Proven YouTube Lead Gen Tactics from Agency Leaders

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Question is to David, what are you working on or what's the challenge right now?

Sure.

I mean, I'm still doing, you know, what we're doing for a while, right? Which is inbound calls from paid search. And, um, after the summer, that's ramping up really nicely. Uh, can't complain. I think what we've been trying and hitting our head on the wall for a while is just tracking and cracking, uh, YouTube. As a channel, so how do we generate those calls from YouTube? Because the clients are already there, and it's a matter of just selling them more. So I guess the question there for the group is how you would go about doing this, right? So it's a totally different channel, right? Like if you guys were doing SEO, you're now going to do paid search. Your skill set is not there. How would you think about, go about doing it? Would you do it yourself? Would you hire somebody? Would you hire the agency? And remember, this is like core competence, right? This is the key value that we bring to our clients, right? It's channel expertise.

I would definitely contract. I mean, definitely.

So the clients are asking for YouTube?

As well?

Is that— what's the—

Clients are just asking for calls. Um, and basically what we've seen is that, uh, you know, as a business, our expertise is channels and expanding through other channels is— um, we know YouTube works and YouTube is part of the Google ecosystem. So, you know, the Google reps will definitely help and they're more conducive to being helpful than Facebook.

I would second Rebecca. We, we, we like leveraging Experts, but I also don't like them just to do it, but basically do it with the mindset of, hey, we want to see how you do it and explain it. And, you know, like, you know, yeah, give me the fish, but also show me every step while you're fishing.

So you already have a team that is delivering Google Ads paid search.

Who's speaking? I only see 7 of us.

Is there more?

Oh yeah, this is Matt. Sorry, my camera is off.

Oh, okay.

I'll put my camera on later, but this is Matt. I was just wondering if you already have like internal team that is basically handling paid search.

We do, but it's a different skillset, right?

Really?

Is it? Is it? Because—

Yeah.

I'm trying to challenge you on that assumption because at my company we have a few people who do Google Ads and they really specialize in Google Ads. And I just actually this week I went to New York to a Google Think lead gen event where you have advertisers that spend $100 million on Google Ads, $10 million a year on Google Ads. So, you know, we definitely are doing a lot of Google Ads. And from— for my team, the person who's doing Google Ads, they also are doing anything that goes through Google Ads. So they do YouTube ads, they'll do Google Display Network, they'll do remarketing. So I think it's a very similar skill set. I would encourage you to think about your current team to expand their capability and just learn YouTube ads. And how to manage them. Maybe the creative aspect of like what type of creative is going to work, that's a different skill set. But as far as buying ads, I think it should be the same team in my view.

So on the buying ads, yes. And we are a performance marketer lead generator, not a service agency.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Right. So that's what we've been trying to crack. I mean, I've been— I am a media buyer. By trade, and I've been trying to crack this for 2 years and have not succeeded. I think what I've seen mainly, the difference with search and YouTube is search is multiple keywords. Like we have tens of thousands of keywords and it works really well. Then on YouTube, the way people have told me is you don't need to target, you could just go global audience. But you really have to have a studio as a creative.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. To really be successful on, you know, performance-based versus just running ads.

Yeah. I think like the things that maybe are small scale, but what I would start is remarketing through YouTube. So if you already got a click to your website and perform certain actions and whatnot, then the remarketing, it should be like hopefully low-hanging fruit. But when you start advertising, like you said, it's audience, it's building audiences and whatnot, optimizing them. But also I think the creative, like the actual ad, the actual video, that's where most people fail at because the creative is maybe not good enough. So hopefully it's helpful. I'm just trying to share my experience.

Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah.

Cool.

All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

Yeah, what's still outstanding there, David? Did you want to ask any follow-up questions or?

No, I guess I'm just trying to do the approach, right? Because I have experience, you know, I just wanted to see what, you know, people would look at doing and if there's something I'm missing. Mainly we've kind of tried the 2 parts, right? Like I've hired contractors and tried to do it internally. The contractors is like, the person, the marketer who I've seen make lead generation on YouTube work really well, It's a unicorn. It's not just like something, because it's not just running it, right? Running it is not too complicated. It's actually getting the same performance that you would with search. That is hard. Yeah.

Yeah.

I also feel like sometimes what we are seeing is people who are influencers, And they talk about how video ads are working from a perspective of they're using them for themselves. So they would create a video of like 30-minute video or a 15-minute video, or they would, you know, I'm here in my garage with my Maseratis and whatnot. And, you know, it works for the influencer. But if you have a client who's a roofing company or you have a client who's a dental office, you know how to make it work for them for lead generation. And, you know, if you're getting the same type of advice that is working for the influencer. It's not the same type of advice that's going to work for, you know, for a business or a brand. And I think, you know, the way we use it is also more upper funnel. That is really, you know, what really works for brand building, but for like a lead gen, you know, for any business, it's not going to work perfectly for any business. So maybe you are struggling to crack the code. It just also depends on the type of businesses and industries you work with. If you would maybe Consider that as well.

Yeah, it's my frenemies who make it work. So those within the Legion space is people share a lot.

Okay.

So these guys have basically shared the part, but you know can only share so much, right? Yeah. So it is it's not an influencer. It's really like somebody who does auto or health insurance. Okay. Through leads, through leads, through YouTube and Facebook. Um, yeah, yeah, it's something I'm trying to crack for a while. Thank you for the feedback. Maybe I'm just not paying enough on the contractor. You just have to like pay for like premium contractors, right?

