Benjamin Shapiro (4:39)

It's an interesting strategy and I like the sort of bifurcation of there's media businesses and there's businesses that use media. I think that's really smart. And I think that often that gets confused for businesses because they think that they need to be creators and people like me who are trying to build audiences in part for lead generation for our production business. But also we monetize through sponsorship and hopefully a little YouTube ad revenue here or there. But that practice of going through and using YouTube essentially as an SEO tool is interesting. But it begets the fundamental question today, which is okay, cool. So I get people to click on my YouTube video that answers their question. Now I'm not just writing blog posts, I'm creating media. Then they watch my video. I think where most marketers are getting lost is the. But then what? Somebody comes. I've matched intent with content, but the conversion happens off the YouTube platform. Talk to me about bridging the gap there.

Nate Woodbury (5:44)

I see this in my mind. I can't separate it as there's a two step approach. So the quick answer is going to be what Step two. So I'll give you that for sure. But the reason I started talking about step one, step one is we got to build a relationship first. So. And this is different from a paid ad campaign, right? Paid ads, you're putting your promo content right in front of new eyeballs. But with this approach on YouTube, people find you through search and you're not pitching to them, you're not getting a lead. At this point, you're just answering their question and you're building a relationship. I mean, imagine there's a real specific question. They watch a 10 minute video of you really going in depth, and now there's this relationship. So now we go to step two. Step two is, at the end of the video, you have a call to action. You have a simple free gift that you give them.

Benjamin Shapiro (6:31)

Ooh, a gift.

Nate Woodbury (6:32)

And there's typically two calls to action. One call to action could be, hey, now that you've watched video one, go watch video two, right? And be specific. But then the second type of call to action is this free gift or this lead magnet. It's like, hey, now that you've learned this principle, I have a resource that I want to give to you that will help you implement this principle or it'll help you learn it more in depth, like a free mini course or whatever. So because you've built that relationship, you've given them value. And if that lead magnet or that gift really relates to what they've been searching for, they're going to want that free gift. So they go to your landing page and they give you their contact information in order to get that gift.

Benjamin Shapiro (7:08)

Talk to me about the delivery vehicle you mentioned. You're integrating essentially your call to action into your content, into your video. There's a couple other experiences in YouTube where we go through this video and at the end we're going to say, hey, everybody, go to Be the hero studios and check out Nate's video starter course. We're going to talk about it. There's the promotional widget at the end of a YouTube video, your end card, there is your links in your description. Are there any other methodologies for moving people from YouTube into a lead capture magnet?

Nate Woodbury (7:46)

So when it's a brand new channel, you're not able to put your own links into cards or end screens yet, which is a clickable link on the screen and the numbers change. Now, once you get to 500 subscribers and you get to 3,000 hours of watch time, you can join that partner program.

Benjamin Shapiro (8:01)

Hang on, Is it both 500 subscribers and 3,000 hours of watch time or it's both?

Nate Woodbury (8:06)

Yeah, it used to be 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours, but in January that lowered down to 503,000. But you need both.

Benjamin Shapiro (8:13)

Oh, well, that's nice.

Nate Woodbury (8:14)

Yeah, very nice. What that allows you to do is a card is a clickable element that can pop up in the top left corner of the video and it's a clickable element. You can have that link to your website or the end screen is the final 20 seconds of a video. You can have something appear on the screen to go to your website. So we use those. Once you're in the partner program, we'll also use the description. The description isn't really important for SEO. I mean, I'm the SEO guy. But everything that people tell you, that other people tell you about what's important for SEO on YouTube, it doesn't really work. You can leave the keyword filled blank. The description isn't going to help you with SEO, but what the description will help you with is it's a sales page for you. If people are going to go through the effort to click on the hard to find little down arrow and open up your description, what are they looking for? Right. If they're looking for a link that you mentioned in the video, make sure they find it easily. If they're looking for information about you or about your website, any other resources you have just listed there in a way that's clean to understand will also put in their timestamps that turn into chapters and that's a functionality for YouTube. So we put stuff like that in there. But going back to the question of so we certainly put it in the description and then I like to buy a simple URL that I can redirect. So if my landing page is suchandsuchdomain.com freegift, I'm not going to say that lengthy thing. I might buy the domain natesfreegift.com I've got several domains and you can't use any. If your name is Hard to spell. Like Angelique is a client of mine.

Benjamin Shapiro (9:45)

I'm like, you know, Angie, it is.

