YouTube for B2B Marketing (with Samu Kovács)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29And Marissa. I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. And we run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out, see this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit five. That's zoom.com slash exit five. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

2:07Trusted by companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site so more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now, they're offering Exit 5 listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out.

2:38It's convertive.com slash exit5. That's convertive.com slash exit5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

2:52One, two, three, four, exit. One, two, three, four, exit. Hey, it's me, Dave. Real quick, I just want to give you a heads up on something new. So we are on a mission here at Exit 5 to be the number one resource for B2B marketers. And that means we need more people to help host podcast webinars and create content for us. And so I'm really excited because this interview that you're about to hear right now is the first one from Dasha. She is VP of Marketing at ProtonAI. She's been my co-host on webinars here at Exit 5. And now she's going to be diving into our community, our members, our subscribers, our listeners, and she's going to be taking on a bunch of interviews as well.

3:34In addition to myself, I'm going to still be doing interviews, talking to VPs and CMOs in B2B marketing, but we need more horsepower. Dasha is an awesome OG member of our community, and she has now signed up to do a bunch of interviews with us. So enjoy this conversation with Dasha. She's going to be another voice in your ear, bringing you B2B marketing, knowledge, expertise, wisdom, insights. Make sure you go and connect with her on LinkedIn so you can find her there and also bug her with guests you want to hear from, topics you want to hear about, questions, and more. Here's Dasha. My guest today is someone who thinks YouTube is the hedge against AI slot.

4:11His name is Shamu Kovac, and he runs a B2B YouTube agency. His whole argument is that YouTube is the one channel where you can't fake your way in. Today, just to go, anyone can spin up a LinkedIn post in 30 seconds with AI, but nobody can fake actually knowing something on camera, which means that YouTube is the channel that gets harder for competitors to copy. So today we get into all of it. The exact research process he uses to pick topics, the ingredients of a script that actually converts, the hook, the body, where to put your call to actions, how he's using AI at every step down to the specific AI models, and what to realistically expect in the first 90 days so you know whether your YouTube strategy is actually working.

4:54Let's get into it. Enjoy our conversation. Shamu, welcome to the pod. Excited to chat with you today. How's it going? I'm really great. And yeah, thank you for having me. Of course. So you run an agency helping B2B companies stand up YouTube channels. Talk to me about that. What's that all about? Yeah, exactly. So there aren't many YouTube agencies for B2B specifically. So we are kind of in a good spot where we have like really good case studies that we've luckily built up over the last couple of years. But yeah, we are a B2B YouTube agency focusing on how B2B SaaS companies and also B2B service companies can use YouTube in a way where they can build their authority, become the go-to expert and name in their niche.

5:36And then also just directly generate leads from it, an actual business result. So yeah, that's our bread and butter. What type of company typically brings you in? Like add some color. Yeah. So most of our clients, there's a couple of different types of clients we work with. Some of our clients are like founder brands. So like if you think about someone like, you know, Adam Robinson, for example, he's one of our biggest sort of names that we work with. He's like a huge founder brand in the B2B space. There are a couple of other founder brands that we work with many founder lab businesses. So that's a big one.

6:08But on the other hand, And we also work with actual businesses with a marketing team where there's no real founder on the top or the one needing it. It's more so just a regular business. In those cases, it's SaaS companies, but sometimes also B2B agencies and service companies as well. How did you get into all this? You just woke up one day and said, I'm going to start this YouTube agency. How did you get into this? Yeah, I mean, it was a bit more than four years ago when I was just in my room in my parents' house and I didn't want to go to college. So I was like, I have to do something. and I knew a bit of video editing.

6:40So I was like, hey, let me try that. Let me become a freelance video editor. So one thing led to the other. I got into YouTube more and then I got introduced into the whole B2B world. And I was like, hey, no one is really specializing in YouTube or B2B. So why don't I just go in there and kind of dominate the space? So yeah, that's what the last couple of years have been about. And now we're here. So it worked out. Exactly. Zooming out, I'm a VP of marketing at a company and I remember joining four years ago and thinking, okay, which channel? do we need to be on? And YouTube wasn't kind of top of the list.

7:14And I feel like that's pretty typical for your marketer. Why do you think that YouTube feels scary or unfamiliar to so many B2B marketers today? Yeah, so what I've been seeing is that nobody really knows how to do YouTube because I mean, if you look around like stuff like SEO, stuff like LinkedIn content, stuff like paid media, all of that stuff, Outbound, they've been around for like a long time. And of course, they've evolved. But like, it's kind of the usual stuff B2B businesses try to, you know, with their go to market, with their marketing. But YouTube is something that is pretty new. Like for the longest time, like people were just thinking of YouTube as a B2C platform.

7:52Now, over the last couple of years, it kind of shifted. So like the B2B aspect is more and more common, that more and more B2B companies are using it. So they're breaking up. But it's still like because of the delay, There's very few, like even people, marketers who understand how to do YouTube well. So it's always like a dark, scary sort of like platform where like nobody really knows like how to do it properly. How do you stay up to date? Like where does a marketer go to learn how to do YouTube well? Specifically, I guess, in B2B? Yeah, I mean, it's not easy. I mean, for us, we work with like 40, 45 clients like actively.

