← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
297 - The Step-by-Step YouTube Playbook with Ryan Hashemi, Chief Strategy Officer at Snowball
00:47:39
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- [00:08]
Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the.
- [00:33]
Ryan Hashimi
The game I'm playing is I want to make a video so good, like from a thumbnail title and people watch as long as possible that YouTube itself wants to push it in front of a lot of people. And so that's just a different game. Like we want most of our audience to come from browse and suggested, which is sort of the traffic source on YouTube as opposed to search.
- [00:54]
Daniel Murray
Hey marketers, we know you love a tldr, so I'll get right to the point. You know wix, the website builder with professional templates? Well, meet wix Studio. Made for freelancers and agencies with multiple clients. It has everything you need to efficiently build and operate campaigns across multiple channels. With Wix Studio, you can build websites that scale with dynamic pages and reusable assets. Fast track projects with integrations from Meta, Zapier, Google Ads and more, finish a B testing in days, not weeks, publish social content, send emails, optimize SEO and so much more. Oh, and reporting is covered with integrations for tracking and and analytics tools like GA4 and SEMrush. Basically, it's an all in one toolkit that scales with you drive real client growth.
- [01:46]
Ryan Hashimi
With Wix Studio, go to wixstudio.com what's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have Ryan. He is one of the best at YouTube out there. I would say. He's grown Jubilee's content strategy to millions and millions of view. He's also the CEO and founder of Snowball, which does content strategy for a bunch of cool brands. So he's going to come on here and tell us how to do YouTube correctly, how to how to think about content strategy, and one of the case studies is going to be the Margie millennials YouTube page, but we're also going to talk about it broadly. But Ryan, welcome to the show.
- [02:30]
Appreciate it. Thanks, Daniel. Yeah, pleasure to be here.
- [02:33]
I want to first get how did you get into marketing? The marketing space? And then we'll go into the conversation.
- [02:40]
Yeah, so I actually started my career in finance and investments and you know, I actually loved that. And the whole point of that aspect of my career was recommending companies to clients like, hey, this is who you should bet on for the next 10 years, 20 years. And came to realize that in that aspect of my career, just how important brand was from a moat perspective. And I guess pivoting into the creative space with Jubilee, I then spent whatever, seven years just pure content, trying to amass as large of an audience as possible for our mission. And the two of those experiences basically intersected in a beautiful way where it became quite obvious to me that organic content marketing is easily the future. And when I look at, if I pull from threads of my investment beginnings, if you think about product, what differentiates you as a company these days, really great product is a given. It can be some differentiator and it can give you a competitive advantage, but not as much, in my opinion. I think the competitive advantage of the next decade plus is truly going to be distribution, audience, you know, depth building with the people who are bought into what you're doing. And so I just. Because. Because I'm so convicted on that, I just, I'm like now all in on content marketing as essentially as a way to build businesses.
- [04:36]
And what is your. I mean, is YouTube the. Your number one channel or do you have.
- [04:41]
Yeah, big, biggest. I mean, 95%. Is YouTube. The reason that is. So we're actually doing a research study with USC right now. We partnered with them to kind of explore the psychological difference of short form content versus long form content. And I'm feeding them sort of my hypotheses that are based on just like what I've seen. But YouTube long form just is far more powerful than short form. Short form is really great sometimes for exposure and like top of funnel. But as far as like true depth and stickiness and, you know, durability and all that, long form, and no platform does long form better than YouTube. And then, I mean, if we're just thinking decades, like, YouTube's the. It's the only platform I feel like I can guarantee will be thriving in 10 years. So, you know, TikTok might not even be around and who knows what. You know, Facebook has changed their priorities and algorithms like 20 times in the past five years. So it's just been the most predictable, steady Eddie and continues to gain advantage in consumption and everything year over year. So it's the horse I'm betting on.
- [05:57]
So I want to go into just like YouTube strategy in general.
- [06:01]
Yeah.
- [06:01]
So let's say the market millennials was starting scratch. Let's start with that. What were the first, like 1, 2, 3 things you recommend we start doing?