Nate Woodbury (9:47)

Yeah. So you buy a simple domain that's memorable. So when you're editing the video and you say, go to let's just pretend Nate's free gift dot com. I don't have that domain. It would appear on the screen in the video. It's memorable. So if people want to type it in themselves, they can we put it on a card or an end screen. In that case, the end screen. If it's the end of the video and we put it in the description, telling them, I will put that in the description below. So any way that you can get people there? The better.

Benjamin Shapiro (10:16)

I can't get my mind off of. You can't put links in videos when you're just starting a new channel, which seems like a threshold for most marketers where they're just starting a YouTube channel for business. They want to redirect traffic, but they can't until they have 500 subscribers. I'm assuming the reason why that is the case is YouTube doesn't want a bunch of people just coming onto the platform creating a ton of low quality accounts to drive traffic. Is there another reason why you think they're blocking people from redirecting off the platform?

Nate Woodbury (10:47)

That's a pretty good guess. I don't know for certain, but that makes sense to me. There is a lot of spam, like in the comments section. There's a lot of garbage that goes on where people will create a fake account and go in and reply to comments as if they're the creator of that channel. So it makes sense that they've got some barriers. You know, they've got this platform. We can upload as much storage as we want. And to put some limits and parameters, their partner program is the real deal. It's not a gimmick. The tools that they provide through the YouTube analytics is just unbelievable. Like if you compare that to analytics on Facebook or LinkedIn, it's, I don't know, a thousand times better. I would just say let that be a challenge if you're gonna be serious about YouTube.

Benjamin Shapiro (11:29)

I keep thinking about how much it costs to get around that where you use Google advertising, but YouTube's sort of integrated advertising platform and it's, I think you said 500 subscribers. It probably costs a buck or two a subscriber. So there's a thousand buc and then you got to get to 3,000 hours of watch time. So it's like a couple of grand to basically get into the partner platform, assuming you could use advertising to buy all those metrics.

Nate Woodbury (11:56)

I don't recommend that route.

Benjamin Shapiro (11:57)

Go on, tell me why.

Nate Woodbury (11:59)

Well, there's two different things we're talking about here. And let me even take a step back. So if we talk about the difference between marketing and nurturing marketing, the way I define it is you're getting in front of people who've never heard of you before. So what people call social media marketing, they're like, yeah, I've got all this content. It goes out all the time. So let's say they do a post to Facebook. Are they actually marketing or are they nurturing their friends? If they post on LinkedIn, are they marketing or are they nurturing their connections? Nurturing is very important to do. It's the next step after marketing. But think about your email list. You send out an email to all your email subscribers, you're nurturing. Same with the podcast, your listeners. Right? So, well, then, what is marketing? How do we market? And I kind of defined it, wrapped it up into three different ways. One is paid marketing. Paid ads. You're paying to get in front of these new audiences. And there's pros and cons to paid ads. You can have a video go viral. Now, that's not really something you can control. It's pretty unpredictable. If a video does go viral 99% of the time, and I'm just making up that number, but I think that's accurate 99% of the time, it's not your target audience that's seeing the video. The third way is search. You can actually turn content into a marketing content just by making sure you have search built into it. So if I know what people are searching for, I create that content, then that content will be in front of those people who've never heard of me before. So that becomes marketing.

Benjamin Shapiro (13:23)

You're right. I'm trying to cut the line with my thought process, which is If I invest $2,500 into buying 500 subscribers and marketing my content to get the 3,000 hours of watch time, then in my next video, after I've made that investment, I can put links in the video, which the video is great for nurture as well. But I also have the demand capture hook there, or at least an additional one other than what I'm saying in the content and what's in the description. So I'm more like, you can buy your way out of those minimum thresholds to be able to have the other hook. That seems to be the most relevant way to get traffic off of the platform.

Nate Woodbury (14:04)

It might be worth a try. It's always. You can always experiment with things. I don't see it as being a big enough benefit because you can get a simple domain tell people, click the link below and perhaps you will get a small percentage higher, more people that will click and go to that page if it is more user friendly there. But at the same time, if you don't have a solid of enough foundation of a channel to even qualify for the partner program, the number of leads and views and traffic are going to be minimal anyway.

Benjamin Shapiro (14:32)

So let's talk about that. I want to double back to. With marketers understanding some of the lead capture mechanisms, how do we figure out if it's worth the investment? If I'm sitting here and I've got a thriving business, but I want to figure out if YouTube is right for me, what are the channels and what are the signals I'm looking at?

