to like actually networking with friends, I would say that's more like Facebook, that's more Instagram, that's more TikTok. I don't really use Snap. Do you use Snap? No. You know, I mean, we should sit on YouTube for a second because you and I are both investing not only more money, but more time into YouTube.

1:55And I don't know if you know this, but YouTube is now... I think it's the number one podcast network now in the world. And YouTube has, I think we saw earlier in the last seven days or so, it's overtaken TV as well in terms of time spent. Speaking of podcast network, and we go back to YouTube, you do know that when you record a video, long form, you can just put it up to Spotify and then just call it a podcast because they allow you to do the video as well. They're trying to give more distribution that way. So we do that as well. But are you good? I mean, your other podcast, you're publishing it to Spotify.

2:31Is that why you're referring to it? Or why are you referring to it? No, because if you look at a lot of the YouTube creators, they'll create videos, like a 10-minute video, 20-minute video. But what they'll do is they'll take that same video and then upload it to Spotify and then call it a podcast. It's interesting because they also take shorts as well because you can kind of swipe a little bit as well in Spotify. So I think you're just going to see more video everywhere. But I think when we, this podcast, when we talk about discoverability, I think the only platform that has discoverability for podcasts is actually YouTube.

3:05And I was telling Brad, unironically, my YouTube now, the videos are starting to move again. And it's only because I'm talking more about SEO and marketing. And whenever we have on this channel, when we talk about SEO, the videos do significantly better. So they like it when you focus too. So that's just a little tidbit for you guys. They do. And I think what a lot of people make a mistake on, and we have a mutual friend named Patrick Campbell. So he has a YouTube channel. It's mainly shorts. It'll be on stuff like - History, war. History, war, but topics like there's more pollution from bacon than a nuclear bomb.

3:46I'm making up a topic. He has something related to that. I could be a little bit off on the title. And it's interesting, you watch it, and Patrick's getting tons of views. I don't know how many views, but if I had to take a guess, maybe 5 million on the low end, 10, 15 million a month on the high end, just from YouTube. It is ridiculously high. His content's great. These are just shorts. And I don't know how often he publishes them, but I think it's getting close to like one a day or maybe it is even one a day. The problem that you end up having when you create generic content, and I think a lot of marketers or business owners and entrepreneurs go wrong in this, if you end up creating content on a lot of general stuff like history or whatever it may be, then when you want to monetize it for something specific, like we create marketing content, it becomes really hard because the algorithms don't know that we're known for marketing.

4:37And Patrick's case is a little bit different. I'm not saying he's making a mistake or anything like that. His content's great. Patrick sold his last company, so he doesn't really have to create content on something specific for a business. I think he's just having fun more than anything else. I haven't asked him, but I'm assuming he's just really having fun. So we've talked about this. We both spoke at a conference in Thailand and we're hanging out. I'm like, why are you doing this YouTube short thing? It was just literally like we went for each other. Otherwise we wouldn't have gone. Right. And he's like, dude, honestly, I'm just doing it for fun.

5:02But he's, he's working on an AI company right now. It's pretty serious stuff what he's doing. I'm not going to reveal it. But I'm like, that's, I think he just does this for like, because he's bored. And so I'm looking at his views, by the way, 14 million views in the last 28 days. What percent do you think are shorts versus long forms? Almost all of it is shorts. 100 % are short form videos. And to your point, the types of videos he's creating, if I look at the shorts over here, you know, why U.S. doctors are so expensive? What if the whole world banned, what if a lot of baking is more toxic than a nuclear power plant, I think.

5:35What if we all stop showering, right? These are all topics that he's creating. And yeah, I mean, they're really well produced and it looks like he's having fun. Oh, he looks, Patrick, you look good. I'm going to see him in two weeks or so. We're doing that little retreat. You look good, Patrick. So yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So with YouTube, I think if you don't have the luxury of Patrick in which you've already made money from a business and your goal is to create content with, if your goal is to create content to help grow your business, make sure early on you're creating content around the subject that's related to your business.

