Breaking the Chains of B2B Content Limitations | B2B Podcast - Content Wars EP9

It's happening right now. It's something that companies are missing out on, literally on a daily basis where they could be talking to 500 people, a thousand people, 10,000 people, depending on what the content is. And we're just not doing it because we're not creating the content. So we're giving up the opportunity to distribute our message for free. So I was just talking with one of our newest clients, and we had just delivered their first batch of content, and I was talking with them about how to distribute that content. Obviously, most of our clients, when they get the amount of content that we deliver, don't necessarily have a process for that yet. So I like to talk to them, give them kind of best practices from a high level of, this is kind of how you need to change your thinking about distribution if you're going to reach your audience. And was a little bit taken back to find out that they didn't even have a YouTube channel, hadn't thought about it, hadn't set it up, wasn't on their roadmap of marketing at all, which was the first time I've run into that where they didn't even have a channel. And then directly after that, the same day, another company that we work with was talking to them, and we've been working with them for a little while about how they're using content and where their video is going specifically. And. And they failed to mention YouTube in their distribution strategy. And, you know, I said, do you have a YouTube? And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we, you know, we have a YouTube. So of course I went and checked it out. And indeed they do have a YouTube, but none of that content was on there. They've got a bunch of old videos that, that were on there, and they're kind of just kind of thrown on there in no particular order. So I thought it might be a good idea if we have a conversation about YouTube, because seemingly in B2B, there is a lot of misuse or underutilization that's occurring. So maybe we should talk that through and share maybe a different way to think about it with the audience. Yeah, I think that's a really common problem. Especially in B2B, they either treat YouTube as a dumping ground or just a place to store their videos. And you're right, their channels aren't optimized. They don't have specific playlists for certain purposes. And really they're not utilized. Realizing the full potential that exists, they're just putting their videos on there and forgetting about them. Almost like it's a graveyard for things to go. And if they need it, they know that it's there. But it doesn't really leverage the full benefit of what YouTube has to offer. Yeah, I think the two most common ways that, that I see it used, at least in a B2B context, the first way is going to be we use it as a hosting platform. We're going to put videos on our website, so we got to put them somewhere. So we'll just throw them on YouTube. We'll get whatever the embed code is and we'll put that on our website. And if someone happens to go to YouTube, sure, they can watch it there. But our intent was to how do we get it on our website? How do we treat it as a hosting platform? The second one is like you mentioned, the, the dumping ground. We created some videos and we don't know what to do with them. So I don't know, just put them on our YouTube and something will happen maybe. And that's, I think for the majority of B2B companies, that's as far as the YouTube strategy goes, the stat has been overused. But YouTube is the second biggest search engine next to Google and that's why Google owns them. The things that they are doing now to make YouTube videos index either in organic search results or incorporating them into the AI results, it has a ton of potential. And if you're not leveraging it, if you're not structuring it right, if you're not optimizing the actual video itself or the playlist that it's a part of, you're missing a huge opportunity in being able to capture the, the audience that is on YouTube. And that's a great point because everybody, like, if you get to the heart of what is the company up to, specifically the marketing team, the sales team, what are we up to? We're up to being able to communicate to our audience. So if we rationalize is our audience consuming content on YouTube? I think you'd be hard pressed to find an audience where the answer was no. Begs the question, why aren't we as B2B marketers, B2B sales teams, whatever it is, why aren't we using this more as a channel or as a tool to reach our audience in a meaningful way? And you can't get there when you're just hosting website videos or you're just using it as a dumping ground for videos that you happen to create. Yeah, I think one of the most important things is to treat YouTube like any other content channel. And if you're just taking the file and just dumping it there. You're missing a ton of opportunity for optimizing the thumbnail or adding a keyword rich description or creating it into a playlist that helps them find more relevant content that's like what they just watched, or creating something at the end that allows them to go to the next video and seamlessly transition into more of your content. But all of those little stepping stones are building blocks that's going to increase consumption and increase subscribership. And while that's not the end goal, if your goal is to communicate a message like we know the goal of marketing is, you're really missing that in. If you're just keeping it on YouTube as an unlisted video, there's so much more opportunity there that you can unpack. And that's one of the keys I think people miss when they're talking about content in general. There's this, this idea that you just need to create content. Well, creating content is cool, but not if nobody consumes it. So you have to have a way to get people to consume it. One of the cool things about YouTube in general we already mentioned, it's essentially a search engine. It's a video content search engine. So when you're creating that content and you're putting it there, going through the actual steps to optimize, is it going to be viewed by the audience, is it going to be recommended by the platform, is it going to be chosen when it shows up in a search result? And when you, when you really analyze what these things are there, there's a science to it. All your thumbnail. There's very famous YouTubers out there that spend more time on their thumbnail, the image that shows up to kind of represent the video, than they do on the video itself. And they're constantly experimenting, seeing what works, because that has a huge impact on if your video is chosen out of the results that come from a particular search. Same with, you know, the, the keyword aspect of things. And there's. There's changes happening as, you know, AI takes more control of things, but there's changes happening in what's being referenced, whether it be the actual transcript, whether it be the description that you're putting in. But there's. There's definitely an SEO aspect into the video to be able to be shown to