Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Samu, welcome to Growth Activated. We're so excited to have you here today.
Samu Kovács: Amen. Thanks for having me.
Mandy Hornaday: So hey, let's start with, I'd love a little bit of your background. How did you get into YouTube and how long have you been in it? How long have you had your agency? Just give us a quick overview here.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, definitely. So I started this whole thing around four years ago as a freelance video editor. So that was my starting point. I was at that time, I was doing a lot of different videos, like not just YouTube, but like short form, other sorts of stuff. But I was starting to work with more and more people that were doing YouTube videos. I just naturally got a lot more information and like behind the scenes stuff of like, okay, what it takes to grow a YouTube channel and go on the platform, make a successful YouTube video, et cetera. So I started like kind of learning more and more about it. And as I like went along and just get more and more experience in that, I was like, okay, why not? just, you know, create a whole service around YouTube and not just the editing part. So that's how the idea came first. And at that time I was still doing the work myself. So I was a freelancer, but like as I was going and I was, I was getting more more clients, I was naturally just like, okay, I will hire another editor. Why can I sort of work too? So I can concentrate on the other parts. And that's how I like built it up at the initial stages. And yeah, since then it's just been like, Obviously a long journey, but yeah, I would just like stacked a lot of clients. And now it's just like a full team and everything's great.
Mandy Hornaday: That's amazing and you have some really killer clients too, which is actually how I found you of course. Now I'm curious, sometimes the cobbler doesn't have their own shoes, so do you have your own YouTube channel personally or do you mostly just do it for clients?
Samu Kovács: Yes, I actually have my YouTube channel, although I didn't do a great job in the last like two months or so of posting just because we were like growing so fast that like it became a lower priority, but I was like posting it and I definitely like right now getting back to it. Before that, I was posting super consistently for years as well there. So yeah, it's definitely something where I'm getting most of my leads from mainly LinkedIn, but then like YouTube is a part where I nurture them. So this is the kind of combo I'm currently using with the agency and that helped me. scale to like over 40 clients is just having LinkedIn as like more my top of funnel like place where I just create the most of my content. But then I have YouTube where I, I would say I try, but I post like weekly. And that's where I really can nurture people and like be at that level of trust. So combining that was really the key for me to like scale this agency. So yeah, definitely trying to practice what I preach.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, and talk to me a little bit about YouTube in the B2B space, because I have to say, mean, of course it felt like a few years ago, everyone raced to create podcasts, but maybe not YouTube channels. Although, you know, I'm sure a lot of people wish that they would have jumped on the train much earlier, but where do you feel like YouTube sits with B2B today? Like, is it still a blue ocean opportunity for a lot of companies or is it pretty competitive out there right now? Like what's the What's the deal?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, good question. yeah, as you said, like that was the podcast boom, like I would say a couple of years ago, YouTube is kind of going through that right now, although it's not like a YouTube boom, would say, but like more and more companies are recognizing the importance of it. And I would say for like 90% of B2B companies, it's like still super untapped. It's definitely an opportunity that like YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, but still everyone in the B2B space knows that like Google and like SEO, how important it is almost all B2B companies do it at some point. But like YouTube is not at that level. Like very few B2B companies do it properly. A lot of them do it in a way where they have a YouTube channel. They've uploaded some videos, but most of them are like, don't have an actual strategy for YouTube. They don't have an actual, uh, proven system that they use for YouTube. But they don't actually like create business results from YouTube. They just like have it as like sort of a video storage platform. Uh, yeah, to answer your question is like, I would say 90% of all B2B companies for their like specific niche YouTube is, just such, such an untapped space.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, well, and part of why I'm talking to you about this today is because earlier this year, think it sort of dawned on me and probably too late, but where YouTube is such a great opportunity for like not only discoverability and credibility, but also lead generation, which is of course why I'm sure you're so heavily invested into it. But, you know, I feel like as marketing leaders, we We're just constantly trying to add more channels. And one of the things I think is so cool about YouTube is it accomplishes a lot of our major marketing goals in one. Whereas you can't necessarily say that about other channels. Like paid doesn't necessarily build credibility, but it might build visibility, right?
