YouTube Strategies for Your Business: Leveraging Content Kathy was telling me about how she’s using YouTube to generate leads and how she’s got the whole process down to a science – they spend a minimum amount of time getting videos out there. She’s got the inside scoop on how to own your content, use YouTube as a distribution channel (plus other platforms), and promote your company to a bigger audience. Watch this live expert interview to get the info you need for your biz. Transcript: Cindy: Welcome, everybody. If you are using video to promote your business, or you want to use video, specifically YouTube, to promote your business, you are in the right place. We’re looking at strategies on how to use YouTube in your business. And we’re going to look particularly at three things today. We’re going to look at YouTube for generating leads and YouTube for promoting your company to a bigger audience. And thirdly, how to set up a system so it’s super manageable and easy to bring YouTube into your business. And we’re going to have some QA time at the end and some bonus information as well. And I’m here with Kathy Swanson. Hey Kathy, how are you? Kathy: I’m doing great, Cindy. Glad to be here today. This is going to be a fun episode, and I’m so honored to be a part of it. Cindy: I’m so glad you’re here. Kathy: Yes. Cindy: Good, good. All right. Well, let’s get right into it. Let’s talk about how you are using YouTube to generate leads for your client. You had a really great story and example, a company that you’re working with to do just that using YouTube to generate leads. Tell us about it. Kathy: Absolutely. So, and we’re good on sharing my screen, right? Cindy: Yes, please, feel free. Kathy: Yep, absolutely. And so, I’m going to go ahead and introduce you to one of my fabulous clients, Karen Barbie Atkinson. She’s an internationally renowned belly dance instructor. She’s been at it for, since well, she’s been doing this since she was eight years old. And in fact, having her 25th, Give Belly Dance a Chance recital to live music this October. And so we came up with the concept of The Baby Boomer Belly Dancer. And so now she has herself branded as Karen Barbie, the baby boomer belly dancer, and now has her own video bot podcast or vodcast for short. And so what we did is we decided, hey, let’s go ahead and reach out to a larger audience. Kathy: So many people have been on YouTube, whether they were on YouTube before or they decided to go ahead and get on it, especially in 2020. And a lot of people are going ahead and getting their belly dance instruction by YouTube. Now, this is not a podcast that’s oriented towards instructional. She’s got some of that or, she’s got videos out there that are instructional and of course, she’s got her online site with thousands of hours of online instruction called Caravan Online. And at the same time, she’s a very intriguing individual. She’s got a lot of great philosophy. She loves live music. She loves improvisation. And she likes to talk about life and even neuroscience. And so let’s go ahead. She had her blog, why not go ahead and turn that into a video podcast and make it easier? And she’s fallen in love with this. Cindy: You call that a vod? Kathy: A vodcast, V-O-D-C-A-S-T. Cindy: Gotcha. Kathy: Yes. So we came up with Baby Boomer Belly Dancer. She is loving this. We started earlier this year, and she’s been building her audience, and people are just really taking to it. In fact, I was at a Rotary meeting the other day talking with some folks from the symphony and the Southwest School of Arts and some movers and shakers in the artist community, and they mentioned her before I mentioned her, The Baby Boomer Belly Dance Podcast. And it was like, oh my God. Yes, it’s working. It’s working. So, yeah. And it’s really, a really intriguing way of getting your message across without pushing. It’s pulling people in. Pulling people into the conversation that they need the most. So, shall we go deeper? Cindy: It’s specifically generating leads for her business. I mean, is this something that you think any type of business could use? Because not all of us are doing belly dancing type businesses or, so, yeah. Kathy: Yeah. We may not feel that we have the … Okay, so there are four basic principles, inform, educate, inspire, and entertain. Well, I don’t know about you, but I kind of feel like sometimes everything comes together, and I feel like I’m entertaining. And at the same time, not all the time, I feel like I’m in the other three categories. Right? And at the same time, if you put in the mechanisms, if you allow people to have a conversation with you, then yes, it can generate leads. Most people don’t remember that. They put something out there, they push, and when they push it’s like, then they don’t, it’s like a billboard. You have no idea who’s looking at the billboard. Somebody may really