- [06:14]
Yep. So the first exercise obviously is getting really clear on your objectives. Like, it's like, what is the business goal that you believe content can help facilitate or accelerate. So that's really, really important starting point. And then the second is an exercise I do with every client when we start. It's based off of this anecdote. I actually know if it's a real anecdote. But with Gary Halpert, who he was a professor, was doing a lecture, I guess at a university, and his famous thing around starving crowds, he would ask his students like, hey, we're going to open up competing hamburger stands and I'll give you guys whatever advantage you want. Like, how are you going to win? People were like, oh, we'll have the freshest ingredients or, yeah, the closest farm to table type supplier or, you know, whatever cheapest price. And he's like, cool, yeah, I'll give you all of that. I'm still going to eat you alive. Because all I want is a starving crowd. I can, you know, if the people in front of me are starving, I'm gonna beat you. And that, ever since I heard that, had resonated with me a lot. And I think I have applied that across a lot of things I do in content, which is to truly understand, like, hey, whoever you're speaking to, what are they, you know, for lack of better word, what are they starving for? What is it? That is incredibly. So much so that it's actually emotional. And so that combined with sort of your business objective is really where I start. It's like, okay, who are we reaching? What do they really care about? Deeply, emotionally? And from there we start pulling threads on those emotions to see, like, what style of content can we make that will like nail that starvation or that emotion? Um, so it's, it's a. Yeah, we kind of start with like a little bit of a philosophical exercise in that way.
- [08:22]
Yeah, that, I mean, that makes total sense. I mean, you got to first find who the people you need to talk to before even creating any content at all, which makes total sense. And then say, I know who my starving audience is, I know what they care about, but I just don't know how to turn that into content or YouTube long form content. Where do I go from there?
- [08:50]
Yeah, there's two ways that we do it. Or maybe I should say recommend folks do it. The first is harder. The first is kind of like this bottoms up approach, which is this emotion mapping that I'm talking about. It's like, okay, you start with the theme or whatever the thing is in the middle and you just draw branches. We would literally do this on a whiteboard. What are the Strongest human emotions that are tied to that thing. And how do you just keep pulling on that? And the ideation for the style of content, what you make is really just around what is going to evoke that emotion. The strongest. That's the hardest. That style is most akin to what we did at Jubilee. Then there is just kind of top down and that's format, extrapolating formats. And this is sort of like under the idea that there's no such thing as truly new ideas. And YouTube is an amazing thing. You get to see what across all industries, genres of content, etc. People are making. That is really resonating. And so what I would say, and I actually do have a graphic. Do people ever share their screen here?
- [10:11]
Yeah, you could share your screen.
- [10:12]
Okay, cool. Yeah, there's like one graphic that we use sometimes and it's. Let's see here.
- [10:18]
And people who are listening on audio will get in the show notes as well, so you can.
- [10:23]
Oh, beautiful. Yeah, perfect. So yeah, here we go. The idea is that again you have formats, shows that people have spent a ton of time and money making and experimenting with. And across all genres that actually can be borrowed in many ways for your own. Let me just show this is kind of the top down approach. And what I have here for people who are just listening to the audio is just. I have for the past decade basically been. I mean, all I do is watch YouTube so like collecting interesting styles of content, formats of content that have done a really good job of creating some sort of mechanism that piques people's curiosity in a very extreme way. And so I've got like a Google Doc of like hundreds of these things. But just to give you an example, right, if you were to say you want to make content around money, you know, you could start with that in the middle and go and look on YouTube and be like, wow, okay, so there are all kinds of format styles. There's this idea of like, you know, little versus a lot or cheap versus expensive. You see extreme transformations do extremely well. You have this like testing experts, all the list goes on. There's like all kinds of different formats that have been tried and proven. And there's something about them like a mechanism, an element that absolutely can be borrowed. And so for an example of this, maybe the one time that I think we indirectly did this at Jubilee is this one here, this cheap versus expensive. This is a Buzzfeed show actually worth it. Like a dollar taco versus $100 taco, dollar steak versus $200 steak. And people, I mean Loved that show. And so we actually did want to make a show about money. And so what we would do, the show we made was called Bottom Line. And we compared two people's lives kind of side by side. One person, basically, the video title was $11 versus $11,000 made in a day. And it's basically two people who are at the very opposite ends of income, and we follow them in a day in their life and also kind of assess, like, how happy are they? Like the person who makes a lot, are they happy? Are they not? Anyway, that's sort of an extrapolation of that format. And it crushed. I mean, it's like one of our most viral videos. Like, it's like 12 million views on that. On that video. Nobody ever was like, oh, you guys copied. Worth it. But this is probably the easiest place to start, is like, there's literally hundreds of proven styles and formats that can. The elements of what makes them interesting can be borrowed to then apply to your. Whatever it is that you're wanting to talk about. So that's like maybe the simplest, like, piece of advice I would give people where they just don't know where to start.