Samu Kovács: Exactly. I definitely agree that like, think YouTube crosses or like checks out lot of the boxes. And what we always see is that sure, like YouTube is very powerful as a lead generation channel. Because for most B2B companies, like their ICPs on YouTube, like it's just the video platform that everyone uses. Sure, if you're like a very niche, like let's say B2B or SaaS solution, then You can expect to have like tens of thousands of views on each of your videos But that doesn't mean that you can like generate really pipeline from YouTube because even we have like clients where they generate a couple hundred views on their videos and they like still generate over six figures a year from just like YouTube leads and So it's definitely a channel that that has a lot of potential and you don't need to like go viral or be like in a super broad Sort of space to succeed there. But as you mentioned that like that that's one part, but then there's all the other parts of like YouTube builds authority YouTube can generate leads directly, but then YouTube can also influence the sales cycle of people that come to you from LinkedIn, from any other marketing channels. So it just has an effect on all your other marketing channels. And that's why we always like to just be conscious of that, of like you're doing YouTube, but you're doing it for your entire marketing channel, not just for the YouTube part.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, good point. based on how, because I also question or wonder, I probably should know more about this, but I imagine that YouTube, I think I read something a couple weeks or months ago that YouTube is now showing up in the LLMs. Is that true? And so now it's like also impacting and probably compounding the efforts that we're all putting in for LLM optimization, or where are you seeing that sort of come to fruition?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, so it's something that's more and more of our clients are seeing. It's just, you know, ChatGPT and other LLMs are citing YouTube videos. They really like, and they actually start citing more and more like videos and actually like YouTube is a place where they do this from. So yeah, we've started like seeing certain, it depends still on the niche. Like you, it's kind of a thing back there. It's so new that we don't exactly know like what's working. Like we have very good playbooks for YouTube for LLM rankings. Like we don't... necessarily know exactly what it's about. We can obviously guess that it's mainly by doing the things that you would do either way to succeed on YouTube and succeed on ranking on Google, the same things apply to LLMs. So like that's kind of our best bet. What we don't know like the exact like nitty gritty details, but what we are definitely seeing is that many of our clients are starting to show up on LLMs. And also if you go into your YouTube studio and just see like where the views are coming from, YouTube actually like puts there, like for example, we see like ChatGPT coming up with a lot of our clients and That's just a clear sign that, okay, that percentage of views are coming from ChatGPT.
Mandy Hornaday: fascinating. Okay. So, let's say we're sold as marketing leaders. We're like, okay, we got to jump on this train. What is sort of, where does this go wrong when getting started? And what do you feel like when for your clients that are really successful, like what has to be true before you get started, before you take on a client and you're like, okay, check, check, check. This is going to be a really successful engagement. What are those things and where do people go?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, good question. So I think there are like two parts. One of them is just what needs to be true in order to succeed on YouTube. And that's definitely like just knowing your ICP and having a proven offer or a proven product like product market fit of some sort. If you're at the beginning stages, you're just like figuring out what you will offer. You don't have a very specific ICP and the very specific set of pain points you're solving. Then YouTube is not the right place to kind of guess or like experiment. It's more like when you already have like product market fit or you already have like a business that is doing well, then that's where like YouTube can come into play and it's really powerful because then like, know exactly who you target, know exactly the pain points you should talk about and you should solve with your videos. And if you know those, that information, that's really all we need to like make a client successful. And then the other part of it, like that's one part, the other part of it I say is just how you will actually succeed on YouTube. So like there are obviously a couple of ways. One of them is to do it yourself as a company. So like this will mean either using your own existing marketing team to have them kind of try to figure out YouTube or hire, you know, a couple of in-house people. Then there's another path of basically working with a vendor like us or like any other sort of YouTube agency or YouTube vendor that does it for you. And then there's also the part of just like trying to kind of hire freelancers or like get a freelance editor and do something there. we've seen that like there are only two options that make YouTube work. One of them is always like working with someone like us. And I'm just saying that because we are a YouTube agency, that's like truly what we see as in the beginning stages, you don't have the capital to like invest in a full YouTube team. So that can be good option. Obviously, if you find the right vendor, there are a lot of YouTube agencies out there that you shouldn't necessarily cooperate with, but obviously if you find the right fit, then that could work. And the other... like a way that we see in YouTube work or companies make