8:24So we run that YouTube channel. We look at the results every single month, every single week. So we're seeing like all those videos and it's this way, it's very easy to stay up to date, see what's working. Of course, we also look at like a bunch of other, like not just our clients, but a lot of other channels, seeing, okay, what's working there, doing just research constantly. But I mean, for a marketer who's like really not like a YouTube specialist, there isn't many places. I'm going to say like my YouTube channel and the recent breakdowns I've been doing, it's just like, I think that's the most helpful place to kind of get started.

8:51But usually like once you start actually doing it and like trying it, that's where you can learn most easily. least, not enough to just watch YouTube videos about it. Yes, I watched a few of your YouTube breakdowns and they're good. We'll put them in the show notes. It looks like a lot of it is just seeing what's working and then applying it to whatever industry that you're working with, which we'll get into in a little bit. Okay, well, when a company does YouTube well, when they figure it out, what impact does it have? What can you expect if you get this right? Is there something that changes about your close rate?

9:24Is it something that changes about your sales cycle, something else? What should I expect if I nail my YouTube strategy? Yeah, definitely. So there's direct benefits and then there's indirect benefits. So I'll also start with direct one. For most B2B companies, there's a big enough portion of their audience actively watching YouTube and being on YouTube. So you can definitely go there and start ranking for those keywords, those topics and coming up for those topics that your ICPs really want to learn about, want to get more information on. And that way you're able to get in front of them. they will trust you through watching the content.

9:55And then if you do everything right, which I'm assuming you will get in this conversation of how to actually turn them into leads. If you do every step right, you can actually turn that traffic into signups, into book demos. Depending on like what niche you're in, like YouTube can be driving anywhere from like 10, 20 plus demos per month or, you know, multiple dozens of signups with the top companies. So like really now YouTube can go anywhere from like, you know, the hundreds of signups or demos per month, which is like kind of the top of it. But that's the direct benefit of it. If you build that out, it can perfectly serve as like an inbound channel.

10:26But then on the other hand, there's a lot of like indirect benefits. One of them is just like building your authority in your space. And that kind of has an effect on all the other channels that you're running. Like when you're the company or the person who's coming up for like a very specific niche on YouTube constantly, that of course translates into Google, into LLMs, because like YouTube videos get picked up there. Everyone will start like knowing your name, seeing your face. Everyone who is, let's say, following you on LinkedIn or is on your email list or seeing your SEO blog posts, they will run into those YouTube videos, get a lot more nurtured.

10:57And throughout our clients, what we see always is that when we nail YouTube, all of that channel starts working better. We see higher trust, warmer prospects. People understand what they do and talk about. They know their brand, they trust them. And sales cycles are just shorter, the close rates are higher. So all of those are great stuff. So that's kind of the two ways I'm always thinking about YouTube. In terms of how a marketer should be thinking about the role that YouTube plays in the funnel, what is your philosophy? Is it more top of funnel? Is it middle funnel? Is it a way to nurture? Is it both?

11:32How are you thinking about that? Or how are you getting your clients to think about it when they first start their YouTube journey? Yeah, definitely both. And it also depends on what niche you're in. Because there are some industries, especially in the very specific B2B niches, where it's like it's so niche and you have a such a small total addressable market but like youtube won't can't really become like a channel that will get you like all those customers you're probably in a niche where like you're doing something like account-based marketing or something like that because you are like such a specific person in those very like specific niches youtube is more so like the middle of funnel bottom of funnel place where you can like nurture these people prove that you're actually a real competitor and expert you can provide value to them or you won't get that like top of funnel sort of awareness new traffic coming in just because like you literally have like a couple hundred couple thousand ICT in the entire planet you won't do this with YouTube you won't probably do this with LinkedIn organic content you have to like go to ABM or stuff like that but for like the 97 % or 95 % of other B2B companies YouTube can perfectly be a top of funnel channel as well generally at the start when let's say you're a B2B company you have like marketing channels working but you're starting YouTube from zero in the first couple of months it's a lot easier to get an ROI just by using it as a middle of funnel place because you already have people in your audience, probably on your LinkedIn, on maybe the founder's LinkedIn, maybe you have an email list, maybe blogs are already working.

12:55So just by implementing YouTube as a middle of funnel so that those people who come through those channels are able to watch the YouTube videos, it's usually just a quick win to just get them more nurture, get the quick wins, see, okay, they're watching the YouTube videos, getting value, close rates are higher, et cetera. And then while you're doing this, you're able to stack and have YouTube compound in a way where after three or four months, it can actually start bringing in on its own new eyeballs and actual leads, demos, signups. And that's where the top of funnel aspect can really kick in.

13:24And after that, it does everything. It reminds me of investing. At first, you're like, is this working? And then all of a sudden, you've got compound interest and you're like, holy smokes. Compared to LinkedIn, where you've got content that lives in the internet for a few minutes, or not a few minutes, but like a day or so you get traffic and then it kind of dies and you're on to the next. I feel like YouTube's kind of the opposite. You might not see anything for a few days and then it actually helps expedite their other videos. I want to double click on something you said about the niche and the size of your audience.

13:55When you deal with a client and they're maybe, I don't know, let's say vertical SaaS, they have a pretty small TAM. Are you saying kind of don't bother or are you just changing how they think about YouTube as a channel? I guess my question more broadly is, Is there such thing as too niche or too small of an audience for YouTube to matter? Yes, there is. And I would say like you have to just have the right expectations going into it, like with everything. If you're like a vertical SaaS, like super niche, you won't create a YouTube channel with videos that will get like hundreds of thousands of views, not even like probably thousands.