6:09Yeah. I think we've both played the game around generic content. Actually, back in the day, 10, 15 years ago, Neil would create content about how he spent XYZ on clothes or whatever. And those would get a lot of views. My friends would be, oh my god, I've read that blog post. Because blog post was organic reach back then. And it didn't really drive business for Neil. And then he ran social campaigns too. And they didn't really do much either. So take it for what it is. You can choose. I think a nice balance, my opinion, is maybe 80 % to 90 % is focused on business that is maybe tied more closely to your business.

6:41And 10%, 20 % you can take shots. Yeah, I would agree with that. 80 plus percent needs to be related to your business. I mean, do you want to talk about the experiment you're running with YouTube right now? Or is it too early? Yeah, I can talk about it right now. The experiment I'm running with YouTube is I'm creating long form videos. Again, I have my first one that'll be published on Tuesday. We're recording this podcast in advance. We'll see how that goes. And with YouTube, I believe in or just in social media in general, because we're running ads as an organization, the play here is to create content related to marketing and a percentage of the content not related to marketing, but more so related to entrepreneurship.

7:21The hopes is the brand recognition will increase the conversions from ads. Not trying to make a direct ROI from YouTube or social media, but we're hoping the reach and the more people recognizing me will increase the click-through rates on the ads and make them much more profitable. Yeah, so you'll have hard data on this in the next six to 12 months or so. Yeah. Yeah, so stick around, guys. In the next six to 12 months, we'll be talking about this. And Neil's working with some of these people that have helped some of the biggest creators out there. So, you know, I think this is, it's going to be very telling to see where this goes.

7:58Like you said, I think we'll actually find out within six months at the latest. Okay, we'll see. And then on my end, we're spending more time And I'm actually leeching off of Neil. So he'll show me kind of what he's experimenting with. And then I'll take a look. And then we're spending a lot more time on our ideas now. Because the idea is what really matters at the end of the day. If we talk about how we took a billion dollars and we donated it to whoever, right? That's going to do a lot better than talking about some SEO stuff. But I would say, one, we're spending a lot more time on the ideas.

8:33And also we're spending a lot more time on the different forms of packaging to the different headlines, different thumbnails as well. And what I'm doing now is I used to just wing it when I recorded. Now I'm spending more time on the bullet points and all that. And I'll even pause when I'm recording and just look at the bullet points. I don't know how you do it. You have a teleprompter, right? I have a teleprompter, but it's not used for a majority of the stuff. It's more so a bullet. Yeah. And then you just go and talk. We do the same way. Yeah. So we kind of riff. I think we operate the same way.

9:01We just need bullet points. but some of you will use complete scripts. I just can't do that. I can do scripts or I can do bullet or I can just free talk. But you do scripts with the teleprompter. Yes, I use scripts with the teleprompter. I don't have a teleprompter, so. No, you do. It's iPad. Yeah, I'm just too lazy to set it up. Brad was supposed to help me set it up and then we just like, I've never set it up. Come on, Brad, you got to set up the iPad as a teleprompter. But if you look at what both of us are doing on social media, yes, we're spending more time, but intentionally we're actually using social media specifically to try to generate way more leads than we did in the past.

9:35In the past, we optimized for things like views. And then from views, we're like, oh, how many of them will eventually drive revenue and become a customer? And it was more so like a metric where our sales teams would ask people, how'd you hear about us? But if you look at now, intentionally, you and I have doubled down on social media specifically for generating leads. And a great example of this is with your ABM product, right? What was the first post that you put on LinkedIn that helped you generate a lot of leads? The gist was LinkedIn doesn't allow you to create personalized scalable ads until now.

10:10And then basically we wrote about some of the features and we said leave a comment if you're interested. It got 1 ,300 comments on it. And then six figures plus views and like 600 likes. But main thing is it was actually generating leads for the agency as well. Because people are like, oh, we actually need agency help too. It's like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, and what my team's been doing for me is they'll create scripts that I read and then it tells people to leave a comment through ManyChat and then you can end up sending them the downloadable material but you collect the lead for them to get access.

10:42How many leads are you collecting from that? On a monthly basis, it depends how many times we put out a video but an easier way to look at it is how many qualified leads are we getting per video that we end up releasing? Ooh, yeah, what's that? So, yeah, and the reason I mentioned that is when you look at just a lead count, there's just way too many. We get thousands of leads from this a month. But when we look at qualified leads, we're generating around 15 to low 20s in qualified leads. These are SQLs, right? Because we don't look at MQLs. Guys, let's just stop looking at MQLs. Just look at SQLs because it aligns everybody.