YouTube work is if they build an in-house YouTube team. But the problem with that is that YouTube is so complex that it takes at least like three hires or so, like three people in a YouTube team or so. So like a script writer, an editor, and then a thumbnail designer, that's like the three kind of minimum that you need. And usually like hiring three people for a company that is, you know, still at, say the early stages is usually not the easiest. Like most of the time the companies you work with have like you know, a couple of marketers and like not a huge team. like just hiring three people for like YouTube specifically doesn't really make sense for bigger companies that can make a ton of sense, uh, hiring an in-house team and just like getting it in-house, it could make a ton of sense and it works very well. So yeah. And the mistake I would say many companies make here is they, have, let's say a marketer in-house or like a small marketing team and they try to solve YouTube by using those people. But the problem with this is YouTube is very specific. It's not, um, short form content, it's not SEO, it's not LinkedIn. So usually those marketers, if they're not specified in YouTube, it's very hard for them to figure it out because of there's so many components, ideation, scripting, editing, thumbnails, all of that stuff. So we usually always recommend either hiring a vendor and working with a vendor, or if you're at the later stages, an actual in-house team that is YouTube specific.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay, super helpful. Well, and I have so many questions, how long, I imagine before you build an in-house team too, you'd want to see some initial success. So like how long do you typically find that it takes to build momentum and actually see sales getting generated in order to prove concept?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, definitely. So obviously all the people that do stuff like YouTube and SEO, they like know it's organic and it needs to compound. So most of our clients luckily don't expect results in like two weeks or something, which is always like unrealistic. If there's any clients that come to us and say, okay, we want results in like two weeks, then, you know, we, just, I don't think we are a fit there. And we just don't start working. It doesn't need to be like six to 12 months to start the initial results. What we are seeing on average is that it takes around three months to like start to see the first signs of success when you're starting completely from zero. If you already have an audience, let's say on LinkedIn or some other platforms, we even see that like you start seeing results from YouTube in the first and second month because you already have an audience. We have a couple of strategies we use to plug the YouTube videos in, let's say on LinkedIn or on your newsletter, et cetera. with that, like we are able to generate results even in the first or second month. in most of the cases, but let's say you're fully from zero, you don't really have an audience on other platforms, you're starting YouTube from zero, but you have obviously a functioning business, clear ICP, et cetera. Then in those cases, it takes around three months to start seeing the initial results. What this means is the first couple of booked demos, the first couple of signups from YouTube, we track that with UTM links, so you see exactly what the result is. That's around the third month mark, the 90-day mark. And then after that, in the four to six month... period is where it starts to become consistent. So this varies a lot depending on your niche, like how many leads, but usually that's the time where we see, YouTube is generating X amount of booked demos or X amount of signups consistently every month. And then the six to 12 month range is where you successfully build your YouTube channel as like a consistently generating machine that is one of your top channels in your business. So that's kind of the longer time horizon. But yeah, these are kind of the phases.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow, wow, okay. Yeah, and was curious like what, where you see the most impact from a conversion perspective. I wasn't sure if it was like just email capture or if it was actually demos booked or free trial signups or what it is, but I guess do you see one that's more successful than others?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, it really depends on the type of business. like, we usually go with the conversion method that specific business already uses with other channels. So like if it's a product led, you know, SaaS, then like it's always like just free signups and that's it. If it's more like a sales led, then usually demos is the easiest way. And if a business already has a very good system for turning that email list into, you know, users, clients, et cetera, then we just go for the email opt-in. with some sort of lead magnet. That's, would say that's the rarest. Like for most of our clients, we just either use a booked-call or booked-demo funnel or a free signup funnel. But then there are some of our clients where they have like a very established email list or like a very established way of turning people that sign up for a newsletter or some sort of opt-in and lead magnet into an actual client. And for those clients, we just go with a free lead magnet.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, okay. That's interesting. I was curious this morning as I was sort of getting into the mindset for this interview, whether or not newsletter conversions was something that would work with YouTube, because it almost feels like if you're on YouTube, like your preferred method of consumption is probably through video. And I imagine that with a newsletter, you're talking about a lot of the same content. So I just wasn't sure if that was like a natural conversion path, but it sounds like you have seen that work.