14:27You will get like very, very specific videos that will get like maybe a couple hundred views. And you can use those and, you know, depending on your niche, you can probably get some new leads. But like for most of these types of companies, YouTube videos will be just used as like a nurturing mechanism from all the other leads they will get from different channels. But for all the other companies, which is the majority, they can perfectly like, yeah, use videos and YouTube as well to just like get new eyeballs in that ecosystem and then generate leads from that. So I would say for most like 90, 95 % of, you know, maybe marketers or these companies watching this, definitely YouTube can become like a reliable channel.

15:03Also, in terms of expectations, it might be that you will only get a couple hundred, couple thousand views per video. And that's completely fine because if those are targeted, usually for most B2B companies, it's a really, really good number that they can actually convert into leads. And then they can be very content with this. You don't have to just look at those big YouTube channels, which majority of them are B2C. And see that they're getting hundreds of thousands of views and get discouraged if you don't do that because you're completely different in your B2B business. So yeah, that's kind of the mindset shift.

15:31I'm saying that like most companies need to have just have the realistic expectations and know what you can get out of the issue. Right. Like even a small number of viewers, if they're high intent, could be worthwhile. Yeah. I mean, we literally like have clients where like, there was one client where we uploaded a video. He's like in the SaaS, so he works with other SaaS companies. And we uploaded a video that got like, I believe now it's at around like 2000 views, but like it was just getting a couple hundred in the first few months. And it was literally booking multiple sales calls every single week.

16:01That's a video alone for that client. And I was literally just getting a couple hundred views at the very beginning. So that goes to show that if you target people the right way and there's high enough intent, and you make the right video and nail every part of the process, there's no reason why you can successfully generate leads, even with a couple hundred views. Well, then let's get into the process. How do you do it? What is the process? Yes. Let's say I'm convinced I want to get on YouTube. Maybe I've even gotten my leadership team bought in. How do I start doing this and do it in the right way where I'm not flopping?

16:34Yeah, for sure. So the first part is just the research. That's always what we start with. The very first thing that we do personally with our clients, and of course, any other SaaS company should do that, is get very clear on, first of all, who they want to target, who their ICP is, what are their pain points that they have, what are really like the desired outcomes that those people want to get to what problems you're solving for them all of this nitty-gritty customer research that's what we start with that's what we gather from our clients well you know if you're a b2b company just want to get clear on that and kind of have that in a structured way because that will be needed for the research to be effective to be able to come up with the right type of content plan that actually attracts these you know right type of people and then also speaks to them sells to them etc so once we have that data from our clients, we then go and do our own YouTube research.

17:21So what this looks like, I'm going to share my screen in a second. But we are literally looking at like hundreds of YouTube videos. We are literally like scraping hundreds of YouTube videos. We have like a proprietary tool for this, but like, you know, you can use a lot of different things. You can even do it mainly. Of course, with AI, it helps a lot. I won't go super deep into this like sheet. It might look a little bit overwhelming, but it's just all the numbers, all the views of videos in specific niches. And most importantly, what we are looking at is the highest performing videos. So like common themes across the highest performing videos in all these different adjacent niches.

17:54So what we're looking at is proven formats, common titles, common thumbnails, common topics. And really from there, what we do is we take those and then adapt it for our specific client. Because what we don't want to do is we don't want to create a strategy like fully from zero, just trying to guess. We want to just strictly look at the data. Again, like literally hundreds of videos that have performed extremely well, like above average. And then that's what we use to then adapt the things that matter for our client and really just create a fully unique strategy. But that is based on the data that we are seeing.

18:26Very important to know that we don't copy any video. We don't want to copy things. We want to look at the data and the proven formats. And then the actual content of the video is always completely unique because our client is in a unique niche. They have the specific expertise, the specific talking points. So all those will be in the video. but we are looking at the packagings and what's proven to work there. So that's the first step of the process. Can you bring back your sheet? I want to ask you a few questions about it. So Shamu is sharing a spreadsheet. It's literally a Google sheet. And you've got the thumbnail of the video, the title, how many views it has, the score.

19:03Is the score something that you, like your internal system is assigned? Yeah, so that's an internal thing. it's called like an outlier score and it's a bit complex basically the higher the score is the more of an outlier that video was like the better it performed compared to like the channel average we this is a custom score but we want to look at like a score at least above like two to three of course the more the better but yeah we have all kinds of data here the most important thing we're looking at is like views score as well but also like the date when it was uploaded how long ago it was also the types of videos so like we're looking at the thumbnail the title and yeah that's really like how we like then structure these new ideas.

19:41Maybe a silly question, but why does the date matter? Because on YouTube, especially nowadays with all the AI stuff, like a lot of things are very much seasonal and like they stop working after a while. So like, of course, there are a lot of evergreen topics, but we always want to look at like, especially if it's about something like AI, cloud, etc. Like these things just change so fast that like something that worked six months ago, usually is not the best thing to adapt. At least we want to have take it with a grain of sold. So we always look at that, see if it's something that is still working or if it's something that just doesn't work anymore.