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Yeah. I mean, it's the classic don't make the new wheel. Innovate on the wheel that already exists.
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Yeah, yeah. The steal, like an artist type type thing.
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Yeah. And there's so many examples out there. Not even YouTube exactly. Too is. There's proven TV shows, there's proven game shows, there's proven.
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Very good point. One of our most popular shows was called Odd One out, where we had like, you know, like seven vegans and one is a secret meat eater. And the group had to sort of collectively sniff out who is the, you know, the odd one out. It's basically a game that's been around for. I think it's like Werewolf or some kind of game that was really popular for many years. And we just sort of brought it to life. Right. And so correct. You can pull those inspirations from anywhere. It doesn't have to be just from YouTube. You're right.
- [14:28]
Cool. So I got down to the. I figured out my starving audience. Now I know. Okay, here are some of the adaptations that do work. What is the easiest path to start? And then what do you recommend? Or what is the path to start to start filming this if I have a low budget or a low. Or not as much resources as a lot of these bigger companies out there.
- [15:01]
Yeah, exactly. So there are a few ways to slice it. The first is you doing everything, and that is the Cheapest, but the most, obviously the most time consuming. And it's also usually the one with the most failure rate, if we're being honest. And so that's, that is. And I can talk about, you know, how, again, how I would approach it if I was doing everything. But that is the sort of the other and the lowest end of the spectrum all the way up to, you know, which right now we focus more on enterprise clients. So they're all willing to invest in an internal team because they want this like, competency for decades. And so I'd say that that is the more expensive but absolutely the least amount of time on your, on the sort of business owner's part. And also usually a higher success rate if the right creatives are chosen and kind of have the right leadership, which is, which is sort of the role we play. And then in between is two other models. One is very common for companies who are smaller, that they're not just starting out, so they have some money. And this is what we with Starter Story, I helped them early on launch their channel right from the beginning. And the model was just hire what in the industry is sort of laughably called a predator, which is a producer, director and editor in one person. And this person does everything. So for Starter Story, for example, Marco, super talented, just young, hungry, fresh out of college, creative is running everything, coming up with ideas, pitching it to Pat, who runs Starter Story. Like you like this. You don't doing all the planning, the scripting and thumbnails, all that, and just Pat just becomes the talent and he just sort of shows up and obviously he's involved, minimizing his involvement. But, you know, if you wanted to, you could just show up. And then one iteration above that is where I think they are now. Because once you get traction, you tend to want to go in this way, which is you have that point person. Marco is still running, you know, but his focus now becomes a lot more on ideas, concepts, pushing it further and still planning and making sure what they're about to film is going to be amazing. But then sort of specializing, outsource a little bit. So now they have a dedicated editor, now they have a dedicated thumbnail designer. And so now you're shifting some of the attention to the, you know, a thumbnail designer that is much better at Marco, an editor that is much better than Marco. And so it just, you know, progressively gets better and then, and then Marco gets more time to focus on better ideas. So it sort of graduates in this way oftentimes. And I think the doing it all yourself is really tough. You know, that's for people who just have absolutely no budget. I think, I think you at least got to give yourself a fighting chance for small businesses. Probably want to start with like a predator type model.
- [18:32]
And then one thing that why YouTube is so great is. And you did this well at Jubilee, but not only filming for YouTube. So could you talk a little about that? Because a lot of your clips also just went completely viral on Tick tock shorts and Instagram reels. So when you're thinking about a YouTube video, how do you think about the distribution strategy of that YouTube video?
- [19:05]
Yeah, and really thinking about it first from like getting viewership outside of your YouTube.
- [19:12]
I think both. I think one is you're filming a long form, but a lot of people want to get out of that long form video, that content that can last on multiple channels so they don't have to keep creating. That's the value of a long form video. You can cut it up, slice it up into a lot of different clips.