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, we've seen that. We've often seen that work and like many of the big YouTubers, know, B2B, B2C space actually use that. It's somewhat true that like it's similar because newsletters are like longer form sort of text content and like YouTube videos are basically the same thing, but in video format. So it definitely has some truth to it, but we still saw that like getting people on an email list and then getting the conversion there works very well from YouTube because many times like the... way we do it is like, okay, we have a YouTube video, but then like the email list, we share a lot of like resources, we share a lot of things that they don't get from YouTube videos, it's like one step further. So yeah, it still works. It still works, but we still like prefer in most of the cases to just like do the conversion on YouTube into like either a free sign up or a booked demo.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, okay, cool. So I wanna go backwards a little bit into the strategy. if we just rewind, I know you said like really know your ICP and I'm curious for large enterprises who might have multiple solutions, multiple personas, multiple industries, do you find that YouTube can still be a powerful solution for them if they're talking to a lot of different. people or does it start to kind of dilute YouTube's performance because YouTube maybe can't figure out who you are.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, definitely. what we've seen is that if you're still in one industry and maybe you have a couple of different personas in that one industry, but you're still talking about one specific topic, one specific industry, and a couple of related pain points that you're solving with your offer or whatever, then YouTube still works very well. If it comes to, let's say, you have multiple unrelated industries and very different ICPs, then YouTube can still work. But in those cases, we never recommend to just have one channel targeting all of those people. Because as you mentioned, like YouTube doesn't like that. It can figure out when there's a channel with videos that are, let's say, one of them, one the videos are for that person and then the other video is for a completely different person. In those cases, YouTube just gets confused and like it usually just suffers. The performance suffers because of that we never recommend to do that for companies whenever there's like clear different ICPs. we just either create like multiple channels or just create one channel that is focused on like only one of them. It depends on like what the priorities are for the business, how much resources they have. So yeah, in those cases, we always recommend multiple channels.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting, interesting. Okay. My other question from a strategy perspective is do you recommend, I know for like smaller companies, founder led marketing is a really popular strategy right now. In those instances, and I know Adam Robinson is a client, I think that's how I found you. Do you build the founders personal brand and lead it to the company or are you building, would you recommend that the company has its own channel? Like how are you? or is there a role in which both would exist? How do you recommend to clients to approach that?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, so that depends on if you're already using a founder led growth sort of process. If for example, in Adam's case, it's heavily like it's like RB2B is growing because of his LinkedIn mainly like that's their his main like growth lever. So it just made a ton of sense to extend that to YouTube and just make it even more powerful. That was the whole reason, reason behind that for some companies where there's like no founder brand and it can still work to like start the founder brand instead of a company YouTube channel, but it's less powerful in those cases. Usually we recommend doing a founder led YouTube channel when you already have a founder, let's say as Motion and you already have either a big LinkedIn or some sort of like big Twitter or whatever. So yeah, I mean, many of our clients like ask this when they start, the only thing to consider is that like people like to connect with people. So usually a founder led sort of growth is easier to grow with organic content because of that reason. But that doesn't mean that company brands or company branded YouTube channels can grow the similar way because you can still make it very personal. The videos can still be recorded by one person or by a couple of key members of the team and it can still feel like very personal. But yeah, generally speaking, like if our client is open to scaling their founder brand and they want like it's a priority for them. then we just always like, okay, let's do it and let's do that instead of a company branded YouTube channel.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay. And is there a world in which you grow both in parallel?
Samu Kovács: There is, but for most of the companies, growing one YouTube channel is a big enough challenge. If you want to grow two, then sure. If you have the resource, then you can push two channels and grow them at the same time. Then sure, it makes sense. for most companies, when you're new to YouTube, just start with one channel and just focus on that.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, no, makes sense. I had sort of Dave Gerhardt in my mind. I'm like, okay, he's his own brand, but then he also has Exit Five. would he, you know, where would he... amazing. Congratulations. That's awesome.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, we actually started working with him just now. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we're just editing their podcast for now, but yeah, exciting.