like the billboard, and unless they go ahead and make the effort to go ahead and figure out how the heck to go ahead and contact you, nothing’s going to happen. Kathy: And you don’t know, it’s not measurable. And we like measuring things over here. And I tell you what, if you listen to this, or watch this episode, you will find out that Karen Barbie used to be a technical analyst and she loves numbers. Don’t let the belly dance fool you, type of thing. And so definitely going ahead and being able to see the results. But there’s a technique to do that. You have to go ahead and do that. You have to give people the opportunity. So how do we do that? Right? There are many ways that you can go ahead and get that person, you know, that person who’s on the other side to go ahead and show that this is relevant for them. And we have many techniques that we use for Baby Boomer Belly Dancer on YouTube, and also on the other channels that we have. Kathy: You can actually subscribe. You can actually go ahead and go down in the show notes. And, you can look at the actual vodcasts on the podcast platform, which I’ll show you in a little bit. You can subscribe to the podcast. You can subscribe to her blog, which is called Damn The Torpedoes. And those are very, some very interesting stories, especially through COVID. You can go to her website. You can sign up for a free trial of Caravan Online. You can get her philosophy topics ebook. You can get her master class. You can look at her social media. And we’re actually going to be adding in, because we’re doing it on a key episode, she’s got a coloring book out there with her philosophy topics that you can buy on Amazon. And so we can have it click through so that you can have wonderful, beautiful. She’s got a dancer that’s an artist that they, what they did is they co-created a coloring book. So you can color in the belly dancers, and you can read her philosophy topics. Yeah. So all sorts of ways to pull them in. Cindy: Let us know here in the chat if you have a YouTube channel or are looking to use a YouTube channel, or if you’re just getting started, just let us know here in the chat. Because I’m curious if you’re seeing anything with what Kathy’s doing with her clients right now that are just sparking ideas for you. Yeah, let us know here in the chat. And if you want to chat privately to us, you can do that as well. That’s fine. Or if you’re here on Facebook or YouTube with us, just pop it into the comments, I’d really like to see who is doing this already. Cindy: So Kathy, you’re saying they’re doing all these things and then they’re actually capturing leads into their CRM or how, what are they doing to turn that into dollars? Kathy: Absolutely. So when we have various ways that people can go ahead and actually sign up to receive things from Caravan Online, or Caravan Studio. And so I’ll show you a little bit about some of the width, the depth and breadth of how we’re doing this. And you know, it’s not for all people, so don’t let it be intimidating. We just have a very great technique, scientific technique. The combination of the artistry and the science. And so we do this in a layered fashion. And that is, we actually have the ability to go ahead and have the YouTube channel. In fact, let me go ahead and share with you that eight-layer system. Cindy: That’d be great. Kathy: Yeah. And so you have your core, what is your topic? What do, does your audience need most from you right now? So you’re relevant because otherwise you’re just talking, even if you have gas, right? And so that core, that topic, ends up being that video. And then what you do is you take that information and you can create show notes. One of the things you may have seen right there on YouTube is if you put the timings in, and what the topics are, it’ll go directly to that particular spot on the video, especially if you have something that’s longer. And so you’ve got that first layer on the top of the core, which is your show notes. Then you have your calls to action. Then you have your distribution. So is it going to be on YouTube, or are you going to put the video on Facebook, LinkedIn? Is it going to be on a podcast platform or even a video podcast platform? And now let me show you those real quick. Cindy: And then if you, oh, good. I’m glad you reshared. I just put it back both of us to chat for a minute. Kathy: Yeah, absolutely. So here we have on podcast, pod.co we’re distributing the podcast and so these are the audio files that people can see. And of course, again, we flesh this out so that there are calls to action as well. So people can sign up. And then here is her video podcast platform. It looks like a blog post. But then like, say if you wanted to see her latest with Victoria talking about mental health and functional movement, you can actually watch the video here and see all the information. Kathy: And better yet, on the side, you can actually go ahead and click on banners to sign up for the free trial. To sign up for the blog post. To sign up for her philosophy topics, etc. And so when that happens, we actually pull that into keep, her CRM, and now we’re able to communicate where it immediately and over time about what’s going on with Caravan and with Karen Barbie. And also, when these things are released, which takes us to that next layer, which is, you need to connect. Cindy: Got it, got it. Kathy: You need to be able to let people know that you’ve got that out there, because otherwise it’s sitting out there and nobody knows, right? And so having, sending emails to your list, the people that are interested, and being able to do that multiple times. Because, you know, maybe the timing wasn’t right that first day, but if they never went ahead and looked at it, they may still be interested. And so getting that timing right. Doing social media posts and even snippets. Now that’s a bonus kind of thing. Cindy: The snippets, yeah. Kathy: You know, there’s a small segment of, yeah. If you’ve got a snippet, it’s like, oh, that was so juicy. Let’s go ahead and pull that out, edit that off and post it on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, and have it be something that says, listen to this, watch this. And then if you want to see the full episode, then you can go here. Cindy: I like that. Kathy: What a great way. Cindy: Because people are busy and they sometimes just want to have that executive summary, or highlight or something like that. And if you can get the message out there that way. Can I ask if you do much with keywords? We use TubeBuddy for keywords, but I mean, do you think about that in terms of the channel name and the description and that type of thing? Kathy: Absolutely. Absolutely. So one of the things that can happen is like you just like plop something over the fence and just name it whatever, that’s not going to be relevant. And so what I subscribe to is a, is essentially a keyword mechanism that you would use in a conversation with someone you were very interested in having a conversation with, versus the old keyword SEO strategy. So it’s like, hey, if my audience is women who are interested in belly dance, whether they belly dance asked or not, and who are also baby boomers or gen X-ers, then you want to say those words, right? You want to talk in their voice. You want them to think, hey, I get you. And at the same time, you don’t want to overload the, you don’t want to overload it with things where it’s like, oh, it’s obvious you have keywords going on, right? Kathy: So the title, absolutely. The subject of your, the title for your YouTube episode has got to be that way. We definitely rebranded Karen Barbie as Karen Barbie, the baby boomer belly dancer, on purpose. And we set that up. Because it was like, yeah, that’s who she is and we’re going to, we’re living that. And at the same time, when we do our Instagram posts, we do, do the hashtags on all the keywords for the show notes. So that if somebody is looking for something, then that works that way. However, in other platforms, it’s a distraction to go ahead and create the hashtags. Let the algorithms, which are sophisticated enough in YouTube and Facebook, go ahead and do their job, and then let Instagram do its job with the hashtags. Cindy: That makes total sense. Kathy: Does that make sense? Cindy: Yeah, I love that. I love that. That works really well. So in this particular example that you gave us, she’s getting new people into her business with the videos, and you’re bringing them into the system. And she’s, how would you say the reaching a wider audience is working in terms of the strategy? I mean, do you feel, obviously you find it effective, but tell us like, what are some secrets with that? Kathy: Yeah. Well, it all comes back to the whole four-point concept of, you’re educating, you’re informing, you’re educating, you’re inspiring, hopefully, and you’re possibly even entertaining. So let’s take the world of non-profits or even associations. Those audiences have had a vast amount of turnover. A vast amount of retirement in the last year. If you take a look at the industry, people said, hey, I’m just opting out. I’m done. And so there’s a lot of new people in those industries and they don’t know you. Cindy: Interesting. Kathy: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of influencers. People who are patrons, who are sponsors, who are in, who are funding organizations, sitting on boards. And if they see an end to say your audience is that, that market. Wow. What if that board member comes to a board meeting and says, did you see so-and-so did this really cool video on why this is working these days, and this is not? And many have been part of a bigger program, pulled off a larger content piece or a larger