20:12Because yeah, there's a lot of stuff that goes kind of out of date on YouTube. Got it. And then reverse engineer this for me. So you would have put this spreadsheet together for what? Like what question were you trying to answer with this spreadsheet? Or like, how did you use it? Yeah, so this is our specific system. How we like to do this and we do this for all of our clients is like our clients usually have like a niche and specific keywords, topics that they will talk about in our videos that we map out beforehand. And after that, we have our system where it just automatically scraped, first of all, a group of videos that are in that specific niche.

20:44So I believe, yeah, this was about the SEO niche. And what we did in this tab is the niche outliers. So basically, outliers that are in the niche. So everything to do with SEO, you can see here, how to rank number one complete SEO, AI, SEO, SaaS marketing also, we went into that. And of course, it's not perfect. There will be some videos that are not really relevant, but it just scrapes everything, all the best performers. And then what we also do in this case is like, okay, it was SEO for SaaS. That was the main niche. Then we look at adjacent niches. So I believe, yeah, like here in the keywords section, we can look at like, okay, what adjacent niche this was.

21:18So like this was cloud, this was get clients. This was keyword research. This was LinkedIn marketing, AI marketing, SEO tutorial. I guess it's not super adjacent because it's the same thing. But yeah, like these are the adjacent sort of keywords that we look at. So the theory behind it is that, okay, we have that niche, but the best outliers or best performing videos usually come. When we look at a different similar niche, there was a huge best performing video, but nobody has done it in that specific niche. So we just are the first ones to adapt it. So in this case, we looked at like the best performers here.

21:48So what we can adapt for our specific client here was an SEO agency for SaaS companies. And then if you take that adapt that proven framework, there's a very high chance that this will work well. And so what was the result? Like, are you done working with the client? Have you generated some videos from this? What was the takeaway from putting this together? Yeah, I mean, we just did that. For example, this research is a precious one. So I did that yesterday, actually, because this is Sam Dunning. He's a big SEO guy on LinkedIn as well. We've been running his YouTube channel for like two years at this point, one and a half, two years.

22:18So he's like one of our longest clients. He's generated hundreds of thousands of dollars from YouTube. But yeah, this was just done like yesterday. So there were a couple of ideas I ended up presenting to him based on this research. So it's always like that in terms of our internal processes. Like we do this research, we present the ideas that we think are best to our clients, if they are all aligned. And then we just start scripting, start the rest of the process that we'll talk about. If I don't have your proprietary system, can I just pull this off with Claude? Like, would I have Claude scrape YouTube?

22:45Do I need a tool like Ahrefs or a SEMrush? Like, what is a stack of a marketer that's not working with you guys look like to replicate something similar? Yeah, I would say at the start, I'll definitely do it manually. So, you know, you can do this perfectly manually. You just put in like these keywords that you see here on YouTube on the search bar and then see what comes up. And like, you can literally just look at outlier videos. If you download something like VidIQ, for example, it has the outlier score shown next to each of the videos, like you will see exactly in the YouTube interface. So like you will see these.

23:14So you can very easily just distinguish which are the outliers. And then you can get the list. I'll definitely do that if you're like just getting into YouTube, because you won't know how to build a system like this. You've never done it. Once you got into it, I like did this process a couple of times. Then yeah, I would look into like videos with Cloud Code, for example. So we have Cloud Code and then I believe AP5 to scrape it. So yeah, you can look into that. It's not super complex, but yeah, I'll definitely do it manually at the start. Got it. Yeah, I think also the best way to learn something is to do it manually because if you don't know what you're doing manually, how are you supposed to build a system that automates it?

23:47So I think that's a great takeaway. Like start doing this manually. You'll also get familiar with the videos as well, like by just being in there and clicking around. That makes a ton of sense. All right, cool. If there's someone listening and they're like, you know what, like, I get it, but we've tried YouTube in the past and it didn't really work for us. What do you say to that person? And how do you know that something didn't work for a marketing team because of a strategy problem versus it being like a channel that just doesn't work for their business? Yeah, I would definitely ask what was the specific strategy they were using for YouTube?

24:23And also, were they doing it in-house? Were they doing it with a YouTube agency, an expert? Because nine times out of 10 in the B2B space, like people marketers just don't know much about youtube in order to like do it at a good enough level that it can actually produce results and also combine with the fact that like youtube is another thing that will start working after two weeks like it needs multiple months usually what ends up happening is like there's a lack of expertise or resources put into youtube and they try to do it in-house they use it as a video storage platform they put up some videos but then if nothing happens they just say okay youtube didn't work then generally like it's just because you didn't have someone that is actually a YouTube expert who does that and knows exactly how to do that on your team.

25:05You try to do it in-house, maybe hire an editor or some cheap video agency who's not specialized in YouTube for B2B or something like that. Or the other thing is you might not have given it enough runway because just like stuff like SEO, for example, YouTube is the same thing. It needs at least a couple of months of runway before you can start to see the results compounding. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases.

25:41And McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2 ,000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeel did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launch virtual teammates.

26:13These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit5. That's optimizely.com slash exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just a thought leader.

26:46I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search. And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time.

27:20That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. In terms of the type of content to be publishing, like let's say I have a keyword and I've done this research and I have a spreadsheet like yours that I've built manually. I'm killing it. What next? Like how do I know what to actually put in the video? well. Yeah, so like the next step in our process is once we have the video ideas, we start scripting them.