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Yep, I agree. So I mean that's, you know, if I were, which is what I think I would do today, if I were starting a channel, which I might in a few months, the focus would be long form because it's just. And I'll get into again why I think there's so much power to YouTube. But within a piece of long form content, you have moments that in and of whatever it's 30 seconds of clip within that long form piece that in and of itself made the piece special. And you have likely multiple of those moments. And so benefit you get is being able to clip sort of extract those moments. And you don't want to do it too passively. You can't just be like, all right, let's just divide this video in tenths and then just upload it. It does work, require some thinking about like, you know, getting that right first two seconds or you know, all that stuff. But yeah, we took these videos that took us a lot of time to make and found those special moments that we felt in and of themselves are viral moments. Clip them up, put them onto TikTok reels. And sometimes we did Twitter, but. And yeah, they would just blow up. They would blow up on these, on these platforms as well. And so I think we've gotten, well, we have 3 million followers on TikTok and I believe close to, I mean it's definitely hundreds of millions of views on TikTok. And that's all from just clipping up the initial effort, basically, which is nice.
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I want to also go into basically the anatomy of a YouTube video. So.
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Yeah, great.
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You talked a little bit about the start, like the first three seconds or not just a second ago, about the first three seconds, the hook. But what are the must have pieces that every video should have?
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Definitely. So I would say now, working with a lot of clients and especially the ones where I feel like we're coming in to do sort of like a rescue job, the biggest thing that the most common thing that I'm seeing that everyone is doing wrong is this is sort of. I'll walk you through the flow of what they do is like, oh yeah, this would be a really cool idea for a video. Like, I think we should make X video. And in the video we're going to do this, that and the other thing. And then they go make the thing. And then after they put all that time and energy into it, they're like, okay, cool, it's time to upload it. So what should the thumbnail and title be? And then they give their best effort. That is actually how we used to do it at Jubilee in the very beginning, but that is now the exact opposite order of how we do things. It is not worth making a video is kind of controversial take, but like, you shouldn't waste your time making a video that you are not convinced from the packaging, like the thumbnail and title, people have to click like, so, you know, yes, we do come up with like, oh yeah, this would be a cool idea. But then immediately force ourselves to say, so what is the thumbnail and title? And is this like, can we come up with something crystal clear? That is a hell of a pitch that like, oh yeah, this is super. Like, people would definitely click on this. If you can't pass that threshold, move on. Like, there's not no point trying to force the video and be like, I think we can make it as good as possible. It just doesn't. This doesn't make sense. It's a waste of time. So that's. I'd say the thing. Thumbnail and packaging is maybe the biggest. Like the concept, the idea and how it's pitched to the world is possibly the most important piece. And it's for whatever reason the piece that everyone leaves to the last. So I'd say that that's like the biggest thing. And then once they're in to the video. So there's really only two things that matter in YouTube as far as like, what gets a video to be distributed. The first is click through. So how compelling is it that people want to click in. So in the YouTube metrics, it's CTR. And then the other is, once they're in, how engaging is the storytelling that it keeps them watching? So click through and watch time are quite literally the only two things that matter. And so the anatomy of a video, if you were to. If you had like the sort of 80, 20 rule, right? Like 80. 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts. If I were to distill all the components of a YouTube video, and it's like, if you could just 10x your focus and energy on two spots, it would be the thumbnail and title, and it would be the first 30 seconds of a video. If you crush that, you have probably, like 10x'd your odds of the video getting widely distributed and seen. Yeah, there's just a direct correlation in the percentage of people who are kept in the first 30 seconds and basically how long they continue watching. And then the rest comes down to storytelling, which we could get into. But, you know, it's a little bit beefy. And maybe the quick thing I'll say on that is, like, there's a common phrase that's used which is, like, open loops, and I'll just use it because I don't have a better phrase for it. But people are who click, you know, who watch a video. You have to assume, and it's a little perverse, but you have to assume that they are constantly looking for a reason to leave your video. That's the assumption that you need to apply. And if that's the case, what you want to be doing throughout your video is almost planting intentionally a sort of curiosity loop that, like, oh, I thought I got everything, but no, I got to keep watching because he just, you know, he, like, didn't finish, like, yeah, he just sort of created something. I need to stick around for that. He won't answer till later. And there needs to be this sort of intentional opening of curiosity loops throughout the video. That is a common way to extend retention. Simplest way, which we did a lot in our videos at Jubilee, is in the format itself. You have a mechanism that has to keep people watching. Maybe the best example of this in all of YouTube is hot ones. Hot Ones. Are you familiar with the show? Yeah, yeah. Possibly one of the greatest formats of all time. Why? Because you have, obviously, celebrities you love, but you have hot wings that are progressively getting hotter as time goes on. And you're seeing your celebrity get answered more and more difficult questions as they get increasingly more in pain. And then by the End, they're dying. And so you have to keep watching because it just gets better and better. And at the end, you get the most spicy hot sauce of all time. And so, you know, for us at Jubilee, like, we had a show where, like, that same. That game show where you're trying to figure out who's the secret meat eater, you have to watch till the end to see if you got. If you. The audience got that right, because you're also playing along. And so there's just. There's, like, lots of mechanisms to keep people watching. But, you know, those are the two maybe most popular ways a lot of things you're saying.