Nate Woodbury (14:53)

I look at what is working currently, how are you currently generating leads and what type of leads are they coming from? And if you've got a paid ad campaign that's working well, then potentially, and I'll give you some more criteria as well, but then potentially that would be a good place to just start sending these YouTube leads and expect a much higher quality lead. The other criteria though, if you're focusing on YouTube search traffic, how to content answering people's questions is the best type of content to go after that, well, does that match your business? Do you have an educational component in your business, like for a public speaker or a coach or a consultant or a course creator? Do you have to educate people or do you educate people along the way? So that's kind of a criteria as well. But if that does apply, then you're going to be able to really build a relationship and generate a much higher lead quality that way and you'll have momentum on your channel. So when you get to the point of that call to action, you have the audience that's there, you'll have enough subscribers.

Benjamin Shapiro (15:50)

Let me boil that down and I want to make sure I get it right because I think that's really important. If you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel, the things that you need to think about are, number one, do you have an existing funnel? Right? Can you make sure that your funnel is working through other paid advertising channels? So if you drive traffic, you know that the capture mechanism works. And number two, do you have something to say? Are you teaching? Are you educating? Is there something that people want to hear that you can say that's worth putting into a video. Am I getting that right?

Nate Woodbury (16:22)

Yeah. And here's something to add to that. So are we turning YouTube into a business or are we taking our business and having YouTube assist our business and generate? So if we're the latter, if we have a business, well, what does that mean? That means that we know how to get customers. We know how to. I have sales conversations with them. We have a product or service that we're selling and we fulfill and we're getting good reviews. Right. So if we have a business, that's what we're talking about. If people are at the very beginning of all of the above and they're like, yeah, I want to create a YouTube channel that generates leads for my business. So does that mean you're creating your business at the same time?

Benjamin Shapiro (17:00)

It seems like you're getting into the awareness building versus lead generation. Right. Are you using YouTube to get in front of people so they know who you are? Or do you have a business where you can take leads from YouTube? Give me an example of somebody that you've helped move from I'm trying to build awareness to now I'm generating leads. How do you bridge that gap?

Nate Woodbury (17:22)

I'll give you a couple real examples that are really clear and we'll use big, successful ones. So Mr. Beast, the biggest YouTube channel there is.

Benjamin Shapiro (17:28)

I've heard of him.

Nate Woodbury (17:29)

Yeah, he does some awesome things. He turned YouTube into a business and he has such influence now that he's used to create other businesses. And that's even a side conversation. His chocolate business or several of other examples. But with his YouTube channel itself, he's not using it as lead gen. He's nurturing. He's not marketing. He's approaching 400,000 subscribers. And when he posts a video, he wants you and me, and I'm assuming you're a subscriber like I am, he wants us to watch. So if he gets 100 million or 200 million views on a video because he's generating that ad revenue, but on the other side, let me give you an example. You can look up Jason Schroeder. He's in the construction space. He provides consulting to construction professionals. Well, when he started launching this how to content on YouTube, he's not expecting these videos to go viral. He's not focused on views, but he's just answering these questions. So people find his videos, they learn they really value because they just love his content. And we started launching one episode per week. After a few months, we increased to two episodes. A week. Six months later, we increased to five episodes a week. We've stayed there for a year and a half now. So at this point, we've put a lot of content out there. And he tells me, and his business was already a seven figure business prior to what he's telling me now. But what he says now is, Nate, we have more business than we can handle because of this lead generation from YouTube. So that's really what we're talking about, is he already had a business, he already had consulting that he was providing, but he had this content that he knew more and more construction professionals would really value, would really need. And so he's built this big base on YouTube, but it's become this lead generation source of people that just love him and value his advice and want to work with them.

Benjamin Shapiro (19:12)

So what's the secret there? Using your construction example, going from awareness to lead generation, how did he bridge the gap from. I now am a known person in my industry because I've got all these videos and people seem to like my content to. They're calling me on the phone, they're asking for deals, they're in my pipeline.

Nate Woodbury (19:33)

It can be as simple as a phone number. Stan the annuity man.

Benjamin Shapiro (19:37)

Stan the annuity man.

Nate Woodbury (19:38)

Stan the annuity man. You can check out his channel.

Benjamin Shapiro (19:40)

Sounds like the nudie man.