27:57I mean, from us, what we really want to do is like two things. So first, there's a proven framework of how to do YouTube videos, like how to do the hook, how to structure it. For example, for the hook, we always want to have like, okay, what the video is about, why people should stick around, and also who we are, like, are we even qualified to talk about it? Like if you nail these three things, then that's a good hook. And you also don't want to make it long. So you want to it as short and concise as possible while you're addressing these three things. So that's about the hook structuring. There's a lot that goes into it, but generally speaking, you want to have a structure for the video in the sense of five steps or three lessons or stuff like that.

28:35You want to package something like that because it's just easier to follow. Then you want to make the cold actions at the right places. So all of these are YouTube best practices. So that's the first part, but then you want to combine it with the actual unique expertise, the actual content that you will present in the videos because these are just frameworks, YouTube best practices, but then you have the actual content that you will talk about there. So of course, that will be different for every company. How we do it personally for our clients, because of course, we are not experts in their niche, is we just gather a lot of information from them, like their existing content, maybe blogs, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, all of that stuff.

29:07We scrape it, get the main concepts that they usually talk about, the frameworks they explain, their point of view, and then we use those for every topic and adapt it. Now, there's always a case where like, let's say there's a video topic that we want to write a script about and our clients don't have like all the existing content on those. So in that case, we like to have, you know, one of the experts from their team just answer a couple of questions to us and then we can take those answers and use that as, you know, writing the script and using this as the content. If I were, yeah, like a B2B marketer in a team and I want to come up with, you know, YouTube content, I would really look at like what existing content that we have.

29:43And then after that, like, who can I bring in from the team who is an expert who can like give us that information that we need and then we just structure it for an actual well working YouTube video. Something that I liked on your breakdown of how you're working with Adam Robinson is he obviously publishes on LinkedIn a ton and then you take his top performing posts and you give him a script that is trained on his voice. And then he just records on his own time a video based on that. so talk about that is that like a common mechanism you take for well-performing content and you make it you repackage it for youtube essentially yeah exactly like a lot of our clients are already big on linkedin or other platforms so there's a very good data of what has already worked and of course youtube and linkedin are different so we don't just like take it and do the same thing on youtube but if there's like a topic that we currently like work well on linkedin there's a very high chance that if we adapt it right on youtube it will also work so yeah that's what we did for Adam.

30:37But yeah, in terms of copying his voice and scraping all of his LinkedIn posts, that's something we do for all of our clients. Whether they have LinkedIn posts or blog posts, we just get all of that. Because then if we have that with AI nowadays, of course, we use a lot of AI in our scripting process. We still have a full script writing department with humans. But apart from that, we use a lot of AI because it's super, super helpful if you have the right prompts, if you know how to make it not sound like an AI slot, and you make sure that you're not using it for actually writing or coming up with the content, but more so just structuring it for YouTube because we never use AI to come up with any content.

31:12That would be just pure AI stuff. That's what we are against. What we use AI for is structuring the videos and then the actual content is always coming from our clients. That's how we make sure that every video is fully based on expertise and it's no AI stuff. I think it's a good call out for marketers because my first instinct as a marketer would be, okay, maybe I'm interested in standing up a YouTube channel, but what are we going to post about? And I think for the marketer listening to this, if you've got a thought leader already or you've got a high-performing blog, you don't really need to reinvent the wheel.

31:45You can take your content that's already performing and then just adapt it to YouTube. Like you kind of already have the evidence as to what's working. You've got the numbers to back it up. You could just convert that into video-first content, following the hooks, following the structure that does well on YouTube. And you don't really have to create new content per se. Let's talk about AI Slop. I mean, AI Slop is everywhere. LinkedIn just announced this button where you can now report posts for being AI Slop. How do you think YouTube compares as it relates to AI Slop? Is there a lot of AI Slop on YouTube?

32:20Is AI Slop free, something in the middle? How are you thinking about that? Yeah, we like to think of YouTube as the hedge against AI Slop. For most companies, LinkedIn is just the best example or I'll say the worst example is the amount of AI stuff that there is there is like pretty crazy. And like people just got onto it. Like when you see these posts, you don't even like read them anymore. If it sounds AI, comments, same thing. What ends up happening is like the relevance of these, this content just goes down because when everything is AI stuff, everyone is pumping out content. The barrier to entry is super low.

32:52And like, that's why Organic LinkedIn has just become consistently harder and harder to get results with for like basically everyone out there. Like if you ask anyone, you know, has been posting over the last years, like they will say the same thing youtube is kind of the hedge against that because with youtube is completely different like first of all it's video so like you can't just like type in something into cloud and like have the full post generated because it's an actual video of course there are these like video generation tools but like no youtube video that is a high performing one is made through that like every high performing youtube video that people resonate with that actually works on the platform is a real video you know especially to be to be like talking head educational space, like every one of these high-performing videos are from a real person who sit down, records the video, and that's how it's made.

33:37So like the barrier to entry is a lot higher. And of course, you can still, let's say, like create just an AI Slop script and then record that and upload it to YouTube. But still, that's higher effort than just like having, you know, a LinkedIn post created in like 30 seconds. And also, it won't work on YouTube, it needs to be valuable. So if you are nailing YouTube, like that's the perfect hedge against AI Slop, because no one will be able to compete with you until they are actually putting in the effort of making sure the research is done well, making sure the content is actually valuable, making sure you're there as a person recording with the right tonality, telling stories, really being yourself.