different audiences that are interested in different things or that are searching for something. So there's a huge opportunity to naturally have your content picked up in a place that isn't your website in a Place that isn't, you know, for instance, like a podcast you throw on Apple or wherever, it's not necessarily going to be shopped around and recommended to people who are listening to stuff like that. That's not the way a lot of those podcast platforms work. But when you talk about YouTube, well, that is the way it works. They want you to stay on platform, they want you to watch the next video. So if you're creating content in a category and you're doing the right things to optimize it to be found, and then you're doing the right things to optimize it to be selected or clicked or watched, you're going to be in a much greater position to potentially share that message or that story with your audience than you're going to be if you just dump your content on YouTube and maybe somebody watches it someday. Yeah, the discoverability aspect of YouTube is huge. And I really think that one of the things that helps drive people to the next video and the next video is what you mentioned of the thumbnail. And I mean, I know that for us, when we're creating thumbnails, either for this or even for some of our other clients, really focusing on what is the thumbnail, how does it stand out, what is the text that lives on the thumbnail? Because that essentially serves as the hook to get them to watch. So if you're used to ads, you're thinking of, you know, what is the headline? That's almost like the headline where if they see that thumbnail and if it has something enticing that creates, you know, an open loop in their mind and says, okay, well what, what is that video about? What is that next thing? And they click. Now you've engaged that user. It's not just in that thumbnail, it's also in what happens next. That first 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, if something doesn't happen, you're gonna lose people. Not as fast as you're going to on a social platform, but people still have a short interest span. And if you're not able to grab them in the first 10 to 15 seconds, you have a high risk of them clicking away. So your mission in the video, really any content, is gain interest very quickly and then jump from that point of interest into the next one, into the next one. Because at any point they lose interest, you're going to lose them. And that fall off rate affects the algorithm and who that's going to be shown to. The longer people are hanging around and watching your video, the longer hold rate you have for that viewer, the more YouTube's going to look at it and say, this must be valuable. People are watching this, they're watching it through. I should share this with more people. And that doesn't matter whether you're talking about a long form or whether you're talking about a short. It's one of the main metrics that YouTube specifically is going to look at when it's trying to determine do I show this to a wider audience or not. And that's a really good point. And when YouTube is looking at that, it usually looks at some of the data that comes in initially right off the first, and I don't know what it is, first 20 minutes, first hour, first two hours, whatever it is. But that's why after we actually upload a video, we'll share it to either each other or to another account that we can watch the full video through. Because that's a signal to YouTube of, hey, this content's relevant. The viewers that are watching this are watching it to the end or the majority of the end, and it just gives positive signals back to it. So it continues to learn from it and understand that this content is relevant. The people that are watching are engaged. It helps build up the signal that this is good content. That's the main differentiator between other things like LinkedIn or even Instagram or Facebook, where you can just get away with posting. Sometimes text, sometimes images, sometimes irrelevant things about bringing your dog to work day. But with YouTube, you actually have to have a voice, you actually have to have a perspective and you have to be able to communicate that in a way that is engaging and entices people to watch, but then like you said, also holds them throughout the remainder of the video. So another thing to bring up when you're talking about how to get audience engagement early, a lot of times you're going to promote your video content outside of the YouTube platform. So you mentioned sharing it, you know, maybe with each other, like, hey, give this a watch and let it play through to kind of encourage that, that signal. You can also do things like share it on social, send an email, share it internally, share it in emails externally with, with your customers or with your associates in general. There's things that you can do and probably sending an email is going to be the biggest one. But the time matters. Time from when you published it to when that email goes out could be huge. If you're sending it to a 10,000 person email list and 1% of those people open it, well, that's a lot of signal that something of interest is happening in that video all at one time and all very quickly after you've launched it, that could be a very positive thing for that video. So there are things that you need to do, things that you need to take into account when you're dealing with YouTube that you don't normally have to think about. But if you do the right things up front with one, the content itself, how you're positioning that content within the platform, and then the activities that you're doing once it is actually live on the platform, it'll help you kind of maximize your results. So that pretty much is what we do. That's different on YouTube and all that's fine, and that's a good thing to understand. But if you don't have the content that makes sense on YouTube to begin with, it's not going to matter. And that's really where that, that transition happens from. It's a. A dumping ground or a storage area into. This is a storytelling platform, a storytelling medium that needs some kind of continuation. It is not a place where you put a video and then it just goes viral. It's not a place where you put a video and you gain an audience or a following or it's going to be continually referenced forever. It's an area that needs not a video, but a series. It needs a. An episodic approach of things to have any prayer of gaining the attention that you would want or need. So I think that the easiest place that people, at least in B2B context, can rationalize, what would we possibly do that's episodic in nature? The easiest one is what we're doing right now. I mean, people understand at least the concept of a podcast. They understand that you could add video to it and it turns into video content that could be positioned on YouTube. What they might not know is that YouTube has introduced a complete video podcast product. You basically turn a playlist into a podcast. So it basically gives you an area that you can turn your podcast into a complete section for