11:13You can look at both, right? We do look at both. And the reason we like looking at MQLs is it's just easier from a marketing perspective, but we hold them accountable to the percentage of MQLs that need to convert into SQLs, right? So we're measuring the quality. But if we do a good video, 15 to low 20s and qualified leads. We also, on our end with YouTube, going back to that for a second, we can broaden up to broader social. But we do add ads into the videos too. I don't think you're doing that yet. And I don't know if you will. You probably will. But we rotate different ads. One might be for Carrot, one might be for Single Rain, one might be for the Agency Owners Association.

11:52and that actually drives leads for all of them. Oh, cool. Yeah, we don't do much of that. We just look at everything as a funnel. If I get 10 qualified leads from social media, roughly 40 % of them are going to end up jumping on the phone. And then we're going to end up getting a hold of them. Another one to two, we'll get on the phone from just dialing. Right? The people who didn't schedule. Some of those people aren't interested. Some of them we can eventually get on the phone. 40 % plus? Plus, yeah. So you're going to be 50 to 60 in total, including dial-in. And out of those, we're going to end up pitching around 30%.

12:33And out of the ones we pitch, we usually can close one out of three. Yeah. This is, I mean, it sounds like you guys, by the way, your sales team, you have your VP. Do you have a sales ops person that's managing all this? Are they all expected to just have their CRM hygiene super clean? No, we haven't. We have sales operation people. Yeah, just focused on that. And I think that's important for people to know too. Sometimes, in general, I've seen with salespeople, there's some that are just really organized, but a lot are just not. And you have to make sure you have a sales ops person to keep the data clean.

13:05Yes. The other reason we need sales ops is not all of our leads are for that person. So someone may come into our UK office, and that was a great example. We actually had someone literally come into the UK office. It was a company based out of, I don't know exactly where they were in Europe, but for some reason they hit up our UK office, hoping that they can help them with Latin America. Record was clean. They did an introduction. They did a few calls. They passed it over to our head of LATAM. He then had all this previous information about the lead. He ended up closing them for, call it a$600 ,000 account.

13:43I'm pretty sure it was around$600 ,000. Not from social. but that was just going back to having really good sales operations because for us is if a lead is messy and all the history isn't there it makes it really messy when someone has to end up taking over the lead because not all of our leads start with one person and end with that person because sometimes someone's just like yeah they may be in the u.s like a great example is is nick got a lead from one of the biggest shipping companies in the world. All right. They want help in APAC. Nick's not the person to pitch him on APAC, but because that company is here, he did the initial call, talked to them, got to know them, figured out what their goals, objectives are.

14:28And they came down to the, towards the end, it came down to, we should actually just start with APAC and then go from there based on your budget and what you're looking to tackle over the next six months to a year. So then we had to pass it all over. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need.

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16:44That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah. And I want to come back to social in a second, but I think a mistake people make, we talked about this in the agency group yesterday. Basically, it's okay to have line and expand where sometimes it's a really small deal. And sometimes maybe it might be, Hey, maybe it's a larger company. They might just want to do a pilot for 90 days or whatever, but it's still worth doing it. Even sometimes at my company, I'm just like, people turn, Oh yeah, we're not, we're the, I don't think we should do this.

17:12I'm like, no, we actually, we absolutely should do this pilot. They're huge. Right. And if we do it well, they're going to expand into other areas. This is a trust building exercise. So, um, we said, what did you say to that yesterday for the, to do pilots? Yeah. I'm a big believer that pilots are really good for software? I'm talking about, so they, sorry, the people that want to work with the agency say, we're looking at this like a pilot 90 days, right? And we want agency services. We want to test you guys out for 90 days. I'm saying you guys will sometimes do smaller deals or even shorter length deals to try to expand them.

17:47That's what I'm saying. We do rarely if it's the right logo and the right project. And this is the most important part, because if they're expecting a world of results in three months, it's not going to happen. For most types of marketing, if they want to see their paid ads revamped in three months and start seeing results, yeah, you can, you should be able to pull that off. But if they want to have page one rankings for a new division or established website, that's old. And it's a big publicly traded company, but it takes them three months to make a change. It's not going to happen. Right. So going back to social, to close the loop here, I would say for LinkedIn, the experiment we're running right now is we're posting three times a day.