34:15All of these stuff make it like impossible to just be able to copy with AI. So LinkedIn is getting consumed by this. YouTube is a perfect kind of place to go against this. Do you have any examples of companies in B2B space that are crushing it on YouTube? Yeah, I mean, I can show a couple of our clients for sure. One of the best examples I can give you, it's a pretty niche one. So it's in the cold email space. But one of our clients is Taylor Heron. He's decently big on LinkedIn, on YouTube, like we started when he was basically at like zero or like 500 subscribers. And really what we did, I believe the first video that we did for him was this one.

34:55Right away, we can see like the views were very different compared to before working with us right away when we started. We just started pumping out videos every single week, sharing his strategies, sharing the behind the scenes playbook, sharing his client results. We got this video, for example, that was just a complete outlier. It basically went mini viral in that lead generation cloud code space, generating, I believe, 40 plus calls in the first couple of days. Just this video, which was very, very crazy. It books around 30 sales calls every single month from his YouTube. So yeah, I mean, he's a really good example of a B2B YouTube channel that is founder led and that is just super value first like his videos the reason they work so well of course one reason is because we like do a good job of like optimizing everything but the other thing is like he's super good at his stuff like he's one of the best at cold email generation so literally like all of his videos are about like the most groundbreaking newest strategies and just sharing those without any filter so that's why it works so well that's one of the things like other B2B companies can take away.

35:57So that's a good example. Of course, I can show, for example, Adam Robinson as well. Similar thing there, like he's sharing a lot of value. But I mean, yeah, this is what we are seeing just working best is like companies or personal or founder brands who are just giving away everything and like making sure their content is valuable. And as you share your screen, there's like stats and that's because you've got that vidIQ plugin. Yes, that's because of that. And obviously you're sharing this and he's got some videos before you guys started working together. The reason that you think those weren't working is that that is like video setup wasn't as good.

36:27He wasn't doing the like hook format that you guys are suggesting. What was the I guess if you're to distill the before and after, what is it? Is it the substance? Is it the format? Is it the quality? So he actually made a LinkedIn post about this kind of artwork together. So like I spent 25k plus on three YouTube agencies and gave me nothing than me, Sean McCollett, paid for himself 10x in 28 days. So he brings down the whole process here, what happened and his experience working with us, but also the YouTube agencies he was working with before. And really what ended up happening, if you look at this channel, I'll just pull it up, before he was making these types of videos.

37:07So the problem with these was that, first of all, there was no structure behind the strategy. There was no signs of that research that I just showed you before, of looking at scientifically those hundreds of videos in this niche coming up with the right titles, etc. On the other hand, there was also no optimization in terms of the thumbnails. These are really, with a YouTube eye, these are not the right thumbnails. There's a lot of things wrong with them. Too much text, not visual enough, too confusing, etc. And then in terms of the content, it wasn't edited well, it wasn't structured well. Sure, he was still providing value, but that's just not enough in and of itself.

37:39So that's why these weren't working. Also, it wasn't super consistent. And then the biggest thing that he shares in this post is that like with those previous YouTube agencies, the thing that they weren't able to do for him is like actually script out the videos because they weren't using his existing content. They weren't able to take his LinkedIn posts, for example, and like turn them into YouTube videos that work. We just like completely solved that. So like he just barely has to edit the scripts. He can just sit down, record and it's fully in his voice, fully valuable. So yeah, those are the main things.

38:08In terms of consistency, what is, I guess, fill in the blank. If you're not willing to commit to blank, don't bother. Is there such thing like if you don't publish once a week or once a month, what do you have to be able to commit to to see results? Yeah, the sweet spot is four videos per month. And that's what most of our clients do. And that's just what's working best based on all of our numbers. But two videos per month is a good starting point as well. You can get the ball rolling. It will be slow, but you can still do it. we have clients who are generating demos, even with two videos per month.

38:41But yeah, definitely where you want to get these four videos per month. Let's talk more about timeline. You mentioned you kind of have to be willing to wait for YouTube to work like an investment strategy. If I greenlight this, how long do I commit to testing YouTube before I'm allowed to judge whether it's effective or not for me? Yeah, it depends on a couple of factors. First of all, with guys like Adam, Taylor, we were just crushing it right out the gate in the first month. But that's not what we promised because most companies will not be like Adam or Taylor because Adam and Taylor were big on LinkedIn already, had a big following.

39:17So it was very easy to translate that into YouTube and just start having videos pop off. For most B2B companies watching this, they will probably start from zero. They probably won't have a huge audience on LinkedIn. For those companies, it always takes at least 90 days to start seeing the initial results from YouTube. So what that means is The three-month mark is where we expect to see the first one to two leads coming in from YouTube. They want to do sales or actual customers and revenue coming in from YouTube. And from there in the fourth, fifth, and sixth month is where it starts to become actually consistent.

39:50So like every single month, at first it will be a couple of demos per month or like maybe five to 10 signups per month. And then it consistently goes up because every video we upload, it doesn't stop working. So we just stack more and more videos. and the more and more of these evergreen videos behind the scenes getting views, the better it works, the better the lead generation machine works. So that's why it slowly ramps up there. But again, as I mentioned, like even in the first couple of months, we are of course looking at the metrics inside YouTube's like views, impressions, all of that to see the upward trend if you're going in the right direction because you don't want to just blindly commit for 90 days and like don't look at any data.

