We started experimenting with Youtube as a content marketing channel a couple of years ago. Came up with a few series concepts, including;

• Startups and Spirits: conversations with investors and key startup people over drinks.
• Blog to Vlog: a video-version of our most successful blog articles.
• The Good, the Bad and the Tip: inspired by the legendary (and discontinued) ‘Winners and Losers’ by L2Inc, but adapted to presentations and design- related topics.
• The (Startup) Office: A weekly 3-minute sitcom of mostly real stories from our office.
  

All of these FAILED. Why?

• The views weren’t there. There was no organic visibility, needless to say virality.
• No direct route to conversion.
• Expensive compared to other brand awareness campaigns.

That’s until we tapped into this video:

THOUSANDS of people watch this video every month, and we can very clearly track how it has affected conversions, and of course the ROI of the production.

More importantly, it’s a constant, no-maintenance source of traffic and customers. While the initial investment is high, it’s ROI exists in perpetuity.

What we did right in this video

A script made FOR Youtube.

Production value: The green screen/digital animation background makes people stick around.

SEO, SEO, SEO: We wrote this script to target this specific keyword, and made it to the top! We now rank #1 for ‘pitch deck’ searches on Youtube (which happens to be the second most popular search engine on the Internet).

Team:

Producing a weekly video like this requires at least 2-3 people:

I write the scripts and show my face (about 8 hours of work per week).

Paula handles the shooting/production and first editing cut (about 16 hours per week).

Elena does the digital animation. That takes most of her time. She can do one video per week with little time for any other tasks.

Then the rest of our marketing team handle the distribution, subtitles, covers and launch, probably 8-16 hours of work.

Tools:

VidIQ to find keywords and track success.

Final Cut Pro for editing.

Adobe After Effects for post.

FAQ

Great info on what you did right and the resources required!! Any advice for companies who don’t have the manpower to pull that off? Where would you save time if you had to? Anyone used firms or freelancers that they could refer?

Weekly is not necessary, it’s certainly hard to pull off.

Youtube is all about SEO- otherwise videos won’t rank.

I started a Youtube channel of my one (shameless plug) which I manage on my free time :slightly_smiling_face: - While this is non-business content, I’ve seen very similar behavior and the content/script formula replicated.

If you search for ‘Pitch Deck’ on Google, our video shows up now, as well as our landing pages. More real estate for our valuable keywords (run the search in your own geos and let me know if it shows up).

How do do it cheaper?

• DIY is the cheaper, certainly. All you need is a decent camera ($500), some lights ($100) and time ($??).
• I know a couple people that could handle the animation stuff as freelance. I can share that over DM.
• 
  

Any stats you can share on ROI of your top blogs vs this video

This is one of our best performing blog posts:

You can check out this article on how we managed to rank there: The REAL cost of content marketing: turning $70K into $200K

There are thousands of articles online on how to grow your SEO, that are obviously focusing on their own SEO, among with stories of influencers making a living from it. Yet, nobody seems to be looking at the real cost behind it. But, worry not, we're going to do that right here, right now.

So that article, alone, has brought at least 392 paid users. That’s already hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Revenue from customers that came from Youtube:

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