Nate Woodbury (19:42)

So he was just a regular annuity agent among many thousands of annuity agents across the country. He would answer real specific questions on these boring topics, but he made them cool.

Benjamin Shapiro (19:53)

Hard to believe, right?

Nate Woodbury (19:55)

He's now America's number one annuity agent. And at the end of his video, he would put his phone number. That's it. He says, if you have more questions, here's my phone number. So I don't necessarily recommend the phone number approach. Go ahead and try that. But that's why I say, what is your business? What is your funnel? What lead magnets are you currently using? Can you experiment with a couple. So some examples that we use that are successful is it could be a mini course, right? It's like, hey, now that you understand the answer to this question, I've got a mini course that I want to help you achieve. Blank. Or it could be a free plus shipping book. Russell Brunson from the Clickfunnels World, he taught us about the free plus shipping model over the last decade or two, and that's still working. But even when I say free mini course, low price, mini courses actually work. Or low price digital products. It could be a live webinar. Hey, now that you Understand this principle. I'm going to do a live webinar. We're going to take an hour, and I'm going to teach you this, this and this. And you'll come away being able to do blank. It could be a PDF download. It could be, hey, now that you understand the value of this real estate investing strategy, I've got a contract template that I use every time I want to give that to you. If you want to be able to download it, just click the link or go here. You know, they become a lead. So that's the key, just being able to connect the value that you're delivering to the free gift that you're offering. And now you've got a lead. You've still got to nurture that lead. Ultimately, to have a sell, it's a larger sell, of course, you've got to have a conversation with them, but that's how you bridge that gap.

Benjamin Shapiro (21:24)

I'm assuming that you use YouTube for lead generation, for your business. Tell me the link magnets that you're using.

Nate Woodbury (21:32)

So I do all of the above except for the phone number. I've got my free plus shipping book and I have the domain Nate's youtubebook.com.

Benjamin Shapiro (21:41)

That'S influence on YouTube for the people on the podcast.

Nate Woodbury (21:44)

Yeah, Hero's guide to influence on YouTube. I've also got a webinar that I do, theleafstrategy.com I've got a mini course. You get different results from different ones. I feel like I customize the topic of the video. Like, is this one where it make the most sense to lead them to the book? And here's a kind of a side topic that might be helpful to discuss when you send somebody away from YouTube to your website. YouTube doesn't like that because people are leaving YouTube. So you actually get penalized. But you can list what your own websites are and kind of reduce that penalty. Another side note, do not put Facebook or LinkedIn or other social sites in your description. Don't tell people to go there. That gets you a big penalty. YouTube does not like people leaving YouTube to go to Facebook.

Benjamin Shapiro (22:31)

Oh, dang. I think we have that in every single video.

Nate Woodbury (22:34)

I'd remove them or stop doing them moving forward, but it's worth it, right? So if you list your website under your YouTube settings, you can put your website in there. So YouTube knows that's your website and it reduces that penalty. But what you also do that YouTube really likes is when you link one video to another video. Hey, now that you've learned this Principle, you really need to go learn that next. Principle, go watch that video next. So if you do a mixture of both, you'll get rewarded for linking to other videos and you'll get a small penalty. But you're generating leads and you only need people to do that one time. So they leave YouTube to go to your website. They become a lead. Now, if they're going to continue watching videos, they don't need to leave YouTube anymore. If they're going to go to your website, you're already emailing them, right? You're nurturing them through your email list. They already know about your website now, so hopefully that makes sense.

Benjamin Shapiro (23:20)

My takeaway from our conversation is something that I feel like I've been preaching for a while specifically about the podcast game and content marketing. There are ways to use a media asset to achieve different goals within your funnel. And for me, thinking about audio only podcasts, it used to be you're nurturing your audience, you're promoting your content in your newsletter, you're increasing your reach. So you're hitting the top of funnel and you have an ABM strategy with the people that you're interviewing. YouTube is not much different. There is probably more ability to get people on platform, off platform with YouTube, but you really have to be strategic and understand what your goals are. You're not just creating content for content sake. Each piece of content needs to have a specific goal in your funnel. This one's about broad reach and awareness. This one's a lead generation and you're figuring out your linking strategy based on that. All right, and that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Nate Woodbury, the CEO of BeTheHero Studios, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Nate, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you could see his YouTube content or visit his company's website at betheherostudios.com if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. And if you'd like to be a guest on the Martech podcast, head over to our website, martechpod.com all right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

Benjamin Shapiro (25:21)

Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything. Com.