Mandy Hornaday: That's good. That's great. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about content strategy. So, you know, I know you had said like a lot of times companies are just uploading the videos they have. Maybe if they have a podcast or an event series, they probably are just dumping it on YouTube or product demos or whatever. where, what do you feel like a proper high performing content strategy really looks like with these YouTube channels?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, so most companies make the mistake of, as you said, uploading videos that are not necessarily made for YouTube, like they are not YouTube specific. They just happen to be videos, so they can be uploaded to YouTube. What we are preaching and what we are doing for the majority of our clients is optimizing the content for YouTube specifically, creating the content with YouTube in mind and specifically for YouTube. Because if you look at all of the B2B channels and all of the YouTube channels that made it work, all of them created YouTube specific content. They created YouTube. for the purpose of putting it up on YouTube and fully optimized for YouTube. So that's really a core of our strategy. And what that means is first we get very clear on the ICP and we get very clear on all the stuff regarding pain points, desires, and just getting that customer research that's always the foundation of whatever marketing you do. But then once we have that, we look at YouTube specifically and do our research on YouTube because that will lead us to know exactly, okay, what's working in your specific niche. are the things that are working in similar niches. So like what thumbnail concepts have worked in other similar niches, like related niches that we can potentially adapt. What were the title structures that have worked for others? What were the video concepts, how they structured the hook, et cetera. And we can look at just that entire data and see, exactly what worked, how we can adapt it to our specific client and how we can make sure that we are not just trying to reinvent the wheel, but we are actually looking at the data and making all of the decisions based on the data. That's really what we've seen is the key to making YouTube work as fast as possible because you're not like reinventing the wheel there. You're not trying to come up with stuff on your own. You're just looking at what already worked, putting it in play in your specific channel. And then obviously when it comes to the content, it's always unique. It's always, we want to make it more valuable than what's currently out there. But there's a difference. Like I always say, you want to sort of copy the wrapper. but never copy the content itself. So like you want to copy how it's packaged and not necessarily like copy in a bad way, but like get inspiration from what's already worked and like base it on actual like already working concepts on YouTube. But then when it comes to the actual content, like the core of the video, you always want to be sure that it's unique to you. You're sharing your own expertise that only you can share and you make it more valuable than anyone else in the market. And that's how you dominate an issue on YouTube.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay. So would you almost say then that like product demos and things like that don't necessarily have a place or have you seen those be successful as well?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, not really as organic YouTube videos. It's always like we create YouTube videos and some parts of it might be like showing the product, relating it back to the product. It's always very important. And we have a couple of specific conversion strategies we use to like relate it always back to the offer and show it in YouTube videos. like just uploading, let's say you did a product demo for your website and just uploading it on YouTube, will do nothing for your business.
Mandy Hornaday: And does it hurt you? So I'm just even wondering, you're, if you, can YouTube be sort of your catalog of all of the videos that exist where it doesn't actually hurt and detract, or would you actually recommend that clients house those things elsewhere so that it doesn't detract from what you're trying to build?
Samu Kovács: You can still house it on YouTube, but we always recommend to make it unlisted, which just means that anyone can reach it on YouTube with the link, but it's not showing up on your channel. So this way you keep the channel clean and you only create YouTube optimized content because people, when they check out your channel and they consider subscribing, like if they see a bunch of random like these product demos, they're not really interested in that. They don't want to subscribe to like, you know, get notifications about new, you know, product demos or whatever they are optimized or they are looking for the YouTube optimized content. So That's what they should see on the main page. So we always recommend to just unlist those videos.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay, good to know. And then I'm curious, how do you view shorts versus long form working together? do you really just focus on long form for B2B? Or the shorts have a part to play in the strategy as well? Or how does that work for B2B?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, we really specialize on long form. The reason for that is when it comes to B2B specifically, we've yet to see big results from short form. We always see the majority of the ROI coming from long form. And that's what we always double down on instead of shorts. The main thing there is many people think that they would just use shorts to get awareness. And then that awareness will turn into more middle of funnel views. Let's say they get people to watch the shorts and then those people turn into long form viewers. What we've seen is usually these are two different personas like someone watching short form is not necessarily the person that will be interested in watching a 10 to 15 minute YouTube video. And even though you want to kind of convert them into like a long form viewer, you won't be able to do that. They will just stay with the shorts. And then the people who are interested in long form will stay with the long form. And if you think about like, who will be your ideal client? Like, is it the person who's scrolling YouTube shorts or like Instagram reels, or is the person that has a specific problem that is searching up YouTube or like looking for solutions or are able to like watch a 10 to 15 minute video going in that on a topic? It's almost always a later. So yeah, we've just seen like limited results from shorts. We still have some clients where we do it like repurposing mainly, but it's not something where we see a ton of results for. So we just very much like focused our service on the long form aspect.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay, good to know. Yeah, I had heard that too, that they end up being sort of different audiences, but I wasn't sure if shorts back to like the newsletter conversion, if shorts could be a good way to convert emails, maybe not product demos and more deeper sort of lower the funnel conversions, but maybe more top of the funnel stuff.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, we've yet to see that even with making calls to action in shorts, it's kind of hard because if it's a 30-second or a 45-second short, there's just not enough room to build that trust where you can make the call to action. Sure, you can make calls to action to subscribe or whatever or comment XYZ, but we usually see that conversions are also always higher on long-form videos, whatever you make the call to action for.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, okay, okay, good to know. So let's transition into execution a little bit. What does this actually look like? So for marketing leaders out there who are like, okay, I'm in it, whether they use you or whether they do it in-house, what have you found that really works? Like how much time does this take? How do you potentially batch the work? What's your flow that you think a lot of us could learn from?