18:27I actually paused that this week and I spent a little more time on each post. So usually it's going to be my team writing the three posts, right? But I'm like, hey, I'm going to spend like 20 minutes on each one and see how it goes. And we only posted one per day. Same reach, right? So we're like, okay, let's just, let's not involve me as much and just take my process, follow that. Here's a Loom video and then just go run with it. So we're just going to jack that up more. same thing with X as well. I just started today for the first time posting on Instagram and a lot of the social networks not all of them but quite a few of them three times a day and I have no idea how it's going to turn out but time will tell and yeah one of them's just been live for 20 minutes and the whole purpose of this is if you can do well with twice a day and you can get similar types of views and you can start reaching more audience.

19:19Because a lot of these social platforms will tell you how many non-followers you reach. And that's the real metric that we really look for with all of our videos. How many non-followers are we getting to on a monthly basis? Because that's the real metric. Like if your followers keep hearing from you, great. You need new followers in the funnel to eventually start closing more deals, you know, six months or a year later. You know, before we move on here, there's a little Instagram hack where if you take your top performing reels from the past and you set it to the preview where it's only like a test post, right?

19:51It actually reaches new audiences and that's all you do. You just keep taking your top posts and then just keep setting it to the Instagram test post. Yeah, Instagram has test reels. Yeah, so test reels, but just take all your old reels that perform well, put it into test reels and it'll expand the audience. Yeah, well, you know, test reels shows everyone who's not your follower that video. Yeah, they won't show your current followers. But then if it goes well, you actually have the option to enable it where all your existing followers can see it as well. Yeah, and I look at it as, honestly, with social, it's okay to repost your bangers because a lot of people forget.

20:24So, yeah. They do, and we repost our bangers, call it three to six months later. They usually never do as well as the original one, but they still do well. Yep. All right, let's pick a next one. All right, let's go for it. No, you can't get rich off of AI code generator apps. I'm curious on your thoughts on that. So I'm saying that as of right now, as of today, you cannot get rich off of AI code generator apps. And when I say AI code generator apps, I mean like a Replit, a Cursor, a V0. There's a lot of these products out there where you can type in what you want to build and it'll code it out for you, right?

21:01It'll build a front end for you. Now, I said, hey guys, a lot of you are posting about the cool apps that you're creating on Twitter. And then I tagged the guy who posted YouTube. Each video gets like thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of views on how he's building something. Oh my God, I just built this. I just built this. I'm like, hey man, of all the things that you built, what's actually generated revenue for you? No response. Then I tweeted to the Replit co-founder because he said, oh, look, you can code something. I coded something when I was talking to my CTO or getting lunch. And then by the time I reached the cashier, it had already finished coding the front end.

21:32But I haven't done anything with that. And so he was talking about, oh, you can code anything from your phone now. I'm like, great. Do you have any evidence? Anybody have any evidence at all where you guys have coded something using a code editor and it's actually generated revenue. And then some people started responding to me, oh my, I built this tool inside my company, it's helping my company, blah, blah, blah. But nobody can give me hard evidence right now. So I think right now we're still a ways off, but I don't think you're going to get rich off of this because the problem, and I'll turn it over to you in a second, I've seen some people talking about how they use these code editors to build their app.

22:03And then once they, it becomes such a clunky pile of code where once they try to run it through Cloud, for example, Cloud's like, it doesn't know what to do with it, right? and it basically starts deleting the code base. So we're not quite there yet, but I think we'll get there, just not today. Yes, and also, when it comes to getting rich off of some of this stuff, if there's money to be made, it'll get saturated extremely fast. Everything where there's tons of money-making opportunities gets super competitive and saturated. Doesn't mean you can't make money in the long run, it just means you won't make as much.

22:35Yeah. Easy come, easy go. And it's always like that, right? And by the way, speaking of easy come, easy go, So let's talk about why most creator products suck. So that's what it is, guys. If you guys have any other questions, let us know. And that being said, go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster. And we'll see you tomorrow.