- [27:38]
For example, the headline. I mean, David Ogilvy said it a long time ago that when you have written your headline, you spend 80 cents on your dollar already. So basically, if you're not spending 80% of your time just figuring out what that headline is, and you really lost a lot of people, even when they're writing emails or they're writing, like, social media posts or they're writing memes, they forget, like, the number one thing is, like, what is that? Like, the headline? And then you can find the image. Like, that's exactly. That's my meme strategy. My meme strategy, in a nutshell, is just I already have the hooks, and then I find an image to go with the hooks, because I already know what hooks were. I don't think about it.
- [28:23]
Exactly. Same theory, basically. Yeah, I agree. Like, if. If I were to pick 80% on it, you know, to spend your time on anything, it would be the, like, the packaging, the head. The thing with YouTube is you have title, but you also do have a thumbnail.
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Yeah, that's like the headline for that. Just like an ad, too. The creative is like, the number one thing.
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Yeah, one thing I'll say there, because unfortunately, it makes it a little bit more difficult because, you know, not everyone's like, a designer. There's an entire network of unbelievable. Like, all they do is freelance thumbnail designers on Twitter, and I exclusively use them. You pay them per thumbnail, starting from, like, 100 bucks a thumbnail. The best thumbnail designers in the world, like, that I'm working with that are literally also designing some things for Mr. Beast and huge creators. They'll charge you $300 a thumbnail. So just let. Let. Let the experts do. I can't even design the thumbnails. Just let the experts do it. You do have to come up with some of the concept, but they'll make it as epic as possible.
- [29:36]
Yeah, I think it, but I think it starts with what you said at the beginning. Like if you figure out what like the hook exactly that headline is then you can go and say this is my headline. This is what I'm thinking exactly the image to like portray what that headline is going to say or that open ended question or whatever you're trying to do with that.
- [29:58]
That's right, yeah.
- [30:00]
And then you obviously you said this at the beginning is like go look at all the examples of those viral or like what are their thumbnails look like. How can you take inspiration and say hey I like this thumbnail for my, my video.
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One One thing I'll say on that note is people definitely caught on to that maybe in the past couple years in what you, I mean what the term now is called is like the beastification of YouTube, you know. Now actually we're starting to see that thumbnails that are like this is just a general trend I'm noticing thumbnails that are anti like what Mr. B's thumbnails look like actually seem to perform a little bit better. So like a little bit more simpler, cleaner but really dialed in onto concept like sort of gets your curiosity. I could share my screen to show an example of like one we did for a client. But yeah, I mean there is simpler seems to be working a little bit better these days is another thing. I'll say.
- [31:14]
Yeah, that makes sense once, once the it becomes best practice. You have to like exactly. Practice. Yeah he, he made the Mr. B's made the best practice and now it works for him because he's already got an audience. Right. But it's not going to work for someone who's trying to be different than Mr. B. So like not be different but have be something more catchy than he's doing.
- [31:44]
Yeah, there's like literally now thousands of channels that are just trying to look exactly like Mr. B's thumbnails. So in the sea of all the possible videos that are being presented to people now, you gotta figure out a way to stand out from those.
- [31:58]
Daniel Murray
What's up Margaret? It's time for a WIX Studio recap. Here are five things you can get done faster using WIX Studio. One, scale content with dynamic pages reusable assets. Two, integrate with meta, Zapier, Google Ads and more. Three, launch and measure a B tests with intuitive design tools. Four, connect to analytics tools like GA4 and SEMrush. And five, manage your client's social media all from one dashboard ready. For more go to Wix Studio.com. that's Wix Studio.com.