Samu Kovács: Yeah, so the workflow starts with, yeah, just creating the strategy, which, yeah, I kind of already went through, like using the customer research and then the YouTube specific research. And that's initially how we always come up with the initial strategy and the video ideas for our clients. And yeah, no matter if you are using someone like us or doing it in-house, that should be the starting step is just creating your strategy. What will be the video ideas that you will implement or execute. And once you have that, the next step is really like scripting out the videos. So when it comes to scripting, Many of our clients have a bunch of our existing content, which is very useful in those cases. Like for example, Adam Robinson has a lot of LinkedIn posts, newsletters that we were able to use, et cetera. Many SaaS companies have blog posts that could be repurposed into or included in YouTube videos and used as resource for scripting videos. So many of the companies that will watch this, like you don't necessarily have to think about like just creating content from zero. You can usually just use a lot of your existing resources. It's obviously, there's a lot that goes into... having those resources and turning it into an actual script that works well for YouTube that is structured properly, has the right calls to action, the hook is well written, etc. Obviously, that's what we do, or like a script writer for YouTube, but yeah, there's a lot that goes into that. But let's say you wrote the scripts, and the next step is recording. In our case, whenever we work with someone, that's the only step that they have to do is the recording part. And that takes around two to four hours per month of their time. And that's really like the only commitment that we get from our clients specifically. But yeah, for that, like we always recommend for any B2B company to start with four YouTube videos per month. And that's the recording, which will take like two to four hours approximately every month. So yeah, that's the recording part. And after you record a video, then there comes the production process. So what you want to do there is edit the videos and make sure the thumbnail is, you know, paired with the title and the video is packaged overall. That's really the step where we edit the videos and create the thumbnails. Then there's obviously the SEO aspect of it. So like everything that goes into the title, the description, the tags, et cetera. And after that's already done, we upload our videos for our clients. So like if you're doing it in-house, then you would kind of go through like all of these steps of everything, thumbnails, SEO, and then the upload. for YouTube and yeah, once you start uploading the videos, really the last step is just using these YouTube videos across all your other channels. So a couple of things we like to do with our clients is putting them out on LinkedIn. So like what this means is you write a LinkedIn post that is optimized for LinkedIn and then at the end you link the YouTube video. So like it should basically talk about the YouTube video in a way that makes people curious and then at the end it links back to it. So we can build a bridge between these two platforms and like even send people who are interested in watching a long form. YouTube video to YouTube and this way we found that like those like two platforms LinkedIn and YouTube can work very well together. That's what I also personally do for my own business. But same thing if you have an email list, same thing if you do SEO. like embedding YouTube videos on blog posts can improve rankings and it also just gives people another way if they don't want to like read the whole thing they can just watch a YouTube video. So yeah there's a lot of like opportunities also like If you're running demos, can set up like automated sequences that send out YouTube videos to people. So they get a lot more nurture before demos or like sales calls that works very well. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunities there.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay, awesome. I apologize, you might have already answered this and maybe I'll just ask it a different way. But if a marketing team is already already runs a webinar series or already runs a podcast or like they have their regular content cadence, is, is it possible to turn that content into high performing YouTube? Videos or would you say no you really got a you really have to create it with YouTube first in mind and sort of recreate some of what? exists
Samu Kovács: Yeah, so it's better than nothing. It's better than nothing and you can still do some stuff. So like, for example, if you have like webinars going out every week or something, then you can do the best that you can to package those webinars. So like create the right thumbnail and right title for you so they can perform somewhat on YouTube. But yeah, what we've seen is that like you can do that and same thing with podcasts, but if you really want to like crack YouTube and grow the fastest, then it needs to be a YouTube first approach. So yeah, it's better than nothing and you still can get results from it, but it will be just a lot faster if you like do it like a YouTube first approach.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I'm wondering too, if the if the inverse works. So I'm thinking like specifically for growth activated or for others that have audio first podcasts where maybe if you created it for YouTube first, you could still translate the audio into a podcast. So it's it's almost just like flipping the priority sounds like.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, that works very well, actually. A lot of our clients do that, and that's what we prefer. So the other way around, because as you said, we do that for a lot of our clients where we create a YouTube video and then we just send them the audio without any effects or music or anything, just the audio. And it's the same thing as the podcast, they can upload it as a podcast as well. and they hit two birds with one stone. And even some of our clients use YouTube videos to then repurpose it into blog posts, whatever. So YouTube can work very well as the pillar content, but it doesn't work super well when it's something else is the pillar content, let's say like a podcast and then it's just like repurposed to YouTube. We always prefer to have it as the pillar.