40:25But then on the other hand, like as I said, for most companies, if they have other marketing channels that are working, even in the first couple of months, they can start using the YouTube videos in smart ways to shorten sales cycles, build more trust, nurture people before they get some demo, for example, all of those stuff. So those can be done even in the first couple of months and seeing results from that. And when you're saying shorten the sales cycle, is that just, you know, you're working a sales deal and there's a relevant video that your founder or whoever just recorded and you have the AE send them that video saying, hey, like you should go check this out.

40:56We just recorded this, this might help. Or is there something bigger that you're thinking in terms of strategy to shorten the sales cycle? Yeah, that's one really good way. But there are also a lot of other ways that we implement. So one of other ways, for example, if a company books sales meetings or demos, before the demo happens, there can be an automated email going out with a couple of YouTube videos to the prospect. And that really helps them because even if they just watch one or two, that completely warms them up before the call. So the close rate increases, of course. Now, there's also, if you have an audience, let's say on LinkedIn, pushing and like promoting the YouTube videos on LinkedIn, like we did for Adam, for Taylor, that also shortened sales cycles there because like people were just reading your post.

41:37Now they see a whole YouTube video, they watch it. Oh shit, like that person is just an expert in this or like that. I need that company. So I would just go book a call, you know, stuff like this happens. So that's a really, really effective way as well to shorten sales cycles. With someone like Adam, are you uploading that video natively in LinkedIn or are you linking out to YouTube? Yeah, sure. How we do it. What we do is we just upload the hook of the video and then like create a LinkedIn optimized text post and just attach the hook underneath it and then link to the video. I'll show what I mean here.

42:09Do they do well? I feel like in general, anytime I've linked out to something else on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn algorithm is like, I hate that. I'm not gonna let it perform. Yeah, so like it does okay. Like, I mean, this post did decently for Adam. Like he usually gets a couple hundred likes. It wasn't like a super high performing post, but it did well. So yeah, what we did here is just like a LinkedIn optimized text post. And then here's the YouTube link. So this is actually a YouTube link, just LinkedIn makes it like this, but this going to the YouTube video. And so all of this is like maybe for LinkedIn.

42:40I mean, there's the argument that like LinkedIn doesn't like when you link to external stuff. Now, this is somewhat true, but like you just have to do it in like some posts. Like it's worth it. And like it didn't fully suppress the post, like it did okay. This won't be your best performing post most of the time, but that's not really the goal. That makes sense. And then how do I tell if YouTube is helping my other channels? Yes. I guess more broadly, like how do I attribute YouTube to like this is working? What is the attribution play that you're recommending to marketers? Yeah, if you want to look at like other channels and how well it's working, you really have to implement self-reported attribution.

43:19Because like even just asking like, where have you seen content from us? And like they can choose multiple channels. they might put in LinkedIn, but they also might put in YouTube. So that gives us a very good, clear signal of that. It's always hard. Generally speaking, you can go off of just feel if you're really in the business. If you have the leads coming in and they are mentioning, hey, I like the YouTube video, you get maybe comments on LinkedIn or people in the DM, sales conversations, mentioning. That's just an overall good feel, but that's also, of course, not a number. You want to have a better tracking than that.

43:50So yeah, self-reported attribution is good. We have UTM links as well in the YouTube videos, but that's more so to distract the direct YouTube leads, not from the other channels. But if you look at the metrics, seeing if, you know, close rates are higher, people are actually watching the videos, they're putting in the self-reported attribution question that they've watched YouTube, then these are all like really good signs that it's just working across the board. Do you have any clients that monitor their gong recordings or whatever platform to see mentions of YouTube? I believe we have like one client who's like on every sales call I believe he's asking where the leads came from and where they've seen him.

44:28And it usually is a mix for that specific client of LinkedIn and YouTube because he uses both together, which I always recommend. I do the same thing for my business. But I don't think we have people going for that. Cool. Let's talk about AI, the hottest topic ever. How does AI fit into your overall process? I mean, you've talked about it a little bit. It sounds like you're using AI in various ways. what are you outsourcing to AI fully? And what are you keeping a human in the loop for? Yeah, good question. So yes, I showed the ideation process. There's a lot of AI, but it's more so just the scraping part and like getting the data.

45:07But then there's an actual human, like in this case, me, I'm the leader of YouTube strategy in the business. So like I look through and like I actually determine what we do and make all the decisions. But AI, of course, helps a lot, speed up that process. Then scripting is the heaviest part where we like use AI. We spend a lot of money on tokens every single month of Cloud. We have a very correct Cloud code system for script writing. We have special skills for every single part of the process. We also have the special materials for every single one of our clients. All of that stuff is very complex.

45:39I have a full script writing department inside the business. We're just responsible for this because it's such a big part for us. It's like the make or break of the YouTube videos. Apart from that, there's a little bit of AI use in the thumbnails. like more and more you can generate different things with AI that are super realistic. You don't want to go just like fully AI generated thumbnails because they don't look good, but parts of it can be AI generated, AI enhanced. Editing is more and more like there's more and more AI usage in it for cuts, for animations. But again, it's still like not, you know, just AI handles it.

