Youtube marketing cost: the Youtube ROI

How are we measuring our YouTube content marketing ROI?

Let's get to it!

Each second of the above video costs Slidebean around $2.5. That's $10 just now — around $150 per minute and around $1,200 for our average video length of 8 minutes.

We are cautious with our marketing budget. Every campaign we do is tracked and monitored to find out if the money we spent is recovered: ROI.

We started this Youtube channel years ago, but it was only about a year ago when we found positive unit economics. In this special edition video, we are going to break down how we make these videos, how much they cost, and why these numbers work for us.

Each video begins with a script. I write most of the scripts, which takes me about a couple of hours. While the script itself only takes about 2 hours of work, I couldn't write four scripts in one day. My brain doesn't work like that. I normally spend a week cooking up ideas and then just sit down and write them.

The Shooting

So once the script is ready, we shoot it.

Paula handles the shooting. Each shoot takes about 1 hour for setup, lights, and around 30 minutes to shoot it. This video then goes to the editing room- which is not a room at all, just her and her laptop and Final Cut Pro.

She cuts out bloopers and radio silence, and then define the timing of the videos, as well as the camera positioning to keep you entertained. These cuts are a bit of a formula that we know works to keep audiences through 8 minutes of me speaking.

So once the video is cut and ready, it goes to L. L is our digital animator and the only team member who dedicates 100% of their time to the Youtube channel.

I originally studied digital animation, so this is what I was planning on doing for a living before becoming an entrepreneur. It was a really cool experience for me to hire one of my peers for the first time.

Anyway, Elena gets rid of the green screen, color corrects and grades the video, and comes up with all the animations. All this process is done in Adobe After Effects, and it's not a template or an automated platform- she actually comes up with the designs and animates them in sync with the script.

Paula regularly delivers the cut video on Fridays and Elena delivers a fully animated video by Wednesday afternoon.

Our Secret Sauce - YouTube content marketing ROI

We believe this is the third part of the secret sauce. First, transparent content: we are open to sharing genuine insights and numbers from our company. Second, production value: we shoot in 4K in a proper studio, and hopefully, you can tell the difference. Third, animation.

Slidebean is, after all, a design company. We pride ourselves in helping you present your ideas, and we wouldn't be sending the right message if we didn't have great visuals to go with our content.

With an edited video, the rest of the team takes over to do the subtitles and Youtube optimization: tags, description, thumbnails, subscribe button... This process happens Wednesday night or Thursday morning typically,  and the video goes live as soon as we are done. We begin tracking our YouTube content marketing ROI.

90% of these costs are people: a total of $4,915/mo between everyone's hours. I'm also including our overhead: office, desk, and admin costs for hosting the team.

Why do we do it?

Do we actually get $5,000+ back from Youtube?

We do.

The channel currently gets ~4,000 views per day, which makes up to around $300 worth of Youtube advertising. Yeah, that's not how we make money. So where does our YouTube content marketing ROI come from?

We make money because people watch our videos and try our platform- or they hire our new pitch deck writing service. More importantly, this is a growing audience: each new video adds more views, more subscribers and more exposure, but the old videos still get views and probably will continue bringing in viewers in the years to come.

There's also an intangible value of brand awareness. We hope that by watching this content, you get to know our brand, who we are, and even share this content with your peers. I'm no celebrity, but people are starting to recognize me as the face of the brand, to consider us a relevant source of startup content: which goes a long way! It opens doors to meetings, partnerships, not to mention a positive impact on the community as a whole.

On a related and very commercial note- I started a personal Youtube channel, where I go into other 'entrepreneur life' stuff beyond the startup topics we discuss here- go ahead and take a look.

Finally, the next evolution of this channel to step up our YouTube content marketing ROI,  is going to bring in a few guests. Vini, one of my co-founders, will be hosting a new series on graphic design- and we are working with a few relevant personalities for some guest videos.