Mandy Hornaday: That's awesome. cool. Wow. Well, this is exciting. You've given me a lot to think about. I know you've probably given our audience a lot to think about. I'd love to hear some case studies. Could you share some real life examples of where maybe your star client or something, I'm sure you have several, but where this has really just blown their expectations out of the water.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, 100%. I mean, one of the biggest case studies that we have and like probably the one that most people will be familiar with is Adam Robinson. So yeah, to give you a bit of context, we've started working with him, I think last year, October. So like around, what is it, like six months ago or something. And back then, like he had no YouTube specific content. He was sitting, I think around 2000 subscribers or something. So like he basically had like a dead sort of YouTube channel compared to LinkedIn. Like he was just re-uploading his podcast or like webinar that he was doing every week, but that was it. And when we came in, like, that was also one thing that I told him is like, you need a YouTube specific approach if you want to like, really scale this. So that's exactly what we did. We created another channel for his podcast. So we are uploading the podcast there. So it's not cluttering the main channel. And for the main channel, we started scripting out specific videos that are about, it's basically the same content as his LinkedIn, but obviously optimized for YouTube. use his LinkedIn posts as a main source and his newsletters. And that's how we started out with. And since working with us, he's getting close to 10,000 subscribers right now. And some of his videos achieved 20k plus views, 40k plus views. So it has really has gone up since the start of when we started out his videos, we're getting like 300 views or something. So it's got him nicely there. And we are also like focusing on getting the traffic to RB2B. So he generated over a hundred signups on YouTube so far. It's always a little bit tricky to track, even though you have like UTM parameters set up because He's embedding the YouTube videos on his LinkedIn, putting it out in a lot of places. So it's always kind of tricky to see where people are coming from. But yeah, we have some data there. So that's one good case study. We have another one, which is, I would say even crazier. His name is Taylor Herron. He's actually the cold email guy for Adam. So like they are, he's doing the cold email for RB2B. And we also started working with him after we started working with Adam, because Adam just referred Taylor to us. And with Taylor, it was similar situation. So he had a like LinkedIn followers, but no real YouTube presence, like a couple of videos, but that's it. And the same thing there, like we just started scripting out YouTube specific videos for him. And in the first month, like he made 10X the investment that he made with us, like just 10X ROI in the first month, which is super rare. We never expect this. We never promised this to any client, but that's just what happened. yeah, like right now he's booking over 30 sales calls every month from YouTube specifically. And yeah, what was also cool is that We had one video that just went like sort of viral in the space. It's now like a 60k plus views, which in like the cold outbound space is like, obviously it's a more niche space. So it's, it did like very well. And he basically just took that concept and turned it into a LinkedIn post and it became his best performing LinkedIn post ever with over like 5,000 comments, hundreds of thousands of impressions. So that just goes to show that like you can work very well as, kind of a pillar content.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, awesome. Wow, that's really cool. Shoot, I was just gonna ask you a question related to that and I lost it in my head, but that's okay. So this is great. I know what I was gonna ask. Is there any due diligence that you would, because I know you were saying even with cold email, right? The audience might be slow or not slow, lower than certain industries or other products and things like that. Is there any due diligence you would encourage marketing leaders to do to say, okay, to really vet the opportunity and if it's going to be worth the investment.