your audience to consume. And more and more people are starting to watch podcasts rather than just listen. Obviously, if it's on YouTube, sure, you can watch it. You can also just listen to it on YouTube as well. So it creates a lot of opportunities for flexibility of how the user consumes that content. But that's not the only type of content that you would want to create for YouTube. There. There seems to be an idea outside of podcasts that B2B content is not episodic in nature. And I think that's, that's one of the major limitations holding B2B marketers and B2B companies back is this idea that we create one off content and somehow one or two or three is good enough and now we're done. The now we're done mentality is the chains that are limiting the potential, not just on YouTube but in their overall communication strategy to their audience. You mentioned it in the beginning that if your goal is to communicate to your audience, are you going to do that once or twice or three times, then be done? No, it is an ongoing thing. It's a conversation. They're at different stages of the buying cycle cycle at any given time. And so your desire to communicate once or twice is not good enough. You need to be able to show up in a continual way. And you brought up a good point that something episodic has value. Something like this has value for its long form and its ability to live on YouTube and the SEO value associated with that, but also the ability to cut out shorts. Literally, short pieces for social, including YouTube shorts, is one of the most underutilized points of a long form video podcast like this because even those shorts are being indexed. I found the other day that there were three different topics that you talked on and each one of those was indexed on Google when I searched for it. Not only are we showing up organically in the YouTube shorts feed, that's also showing up on Google search feed. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've read a lot, heard a lot about shorts. They're, you know, oh, they're the next best thing. I mean, we, we recently started using them ourselves and I was very shock. I mean, this is a newer podcast. We're taking the clips, we're making shorts, it's going into social, it's going into a number of places, and all of that's fine. But I was rather surprised when I started putting them into YouTube shorts. And you know, first you get, you know, 50, 60 views, then you get a couple hundred views, and then all of a sudden you're getting 1000, 1200, 1500 per short. And mind you, we've got shorts for almost every single day if we wanted to. So that's literally the ability for us to reach a thousand people per day for free with the message that we're putting out there, which that doesn't happen on every other platform. That's, that's something that probably won't last, but it's, it's happening right now. It's something that companies are missing out on. Literally on a daily basis where they could be talking to 500 people, a thousand people, 10,000 people, depending on what the content is. And we're just not doing it because we're not creating the content. So we're giving up the opportunity to distribute our message for free. Yeah, and I feel like there's so many companies who let limiting beliefs creep in when they're thinking about creating video content. And I, I saw a company, it was a manufacturing company and they were literally talking about gaskets on a long form video podcast like this. And it was crazy because the subscribers they had was astronomical. I don't remember the exact number, but I was like, wow, for that specific and niche type of manufacturing company, I couldn't believe the following that they had created. And it's interesting because so many people are like, oh, well, I don't know what to say, or I don't, you know, I don't know this or I don't know that. And it limits them from actually starting it because they don't think that they're going to have people that are consuming that content. But the reality is I don't think that there is a industry in the world that people wouldn't listen to. Well, and also like, we're kind of talking a lot about a podcast format. It doesn't have to be a podcast. You could have a podcast, you could have a product demo type show, you could have a thought of the week or what's happening in our industry update. You could think of 40 shows on a per company basis. And as long as you're treating it like that, where you do it on an episodic nature, you would have YouTube content. You can, I think that it's a bit boring, but you can not do that at all. And just have episodes of only our customer testimonial, or maybe we put one out every month when we do a webinar, but those are episodic in nature because you started it with the idea that it's going to continue and it's going to be more than one. So if you need to start a place that's Natural in a B2B format, great. Start doing a webinar once per month, once per quarter and start putting that into a playlist. Branch out from there, start doing a customer testimonial or a case study once per month or once per quarter and start putting that in a playlist. Branch out, get a product demo, get a podcast, get a something, but start thinking episodically so that you can create content that makes sense on that platform. And to your point, also figure out how you're going to break that down into YouTube shorts because you want to expand your reach. Your shorts going to go a lot further than your long form video is going to, at least initially. So I think all this is really to say that YouTube is a viable channel for B2B. And I think so many B2B companies are ignoring it. They're missing the opportunity and they're really doing themselves and their companies and for that matter their customer base a disservice by not being on that platform. I'm in no way saying YouTube's the only platform to be on. I think from a B2B context is probably one of the main ones. And I know everybody's real hot on LinkedIn. Oh, LinkedIn is the king of B2B content. That's where we need to be and that's where we need to be social. And that's true, you do need to do that. But this is a way to help you even do that better. If you're creating the episodic content that's being housed in YouTube, shared on YouTube and you're growing that audience there, that's great. But that same content is what you'll use to cut down and create social content for not just the company, but also your team members that are involved, your thought leaders, your subject matter experts that are involved in the creation of that content. Now you have this evergreen resource of content for them to use on LinkedIn. So I think when you're talking about B2B content, the 1,2 punch is create episodic content, whatever it looks like for you, wherever you need to start, make sure you're getting it onto YouTube in a way that makes sense, that's optimized for that channel, and then figure out how you're cutting that down into social content that can be used not just for the company, but also for your team. And that's how you're going to win the content game, at least in B2B today.