program, or webinar or whatever. And it allows you to go ahead and kind of, well, you know, they do call me Kathy Swanson, the instigator. So, instigate. Yeah? Cindy: I love that. Kathy: Instigate a conversation. Right? What can get somebody intrigued and willing to go ahead and communicate with another, in other words, influence the decision making process? And that’s ultimately what we’re doing here. I get to do a lot of cool things. And one of the biggest things I get to do with my clients, as well as their end clients and customers, is help people make decisions. Kathy: Nice. And that’s where, for me, that’s where the fun is because I’m just that kind of geek. Right? Cindy: And you’ve got a bestselling book. Kathy: Geek goddess. I sure do. Cindy: Yeah. And tell us about that. Kathy: Yeah. It’s called, Automation Works, turning your marketing from a money pit into a money-making machine. And it’s not a how-to book. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And it, and in fact, there’s some stories that we just do not have time for today. Because there was no book in Kathy in February of 2016. However, there were six books in Kathy in June, 2016. And an actual real book that became a best seller in August of that year. And this is a why-to book. Kathy: This is for people who are decision-makers. These are presidents, CEOs, people, COOs, CFOs, the people who are really running the marketing show because they’re looking at the results, let alone the CMOS and the people who are on the marketing team. And in fact, a lot of people are picking it up because they’re part of the marketing team, and they’re saying, hey, this is why we need to do this. And has a lot of great stories on why automation can work in a business so that, that team is more effective and can do the things and have the time to do the things that are more effective for that company or organization. So. Cindy: Nice. Nice. I just wanted to say, for those of you joining us live right now, we get a lot of questions about what equipment we use and some of the different things Kathy’s talking about in her systems. I got a text last week from somebody I work with, what lights do you use? So we’ve got a PDF too. So if you text the word, tech, to me at (530)203-5703, you can get that PDF. And then everybody who texts in today, you’re entered in to win. We’ll pick one winner to win a copy of my book, 7 Marketing Basics, and we’ll get that out to the winner today. But Cathy, you’ve got some advanced kind of special stuff you are offering today too, tell us about that. Kathy: Absolutely. So I have been essentially sitting on my own podcast, now video podcast, called Automation Works Revisited. So I didn’t have a podcast in me. I’m doing all these podcasts and vodcasts for clients, and it’s like, wait, I could do that too. And so what Automation Works Revisited is coming up. Already have several episodes in the can, more coming on Monday. And it is a commentary on all the things that have remained important or changed since I wrote my book. And of course, a ton of things have changed even before the pandemic. And another ton of things have changed since then. Kathy: And so I’ll have guests on. Cindy, I know you’re going to be one of my guests in an upcoming episode. Yeah. And so we’re going to just, we’re going to talk about these things and why they’re important and what those, the essence of those are that make it to where it’s like, you need to consider that as part of your strategy, or a part of your technique that you do. And you know, I think one of the things I’ll definitely be doing is actually going in deeper into the eight layers of this YouTube process that I talked about real quickly. And, dive deeper into those so that people can see, well, why would I go ahead and set up a Patreon channel, for instance? It’s like, ah, so many reasons. Or, what does it really take to go ahead and monetize on YouTube these days? Because they’ve made it much more difficult, and at the same time, it’s still attainable. Cindy: So exciting stuff. How do people get a hold of that? We put it in the chat too, but just for people watching the replay, we’ll put it in the show notes too. But how do people get access to that? Because you did go through that eight-layer process that you use for YouTube really fast just now and I’m like, hey, wait, I feel like I need to be jotting down some notes, man. Kathy: Absolutely. Well, and you can get early access to Automation Works Revisited, my video, new video podcasts, by going to access.mrktgwerx.com. Now, I abbreviate it as M-K-T-G-W-E-R-X.com. So access.mktgwerx.com. And yes, I spell works differently. My company is, Integrated Marketing Works, and I look at the word works kind of like skunkworks. Lots of interesting think tank kind of things. Machinations, a little steampunk thrown in there as well. So yeah, that’s why I