- [32:37]
Ryan Hashimi
So we've talked about the like figuring out the starving audience and then we figure out like what is the, the YouTube video going to be about? We figure out that what you need to focus on in, in the video. Now what is the strategy for hey, now I want to go upload this video. What, what did I need to think about for uploading video?
- [33:04]
This is not an area I pay that much attention to. So I think, well that's good to know.
- [33:09]
Then people shouldn't spend.
- [33:11]
There are a lot of people who are like, oh, I gotta get my tags optimized and like my description. Super. You know, if you are making extremely niche content and you're not expecting to for like YouTube to kind of like proliferate it, then I would say that matters more because then you're relying on search. Like if your strategy is search that people will like you're going to be like one of the only players in a certain space. And so when people search something like you want your video to show up, then that does matter. And for those people I would say use a tool like Vidiq and there's a couple of tools like this, but it's basically it's kind of like keyword search, like Ahrefs type tool specifically for YouTube and it gives you the sort of competition level of a certain keyword popularity and then sort of like aggregate scores basically for how good of these keywords are. And for those people I would spend some time on tools like that to say hey, what are keywords that you could own? Is the same, same strategy as SEO.
- [34:25]
Basically what are you're trying to figure out? Because there's YouTube videos that you're trying to get the most amount of attention on those YouTube videos where you're answering a specific question that your audience has.
- [34:43]
Exactly.
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And you have to rely on long tail keywords to do that.
- [34:47]
Exactly right. So for those people the tags and keywords do matter. And that's where your description treated almost exactly the way you would treat SEO. It's like, well what should I put in this blog and how do I sort of make it SEO rich? And same exact style of thinking. But I would say for every single one of our clients and partners. And when I launch my video and all that stuff, the game I'm playing is I want to make a video so good from a thumbnail title and people watch as long as possible that YouTube itself is like wants to push it in front of a lot of people. And so that's just a different game. So you want like we want most of our audience to come from browse and suggested which is sort of the traffic source on YouTube as opposed to search.
- [35:34]
That's exactly how I think about reels too is I think like you, I want to not only push it to my audience, but I want to push it to that not that non follower account. And if I can get that non follower account exactly higher and I can. But it's a different every. All these platforms have different type of metrics that you need to think about Reels, think about like optimizing. Would this be shared in the DMS or a Slack channel? And can I make a problem that is quickly shared versus YouTube is a little different than.
- [36:10]
That's right. Yeah. The only other thing I would want to maybe add because I think for business owners and marketers, one of the things that they care about and I think maybe is unique to like what I try to think about a lot is ultimately converting your audience like that you have an audience great, they're watching content. So how do you get them to accomplish like you beautifully just took us through sort of like the mechanics of doing YouTube well. But now I think once you have an audience that's there and is watching your content, how do you convert them to take an action that will impact your business in the right way? And this is something I don't think a lot of people do super well. But it's a framework that I kind of stumbled upon when trying some stuff at Jubilee and I have a graphic but maybe I'll give it to you to share later. But essentially what you want to do is the goal of your content over time is to showcase the value of your product or service very seamlessly. So most people, they think, I'd say maybe 90% of YouTubers even, but especially businesses, it's like they sort of interrupt the content basically like a shout out style. It's like oh hey, by the way, please go check out whatever. Obviously that works some. But what we've seen done, you know, can have like a sort of 5x magnitude of difference in conversion is if you can incorporate your product or service into the content as important. And by having it into the content, it actually makes the content better because it's in it and it sort of seamlessly showcases its value on its own. If you can do that, conversion will be unbelievably high. And it's simple but not necessarily easy. And there are a number of really, really great examples of this, which I wish I could sort of visually show, but I just want people to think about that and go through the exercise of thinking about how they could possibly do that in their content. If you do that, I can almost guarantee you, you will be very pleasantly surprised by the. I guess, yeah, the sort of power of what your audience now is like the impact it's now having on your. On your business. So that's just something I wanted to throw in.
- [38:53]
Yeah, I love it. I think it's the difference between ads on a TV show versus product placement in a movie. Like, for example, you see someone driving an Audi really fast in. In a. In a spy movie, and you're like, oh, that's a sick car that's driving fast. It seamlessly shows the value and how cool that car is, but it's not saying, hey, I'm going to go buy an Audi or stop.
