Driving Demand via YouTube (📈 MTN #12)

In this edition

• 📊 YouTube Benchmarks for B2B
• 💡 Demand Gen & Product Education via YouTube
• 📈 Why You Need A Short + Long-Term Marketing Plan

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📊 Featured Benchmark Data (from Benchmark Groups)

YouTube Benchmarks for B2B

Median YouTube performance for B2B companies (April 2023):

• Avg Views: 1.27k
• Avg Watch Time: 1 day, 4 hrs
• Avg View Duration: 1 min, 23 sec

Join this group to view more metrics, and how your company stacks up. See if you’re ahead or behind the curve, and where you can improve.

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💡 Trends & Insights (from Reports & Surveys)

Using YouTube for Demand Creation and Product Education in B2B

I think there’s a huge opportunity for B2B companies to leverage YouTube to build their brand, create demand, and let prospects view a “demo” of their service or product before booking with sales.

Often, when I need to learn something new, I turn to YouTube. And it’s usually clear who the top channels are for a given category.

This means that if you can be the top channel for your category, you’ll also be seen as one of the top thought leaders and experts in your space.

And while it’s certainly not easy, it can be done.

Superside has hit 193k views over the past year. And Ahrefs is killing it, at 19.3m total views 🤯. 

The key is being the top educator in your industry, not pitching your product.

I mean, obviously, you can have a “how to use [your product name]” playlist – but it shouldn’t be the focus of the channel.

For example, if Databox were to invest (something I think a lot about) we could talk:

– Top metrics every marketing team should measure
– How to use leading metrics to produce more consistent lagging results
– Different planning methodologies
– How to make sure you’re using data contextually
– How to use numbers to tell a story the C-Suite understands
– etc.

YouTube gets even more exciting when you compare it to podcasting. The top-performing channels get almost 17k views/month. Most B2B podcasts publish for a year without hitting those numbers.

We recently interviewed and surveyed B2Bs to learn what types of content they’ve found most effective, how they optimize for search and grow their audience, and more.

A few insights:

• The majority (40% of respondents) post 3-5 videos a month
• Most have run their channel for 1-3 years, and many of them have had it longer than that
• The biggest challenge cited, was finding topics to create content around, followed by maintaining a consistent production schedule

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📈 Drive Predictable Performance (from Metrics & Chill)

Why You Need A Short and Long-Term Marketing Plan

You have pipeline goals you need to hit this year. But you also need to have a plan for long-term growth, so you don’t plateau.

Here’s how Amrita Mathur uses a combo of short and long-term planning to drive predictable growth now while ensuring Superside can continue to expand and differentiate in the future.

The short-term plan is to hit this year’s pipeline goals, while the long-term plan is to make big bets on future programs that will drive continued growth.

Her short-term plan looks 1 year~ out, and just about everything in it is expected to contribute to a pipeline target. She does this by utilizing three proven programs: performance, content, and account-based marketing (ABM).

Because she’s put in the hard work to build those programs to maturity and track their performance at each stage of the funnel, she can fairly accurately predict how much pipeline those channels can generate by playing with different levers.

But she also knows that what’s working this year won’t continue to drive growth for years to come. Performance (especially for paid) plateaus, you saturate your audience, max out your spend, or in the case of organic content, the platform may change the algorithm and throttle your reach.

To solve this, she’s constantly executing a long-term plan to identify moonshots: programs that will pay off big, but take a long time to get off the ground.

Whereas just about everything in her short-term plan is expected to contribute to pipeline growth, she has no revenue expectations for long-term plans. If they yield fruit sooner than expected, great. But they’re not expected to. In fact, she sets expectations early by telling the team not to count on these moonshots to contribute anything to this year’s growth.

The idea is to commit to testing and building the program and look for early signals of success. The exact leading indicators vary, depending on the experiment. For example, right now her team has a long-term plan to get YouTube working that they’ve been working on for about 1 year.

She believes investing in these longer-term bets will be the key to ensuring Superside is able to continue to grow and differentiate itself in the future.

When does the long-term plan end? It depends on the goal, but generally, the program is considered a success and held to pipeline expectations when there are enough signals it’ll work, and the payback period makes sense.

The key to Amrita’s approach is how she balances short-term wins with long-term gains. By putting in the hard work to build a few revenue-generating programs, she’s earned the trust to make bigger, longer-term bets.

We also covered how she:

– Got permission and trust to make these long-term bets (and how you can too)

– Decides when a channel “makes the cut” or not

– Plans in 6-month increments (and why)

… and a ton more.

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Drive predictable growth

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