Well, you know, once you have some kind of a formula and you know a company that they're getting the leads and it's working for them, then I would maybe try to reverse engineer what they are doing, use some tools to kind of see the creative that they're running. You can use SimilarWeb, AdClarity within Semrush. They actually have pretty good competitive tools and try to like, you know, reconstruct their flow, their conversion flow and whatnot. Maybe that's the way to approach it.

Okay.

Cool.

Cool.

Love that. And I think there are some— I'll have to look through the CRM of the AOA members, but I think there's some people who are like more specialized in YouTube that I can put you in touch with. I'll just have to take a look over there.

All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. So this is an agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host, Neil Patel. And myself, Eric Siu. And these were 9 and 8-figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is, at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that. If you want to grow your agency to 7 figures, 8 figures, and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well, and it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. And you're going to learn how to acquire more clients, you're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November 30th We are holding a special price and you can apply at marketingschool.io/agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a 7-day free trial, right? So once November 30th hits, we're going to increase the price by $200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more and we'll see you inside.

Is there someone else who has like a main challenge like they're bringing up or just like a topic that seems to be coming up More so that you want to discuss with your fellow members. Gabriel was looking, looking antsy there. No, I'm just kidding. Who was speaking? Matt?

I was just asking. I saw the pack raise his hand, but my question is maybe just I wanted to check the temperature of the room in terms of Q4. You know, it's the last quarter of a year. Usually it's busy. I kind of see that a lot of deals that I thought that were going to go through by now, a lot of things are on hold. And I'm talking about sales, business development to see how, you know, if it's only me that I'm seeing sort of clients maybe waiting, at least here in the US with the election. But I just wanted to check the temperature if you guys are closing, killing it, you know, or it's just a little bit. Slow right now.

Slow for me.

Slow.

Yeah.

Typically slow.

Yeah.

Like compared to, for me, like at least when I look at last Q4, October usually is the month that September, October, November when we tend to close a lot of deals. And I think, you know, I have the leads, but with the closing, it's a little bit challenging. So I feel like it's good to hear the feedback that it's You know, I'm not alone. Anybody else who's killing it?

I'm not killing it, but we're seeing an improvement. But we're weird because we were coming— we had a standstill. We were nearly at a standstill in February, March. And so we've put so many irons in the fire to create momentum again. So we're picking up. Deals do take a long time to close for sure. And I was kind of trying to glance at last Q4, but it's just night and day. Just was a different salesperson and all kinds of stuff. So I have no real comparison. So, but selling is possible.

We're a different monster as well because we're lead generators. So we don't charge for services. We basically sell leads and calls. And those are easier to sell because there's a metric to be put in. Then combined with auto insurance coming back up, so we're like 50% month to month.

It's nice to have a no-brainer offer.

I'm also curious, based on What you were saying, Matt? Like who is doing the main business development? Are you like the main closing? Like is there anybody that's still like closing their own deals, or do you pretty much have like a team? Or what's that structure look like?

You mean anyone?

For me, I'm the closer.

Yeah, I wanted to start with start with Matt and see what that looks like.

For me, I'm the closer, but. I see that this is not entirely scalable. I've been speaking at 10, 20 events per year, and right now I'm getting support on the marketing side. But also, I actually am working with Rebecca's team to onboard HubSpot for CRM, which is a great help because I had that issue on the last call, and then I connected with Rebecca. So I think my goal is to develop a sales operation that is going to be More than just myself, but I just I'm definitely not there yet. It's just something that it's on my mind right now. So I'm not sure if anybody else. I know that Pac has like a scheduler. I think he was saying last time, but beyond that, I don't know if anybody here has a sales team per se. I feel also from you know conversations with other agency owners. If let's say you're selling to dental offices and that's your niche, or you're selling to I don't know, law firms or something like that. It's easier to put up a salesperson with a phone and CRM to hit these targets versus when you sell, like in our case, would be maybe a marketing director at a mid-sized company. And a salesperson out of college with a script, they're not going to get their attention that easily, right? They want to talk to somebody who's already more of an expert. So I feel that this is a role At an agency where you work with, you know, maybe, you know, broader businesses and you're targeting marketing teams when you have to have somebody with more experience who just would maybe support you in that. But I don't feel like it's that easy in my case. Maybe anybody has any feedback on that.

I actually agree with Matt. I think, you know, from within our sides, it's usually owner-led growth, right? And I have a sales rep which we're training and hopefully, you know, can eventually become part of leadership. But, you know, everybody I know is basically, it's like the owner is hustling for the deal. So I don't know if there's a— what the model would look like if you start giving it to the sales team and what that will how that will affect your business, you know?

Yeah. And go ahead, Rebecca, I think you were talking.

I wasn't, but I know plenty of large HubSpot agencies with sales team, and I'm sure Austin can speak to this very effectively. There comes a point where you definitely have a sales team, and I don't know exactly what the number is, but, you know, it's definitely done It's definitely done. It definitely works. And I know those owners personally. I'm just, no way am I there.

Seen it go a couple ways. One is if you want to scale with kind of non-founder caliber people, you have to simplify your offering. I've hired salespeople who don't have that consultative leadership, thought leadership to kind of advise. So those calls end up being more simplified to, you know, what's your problem? How many resources do you need? What do you need? And then let me get back to you type of calls. So I don't think those do as well, but they can scale. And then the other, you know, I've worked with bigger, you know, tech and development agencies and how they scaled is, you know, rather than founders, it's, you know, executive directors who are just as senior, but they're just not the business owner. But they can, you know, they're basically kind of like you, Matt, right? But they just don't want to be the business owner, right? Like, they're— they just want to be part of an organization, but they can consult, they can advise, and they can, you know, they can lead teams. So they're, you know, usually kind of an executive level, almost like partner. And maybe they, you know, they eat what they kill type thing. You know.

You know.