CRAFTING TAILORED YOUTUBE STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

Thank you, Harshit. Thank you for inviting me over. It’s a pleasure.

Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Ankita. I’m a working mom of two girls, 13 and 4, and both of them require very different parenting.

I have to keep switching my words and my actions from being a mom of a teen to a mom of a preschooler and back. And incidentally, I do the same thing at work. I am the VP of marketing for two sister companies. That’s Touchstorm and VideoAmigo as Harshit mentioned. That Touchstorm is the team founded in 2007, the OG for YouTube.

We are a YouTube-first video marketing agency for large global B2B brands. Some of our clients are, P&G, and Johnson’s huge brands across the globe. And Touchstorm is a B2B fast platform that’s just come out of beta. And we offer very deep YouTube insights and analytics to people who want to grow on YouTube.

And yeah, my role as head of marketing involves switching hats between, these very different services, the people who consume them, and the personas are different. The messaging is different. So yeah, I’ve become a semi-expert in this hat-switching business now.

We have your solution. Absolutely.

Like I was saying, we are more brand-focused and YouTube is. YouTube is something that people have not just woken up to recently, right? 2007, when we were that time. And we were the people who took a bet on YouTube even before the days of broadband. So, we do have that legacy expertise with us.

As a B2B agency, Touchstorm has worked with Procter & Gamble, Johnson’s, and Toyota. And at VideoAmigo, we use big data to produce very deep insights that help our clients. And it’s not just on YouTube, but their overall marketing. It’s deep, its niche, and it comes as a premium, working with those big brands is really what makes sense for us. And having said that creators are such a big part of the ecosystem. On VideoAmigo, we’ve created a set of tools, especially for creators that equip them with data and insights to make better decisions to grow their channel.

At Touchstorm, we are a little more selective at whom we work with because of our expertise and data and what sets us apart from the competition, has to be our data, hands down. VideoAmigo tracks more than 26 million channels and more than 2 billion videos daily, every single day.

And it’s not just the YouTube data, we append this data, and we add information like topics, sentiments, commerce-related information, what are video types, what are genres, and so much more. So, this data gives us the capability to do competition tracking, to create industry benchmarks. You can go deep, even within your micro niche is a topic taxonomy.

It has multiple layers and we go nine levels deep to identify what is the topic for a channel. What is the topic of a video? And I think that gives us, unparalleled meaning. And I would go out and say that we are the only company in the world right now that has this kind of capability. We’ve collected and enhanced this data using machine learning for the last seven years. That’s our differentiator in the market.

Since we are more brand-focused, I would like to start from a brand perspective. When we start working with a brand, whether they’re new to YouTube or whether they are, they already have a YouTube presence, whether they are a medium-sized business looking to grow a large enterprise, we start with the same thing. We start with what are their business goals, what are their marketing goals, and what are their goals on YouTube.

That’s the starting point. I want every video of mine to go viral. That’s not a goal at all, right? I’m sure you’ll agree. My goal, I don’t even mean subscribers and views because if somebody says that I want to grow my channel by 100k subscribers in the next three months, it might seem like a smart goal.

It’s specific, it’s measurable, it’s achievable with the right resources put behind it. It’s relevant to YouTube, time-bound, so you might say, okay, that’s a good goal. But that’s not a goal. That’s a KPI. It’s a Key Performance Indicator. It’s a metric and metrics should not become targets. This is not something we say.

This is something that’s said by Bernard Marr, who’s the author of 21 bestselling books on business and technology. The focus at Touchstorm, we live by this. We understand our client’s goals. We understand the reason that YouTube is important for them. Why is it a focus? Why is it part of their channel mix?

And then, at Touchstorm, we tailor our services accordingly. I’ll give you a couple of examples. So, one of our clients wanted to use YouTube to reduce the number of calls that their support center gets. The call volume was very high. They weren’t able to handle that and adding more capability to the contact center is an expensive business.

So, they wanted to use YouTube videos to help people get that support without having an agent on the call with them. And that’s what they reached out to for another client of ours who wanted YouTube to do a product demo. Now, they make specialized equipment for surgeons. And is huge surgery equipment, which is very difficult to take place and give the product demo to surgeons, who are also extremely busy people.

So, using YouTube, we were able to simulate a surgical environment and show, how their product really and build a community on YouTube for the people who were going to use it. A retail client of ours based in the U. S. wanted their brick-and-mortar grocery stores to become the go-to stores for their localized area, and they wanted YouTube for that.

So, you see, each of these businesses comes to us with a very different need for YouTube. And we can and they look at YouTube for a different reason. We provide them services accordingly. To meet their goal. Whether they have any company, any business, whether they have an established presence on YouTube or not that is just one of the factors to be taken into consideration, it helps us define the KPIs for meeting that specific business goal and for brands that do this in the house as a platform, VideoAmigo provides a range of solutions.