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, 100%. So the easiest thing you can do is just search up your niche on YouTube. So like, yeah, let's say you're in cold email, cold outbound, you're just typing like cold email and some like related keywords, like you just do like a couple of different like keyword combinations and just try to see, okay, what's already in your niche? What are the type of results those videos are getting? What types of videos those are? And like, that's really how you can get a good grasp of what's possible in your niche. So like, Let's say you have a very, very specific niche and you search it up on YouTube and you don't see a lot of videos. You maybe see a couple of them with like a couple hundred, maximum, a couple thousand views. Now, you know that that's kind of the ceiling that you can get to. That doesn't mean that YouTube is not worthwhile because with most of the niches is just, you know, even if it's very, very specific, usually in those cases, the deal values and average contract values are like a lot higher. So even when getting a couple hundred views and you get just like one or two deals, it paid for itself like tenfold. So in those cases, it's always worth considering YouTube, but it's very important to set the right expectations. And that's always what we do with clients is like before getting started, we know their niche and we know what to expect more or less, like what's realistic. And many of our clients, like we just say to them like, okay, you won't get more than a couple hundred views per video. Like that's it. We still are confident that you'll see a very nice ROI from it because of the dimension reasons, but we are not expecting you to like... go viral or like generate tens of thousands of views or anything like that because you're just talking about a very specific solution for a very specific ICP. So that's just not realistic. So yeah, that's the easiest is to just search up your niche on YouTube and see what's out there.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, you, you reminded me, I was just, as you were talking, I was thinking I several months back, I interviewed Eric from Hatch. don't know if you're familiar with him. but he, he runs sort of a video LinkedIn combo, sort of a content first agency, but, and he had even shared like, Hey, if you get 50 B2B views, that's, you know, 10X more powerful than if you were in like the B2C space or whatever it is. So it's a good. It's a good reminder because I think we're all consumers in our personal time too. And so we have these expectations that something might get thousands of views or hundreds of thousands of views in order to be good. And with B2B, it just doesn't translate the same.
Samu Kovács: Exactly, yeah, that's very important to always know.
Mandy Hornaday: Great, great point. Is there any final tips or advice or things we didn't talk about that you think would be really helpful for marketing leaders as they're evaluating whether this is the right strategy for them?
Samu Kovács: me think. Yeah, I think we've covered a lot of ground here. would say the important thing that I think we might have not covered is I think the importance of long form versus short form. I think that's a big like sort of shift that's happening right now is that a lot of people are looking for just longer form content that they can consume and learn from. And a lot of companies fall into the trap or like just make the mistake of... of only focusing on short form because that's easier to create. Usually it's easier to get to people. People are consuming it better, but that doesn't mean that it should be only type of content you're creating. So what I see is a lot of B2B companies, a lot of B2B even founder led personal brands, et cetera. or let's say only focusing on LinkedIn and they're just doing like short from LinkedIn posts and they are getting very good results from it. But the thing there is like, if you would just pair it with like either a podcast or YouTube or some sort of like long-form content, it would do so much better because you would have a place to send people to that want to learn more, that want to learn more from what your expertise is, learn more about what you do, where you are able to share more information, just be a deeper trust and the sales cycle will be a lot shorter. It will be a lot easier to convert people and it will just have like so many benefits. I think that's a big part of lot of like marketers or like just founders don't consider is that like how important long-form content is nowadays. You just need to be a trust. Otherwise your competitors will build that trust and like you don't want to be in that place. And so I think that's sort of an important kind of shift. A lot of people have to make.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's been such a pleasure. I've learned so much. appreciate your time today. Of course, I'm sure people can find you on LinkedIn. there any, if people are interested in learning more, guess, should they book a discovery session with you or where do you typically, I guess they should check out your YouTube channel.
Samu Kovács: Yeah, exactly. like YouTube, LinkedIn, my website, these are all great places to learn more about us. Our website is ks-media.co. But yeah, like I'm super available on LinkedIn as well. yeah, if anyone is like interested to kind learn more, see how what it would look like for their like specific company, then yeah, I'm always happy to chat. Anyone can book a discovery call on our website. But yeah, really, really enjoy it and thanks for having me.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome, thank you so much.
Samu Kovács: awesome.