46:10It's like a person using AI is handling it who's like an actual expert at it. Apart from that, like we use AI for our agency stuff. So like processes, automations, we build with AI, different portals, softwares, but that's not really the YouTube side of things. Yeah, I would say these things mainly. Let's talk about scripting for a sec. What are the ingredients to a perfect script? Like I love how your suggestion for the headline or the hook, it's kind of like this three-step thing. And if you do those three steps and you do it pretty short, like you're going to hook the audience. What is the equivalent for script?

46:43Is there something like a checklist, I guess, for the perfect script? Yeah. So that's always the first part of the script, which is the hook where, as I mentioned, like those three things are what we are looking to nail. Yeah, then for the body of the script, which is like the 90%, like the actual meat of the video, we always, as I said, structure it in a way where it's like five steps, four lessons, 10 mistakes, all of these, because it's just easier to consume it and like go through it in like a specific order because it's not like a chaotic video. Like people see, okay, we are going through like a structured process.

47:14So that's one thing in terms of, it really depends on the content, to be honest. But yeah, that's one best practice. Another one is like the call to actions, where you put them. So we found that the highest converting way of doing call to actions in YouTube videos is doing two specific call to actions inside of every script that we write. The first call to action, we do a shorter one at around like 33 % of the video, where it's like subtle, short, just mentioning that, hey, by the way, if you want to do XYZ, then I'll put a link in the description for XYZ. We don't want to get people to click away.

47:45We don't want them to kind of stop anything like that. We want them to keep watching. So that's why it's short. And then at the very end, at the outro, we do another call to action, which is longer. We go deeper there, a bit more direct and strong. But then, of course, because it's the end of the video, we don't really care about people clicking away because they will click away anyway. So it's just about like getting that conversion and like explaining them like, hey, the next logical step for you is to sign up, book a demo. And we all do that in like a value-based manner. So like we explain them the value that they will get, not in like a salesy way.

48:15that's important. But yeah, those are the two call to actions we make in every single one of our videos. That's how I would say is the second best practice is like, put the full actions at the right places. I love that. On call to actions, the kind of funny YouTube thing is like, smash that like button, subscribe today. But as marketers, we're kind of trained, like, you know, keep it to one call to action. So if you're not Mr. Beast, and you're a B2B marketer, do you ever want to have two call to actions one that's like follow our youtube channel or do you want to always send them to your offer no we always like send them to the offer as i said perfectly like for b2b youtubers where the audience growth is the main thing like of course you will do that like those cringe stuff but yeah for b2b it's like you just want them to take the next step also like subscribers are not really like a metric that we optimize for anymore because it's just views and conversions that's what we care about not necessarily subscribers youtube doesn't also care about subscribers as much anymore because it just pushes it out to people who it thinks will like the video, not necessarily to subscribers.

49:18So it doesn't benefit you that much. And so yeah, we don't do those. What about AI models? You said thumbnails. You're using AI across all these different things. Are you using the same AI model for all of them? Do you have preferred, you know, I've got this tool when I'm writing the script and I use this model, but then when I'm doing a thumbnail, I switch it up and I use this. What's your stack? Yeah, to be honest, like I don't do the thumbnail designs myself, but I think our panel designer uses VO3, which is like, I believe, Google's image generation model. I'll have to see, but I think that's what's used for AI.

49:49Yeah, for scripting, we always use like the best model. So like right now it's Opus 5 that just came out from Cloud. That's what we found is best. Fable 5 is like super expensive in like AI tokens and we haven't found it to be that much better yet. So we don't use that for scriptwriting yet, but yeah, Opus 5 is really good, which just came out. So that's what we use for the scripting part. Awesome. Cool. Well, this was great. If people want to find you, where can they find you? Yeah, two places. I guess three. So one of mine is the LinkedIn. That's where I'm super active. Anyone have DMs, I'll respond.

50:21So yeah, and I also post a lot there. Also my YouTube channel where I post like those longer breakdowns, like everyone who wants to learn about B2B for YouTube, like I believe it's the best place to learn there, sharing everything there. And then of course our website where we have all our case study results, but also the option to book a call with me, which is ks-media.co. So I guess it will be somewhere in the description, but yeah, those three places. Shamu, this is great. I learned a ton. I'm logging off and I'm going to my marketing team and I'm saying, guys, we need a YouTube channel right now to repurpose all of the content that we've put out over the years.

50:53You have me convinced. Thanks for making the time to come on the pod. Super appreciate it. Thanks for dropping a lot of wisdom and knowledge bombs on us today. Yeah, thank you. It was great. Thanks.

51:07Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit 5. There's nearly 5 ,000 members now in our community.

51:39People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 % free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk-free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exit5.com, and I will see you over there in the community.

52:18Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Customer.io. They're one of our longest running sponsors. Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send, so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. What we love about Customer.io is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft. They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie, and the team bring something creative. Every time that we work together at our Exit 5 event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter. They shared an AI prompt cookbook.

52:49And at Drive last month, they were giving out Airbnb gift cards and AirPods. They believe marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought, and taste. And no, AI can't do this part for you. The best teams treat AI as infrastructure and built the right way. It actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. customer io helps product teams build personalized campaigns across email sms push in-app and web hooks using their own first party data and today more than 9 000 brands trust customer io to send their messages including notion less mills and angie so if you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging or you just want a great marketing team to follow it's time to go and check out customer io go to customer.io exit five that's customer.io exit five

53:35Thank you.