YouTube strategist

Your Videos Get Views But Not Customers

By Stewart Read · UK YouTube strategist

You're publishing. You're getting some views. But you're not getting enough leads from YouTube.

Almost every founder I speak to describes the same thing, and almost none of them call it a strategy problem. They say they wanted some guidance and some direction. One of them put it better than I could: people don't know what they don't know.

A YouTube strategist decides what the channel makes and why, so the people filming and editing stop guessing and start getting you more leads, calls and sales.

What a YouTube strategist actually does

Five decisions, all made before anyone hits record:

• Which subjects are worth a video. Judged on what your buyers search for and whether the results page can be won, rather than on what you feel like talking about.
• How each one is packaged. The title and thumbnail decide whether the video is seen at all, and they're usually written in the industry's language instead of the buyer's.
• Where the video sends a viewer. A video with nowhere to go is a missed opportunity to generate revenue. Most business channels send everyone to the same homepage whatever the subject.
• What counts as working. Which numbers mean something for your business and which ones are vanity, so the team stops optimising for the wrong thing.
• What to make next, and what to stop making. Decided from what the last batch returned, not from a content calendar written in January.

Filming, editing and uploading are separate jobs. Most businesses already have someone doing them well.

A strategist isn't an editor, an agency or a tool

Your team edits the videos. They can film and edit beautifully and still have no idea which of it brought you a client. That's not their job and it never was.

Most agencies sell production. They make the videos. Better-made versions of the wrong videos change nothing, which is why so many founders come out of an agency contract with a prettier channel and the same empty calendar.

The tools give you a dashboard. YouTube Studio and the analytics suites show you the numbers. Reading them every month, working out what they mean and then deciding what to do about them is still your job, and that's the job you don't have time for.

What's missing is someone who owns the channel

Most of the businesses I look at have people making videos, and the channel itself isn't anyone's job. Filming and editing are skills your team either has or can hire easily. Running the channel takes someone who's spent years on YouTube specifically, and that's usually the person who isn't there. Five jobs go unowned as a result.

The research. Finding what your buyers type into YouTube, which of those searches you could realistically win, and what each one is worth to you commercially. One business I looked at had fifteen years of results and a category their market searches constantly. The videos ranking for it were years old, from channels whose authority was fading. One well-researched video could have started that pipeline, and their team wasn't looking, because the research wasn't anyone's job.

The strategy. Deciding which of those subjects you make, in what order, and what each video is supposed to do for the business. Without that you get a content calendar, which is a list of videos with dates against them and no reason why those videos instead of any others.

The optimisation. Titles, thumbnails, descriptions and where the video sends a viewer. These decide whether anyone sees the video at all, and whether the people who watch it ever contact you. One specialist I read had twenty years of experience, a published book and more than 200 videos. Her titles used the words her profession uses, while her ideal clients were searching in completely different words and landing on competitors. The person who wrote those titles is the least able to spot that the titles are the problem.

Feeding the algorithm. YouTube decides who to show your videos to based on what it's worked out about your channel from what you've published so far. When your uploads pull in different directions, it can't place you, so it shows your videos to fewer of the right people. Keeping that consistent is a deliberate job.

The reporting. Reading what the last batch of videos returned, saying which ones brought you leads, calls and sales, and choosing what to make next on that basis. YouTube Studio shows you numbers. It can't tell you which video booked a call, and working that out every month takes time your team doesn't have.

In both the cases above the videos themselves were fine. What was missing was somebody whose job it was to read the data and act on it. These are five specialist jobs, and a business under about thirty people rarely has anyone who can do all five. So the videos keep going out, and the business still can't say which of them produced a customer.

If an agency has already let you down

Assume I expect it. Most founders I speak to have tried one, sometimes several. The complaint is rarely that the ideas were bad. It's that the ideas didn't fit: "that's great, but none of these I can actually do," because they'd have been off-brand, or the scripts felt cheesy to read aloud.

A strategy you won't execute isn't a strategy. Everything I recommend has to be something you'd actually film, in a format you'd actually keep up.

"YouTube doesn't work for my niche"

Sometimes that's true, and I'll say so. More often the channel has been aimed at the wrong half of the market: the people who find the subject interesting rather than the people who'd pay to have the problem solved. Those two audiences watch different videos, and the analytics report both as views.

The way to tell the difference is to check who the videos are built for, which is something you can test in a few seconds before you hire anybody.

What carrying on without one costs

The cost isn't money, it's years. One founder, describing what would have happened without direction: "I could have fumbled around for the next couple of years and made a hundred videos with barely any results."

The other cost shows up in your sales calls. When a prospect arrives knowing nothing about you, the call becomes a comparison: what can you do for me, these other people charge this much, and it turns into a race to the bottom on price. When they arrive having watched you explain your thinking for an hour, that conversation doesn't happen.

Do you need one yet?

Probably not, if nothing is being published. Your constraint is production, and a strategist with no videos to direct is an expensive consultant.

Probably yes, if videos go out regularly and you can't say which ones brought you business. That's a direction problem, and it compounds every month it goes unanswered.

If what you need is someone to run the weekly upload, schedule and comments, that’s a channel manager’s job, and the two often work together.

If you’re weighing a coach instead, here’s how to tell whether a YouTube coach is worth it before you pay for one.

Hiring in, or hiring out

A YouTube strategist on your payroll in the UK costs somewhere around £52,000 to £72,000 a year before employment costs, and you'd be hiring for a skill you can't yet assess. An external one on a retainer costs a fraction of that with no headcount, which is why most businesses under about thirty people go that way.

What I do is read your channel every month and show you what the last batch returned to the business, video by video. If you want me to tell you what to make next, and why, that's the level above, where I tell you what to do about it. That's YouTube channel management rather than production. You deal with me directly. There's no account manager in between, and there's no shared group call.

Send me your channel and I'll tell you honestly whether I think I can help. If your channel isn't ready for a strategist yet, I'll tell you that instead, and what to fix first.