look at that differently. However, Automation Works Revisited, works is spelled the right way. No worries there. Cindy: Gotcha. Gotcha. So you did whip through that really fast today, and I think it was awesome because we completely laid out what you’re doing with one client on how she’s bringing leads into her business. And it sounds to me like the system you’re using, even though the example was for belly dancing and kind of coaching company, that that system would work for anybody. And you’re generating leads for them right now and reaching out to a bigger audience, and you’ve got that eight-layer system in place. So I feel like there was a ton of gold in this little short 20 minutes. If someone were going to just do one or two things, maybe they’re just getting started, what would you recommend to do the first, what are the topmost important things to do? Kathy: Oh, absolutely. Well, number one, focus. You could also call it clarity. Focus on the value that you are going to be providing. This is an important conversation. So, what does your audience need most from you right now? You know, this is not an ego trip. Well, if you could do it as an ego trip, but don’t expect good results from an ego trip, right? Cindy: And don’t be all over the map, is what I hear you saying. Is like, don’t try to do 50 things. You’re saying like, bring it in. Kathy: You can do 50 things. Ah, I would offer it up. You can do 50 things. Think about it as an umbrella. So, for instance, when you think about Simon Sinek and the concept of why, and the really easy way that I’ve learned when reading Simon and watching and stuff, is to be able to complete the sentence, I believe. And so my why, for instance, is I believe that innovation and entrepreneurial thinking are the keys to thriving economies. And everything I do, from my business, from how I consume in the marketplace, even how I go ahead and judge for robotics competitions with kids to help them learn teamwork, leadership, attitude, and most importantly, critical thinking, aligns with that belief. And when you have a belief, or a focus, or a clarity of purpose, then that allows you to hang things from that. And so you can do 50 things. Yeah. Cindy: I love that. I love that. That’s so great. That’s the umbrella bit, right? Kathy: It’s your purpose, your focus, your clarity. And that’s one of the reasons why I love working with purpose and mission-driven businesses that are entrepreneurial thinkers. And especially those that are in their prime and don’t want to be left behind in today’s online world. Is that I, one of the secret sauces of what I get to do in this world is to go ahead and help them find that clarity, that purpose, that overreaching umbrella, and have this right strategies, tools, techniques, technology, to hang from that so that everything is going in the same direction. I have no, if you want to go ahead and get a word over here somewhere or do something ego-driven, great. We’re just not going to measure it. That’s okay. Focus. So that would be number one. Cindy: Number one, focus. Kathy: Long version, focus. And then two, think about your commitment. Because you’re making a commitment to people. Now don’t overthink that, right? At the same time, think about how much time you want to be able to dedicate to this and how frequently you want to do it. So from an algorithm standpoint, I highly recommend at least nine minutes. Snippets can be shorter, but you’re when you’re talking about an episode, to have it nine minutes or longer on YouTube so the algorithms can work well. And to do it at least twice a month. If you can do it weekly, great. If you can do it like daily, well, obviously you’re doing this as your main focus. And luckily you have a team that’s working on the rest of your business because you’re pretty much doing videos all the time. Kathy: So at the same time, when you’re starting out, think about how you want to, where you want to start, because you can always do more later. You can always phase these things. You do not have to do all eight layers day one. In fact, the only ones that you have to do are the first five, and then layer in. Just like a beautiful cake, layer in that frosting. People will eat it. Cindy: It’s so good. Oh, I have cake right here. This is my marketing as easy as, I don’t know, cupcakes or something like that. Kathy: As easy as cakes. Cindy: Oh, Kathy, I love it. Thank you for that. You made it really clear the first two things to do, and you gave your whole eight-layer strategy today, really fast, but really solid. And right here in the chat, we know how to get access to more details on that. And thank you so, so much for being here. I appreciate you. Kathy: Appreciate you too. Cindy: And everything for joining us. Now on the replay we’re we’re glad to see you. Kathy: Fantastic. Looking forward to next time. Cindy: See you next time.