- [39:22]
Nailed it. Nailed it. Yeah. I mean, one. I guess an example you guys probably look this video up is a great example of this is with one of our clients, which is Ahrefs YouTube video. There's a video that we made with them recently. It's called the Google Update that crushed his business overnight. And that is also an example. That thumbnail for that video is also an example of simple wins. And it's like one of their most viral videos. But how the product is used in that video is exactly what I'm talking about. Which basically they're sitting down with a guy who had a website, like an affiliate website, that he was making a good amount of money from. The website just tanked. He was doing tons of money. Website tanked. And in the video, they're sort of diagnosing what went wrong using the AHREFS tool. And. And because they're doing that, the audience is like, oh, I didn't even know you could do that in ahrefs. Or like, whoa, that's kind of like. It's a phenomenal. It's like the almost indirect star of the show, and it did really, really well for them. And so I think if people just want to see an example of that, go check out that video.
- [40:35]
I think that's a great way. And I also think what you said at the beginning, like, why long form matters, because even if you don't do that type of long form shows deep expertise that you know your topic you're talking about. So if you are doing a tool that understands YouTube and you do a YouTube show that shows how deeply you understand YouTube, they will think of you as the YouTube expert and then inherently go look at your product. That's more of the long play.
- [41:09]
That's right.
- [41:10]
And then there's a short term play of if you want conversions. Now how do you naturally embed? Because I think you shouldn't do that on every video.
- [41:18]
I agree. I totally agree. And I wouldn't even do that from the start necessarily. Yeah, yeah. But you want to build trust first. Yeah.
- [41:25]
Lastly, what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [41:30]
I kind of said it at the start but I really truly believe that organic. I mean there's a reason I stepped down from running the business to go all in on this because I truly believe that organic content marketing is like the brands that sort of almost position themselves as like media companies like first or content is their priority. I think they're going to win. I really truly believe that. I think everyone is creating killer products these days and the tech and the talent and all that stuff is products are all great and you're not going to win by having just a slightly better product. If you're talking decades and moat building. I truly believe that building an organic audience around. Yeah. With organic content, if you have a long term view, it's going to be a massive moat builder for the companies that prioritize that massive. Obviously they do it right. But like I will say that every single day, you know, great product, basically a spicier way to say it is like great products don't matter. You know, you have, you have to make. Create an audience that cares about it basically.
- [42:58]
I think that's well said. If you go to the simplest form of what marketing the number one goal of marketing is, is to get attention. I mean and so if you can build an engine that's organic, you're getting distribution to and then you're building that muscle of how to create great content as well.
- [43:20]
Yeah, good storytelling. Yeah, exactly. Like stuff that are just inherently will never go out of vogue. Like you know, they'll always be. Humans love stories. Right. And so yeah, I think another reason we get like a lot of the if I were a common thing we hear from sort of people that are coming our way is like paid is just like we're scarily dependent on it. And if you crack really good organic, this is actually another thing. It's expensive at the start but if you crack it, margins explode because you're not giving up 50% or 40% or whatever it is per purchase. You're just investing in the making of the content and everything else from there is margin expansion.
- [44:09]
So yeah, yeah. I always say treat content as a product. If you think of it as a product, you invest in it, you double down on it. You only do it for if you do building a product, you're only doing it for the audience. The end goal is not only the business, it's the audience. And if you start thinking about like that, you start creating way better content. Instead of thinking go in the back was I need to create content to get more sales. Now create great content so your audience comes to you and then show them why you're great.
- [44:46]
Exactly. Yeah.
- [44:48]
Lastly, where could people find you?
- [44:52]
Well, definitely on LinkedIn. I'm starting to post a lot, a lot more there. But my name.com so ryan hashimi.com is just a personal landing page. Also obviously Snowball. So Snowball Agency is the company. And yeah, I'm around, I'm on social on Twitter. Happy to chat with folks.
- [45:18]
Well, thank you for breaking down the YouTube strategy and I definitely need to go back to square one and think about all the problem first that I'm trying to solve and then all the find all the different formats that we can deliver it in. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing.
- [45:37]
Oh of course, yeah, anytime. I I find this very fun.
- [45:41]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple podcasts, Spot, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us.
- [46:02]
Ryan Hashimi
A five star rating.
- [46:04]
Daniel Murray
It helps bring more marketers into our community.