So, we have once they know their goals and they understand what they want to do, and how they want to track, VideoAmigo offers different solutions to them. There is Tuesday TubeStats, which is a weekly report of YouTube insights. For the brand, their category, their competition, which influencers are talking about them this week, which influencers are talking about the competition this week, something that’s very difficult to track manually.

And it’s our leanest solution at $4.99 a year. Every week you get that report in your inbox. You don’t have to log in. You don’t have to go anywhere. You just see and you’re on top of what’s happening in your category. Very valuable insight. And then we have a YouTube listening tool for social listening just on YouTube.

So, what are people, what are influencers saying about you? What are influencers, what are the commenters saying about you? Very important. Analyzing comments is such a huge manual task. Our tool just makes it a snap. And then we have a review marketplace for brands that want to source genuine user-generated content.

It’s not influencer marketing. It’s people talking about their brand organically. And then you take that user-generated content and bring it into your marketing. So, our marketplace enables brands to do that. And finally, we have the brand tool suite, which is a collection of reports and insights for brands that want to get deep into the data.

One of the examples of what we offer here is a YouTube share of voice. As a marketer, you understand the share of voice is very important to marketers and brand managers. And if you do your focus, you want to know how you’re doing on YouTube. I don’t think there are a lot of tools out there that give you the YouTube share of voice, but video does.

And you can track your share of voice against a predefined competitive set. And something like this is a direct input into your paid ads strategy. If you’re doing paid ads, then you can adjust your budget and get more ROI from the campaign. If you’re losing your share of voice, you can increase the ad spend to maintain your lead or get ahead of the competition.

And if you have a large lead. You could consider reducing your marketing ad spend for that duration so that you still have the lead, but your ROI increases from the marketing campaign, right? So actual tools to help marketers make smarter decisions. And creators on YouTube, the serious ones, the ones who are not there just for fun, have goals too.

Some of them want to make money through ads. Some of them want brand collaborations, or some of them want to build up their brand on YouTube so that they get, they help their business. And they need data about their channel. They need insights. They need to know what’s happening in the industry around them.

And VideoAmigo has a creator tool suite that helps them do just that. This is created just for creators. When they’re starting as a creator, they would say that subscribers and views just seem like the most important thing. Those are the things you immediately get to see. And those are the things that people generally obsess over.

But as they grow, they want to know what is working and what’s not, it’s not hitting spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks. That’s not how successful YouTubers grow. So, they need data to understand. And to help that we have this metric called applause rate.

So, here’s a pop quiz for you and your viewers. Tell me which video does better. Video A. It has a hundred thousand views and 20,000 likes and video B, has 67,000 views. And 14, 000 likes.

20, 000 likes. 100, 000 views, 20, 000 likes. And video B with 67, 000 views. So much smaller number of views and 14,000 likes.

Exactly. So, B has done much better because like you said, the engagement is much more the ratio of likes to views is higher. When YouTubers track this, it helps them understand what’s working for their channel, and their audience.

And these are the kind of, this is just one of the examples of what VideoAmigo creator tool suites help creators understand. Oh, and did I mention that the creator tool suite is free, completely free? We don’t charge the creators at all. So, anyone who has a YouTube channel can just go sign up.

And use the tools free for life, one channel. So yeah, I would say that our services and our platform cater to everyone irrespective of the stage of their YouTube journey. They just need to know their goals from YouTube.

Monetization, from a service perspective, we work with a few media houses who want to monetize their content. So, we have to help them with the strategy, but for creators, we don’t have them grow their channel. It’s more organic and monetization as a result of that, when your channel is growing organically and you’re getting big, the monetization, obviously gets, gives you better results, but we don’t work directly with creators a lot.

There are very few creators we’ve been working with in the past. As I said, at Touchstorm, we are a little bit picky about who we work with. The creators that we’ve worked with, are industry leaders and thought leaders who wanted to build their brand and have that captive audience on YouTube. So yeah, those are the kinds of services we provide.

No, we keep a very sharp eye on the industry. I think that’s the only way to stay updated. At Touchstorm, we have very strong account managers channel managers, and YouTube strategists who work together on a day-to-day basis. So, when new features roll out, even partially, YouTube is testing them out and somebody has access to them. YouTube will roll out a feature in India, test it out, and stuff like that.

Then we immediately inform everybody that we have our processes and systems in place. And not only inform them about the feature but also discuss and debate what it means for clients. So, we develop what we call the touchstone point of view. What is the meaning of this feature? How does it help?

Who does it help? Every new feature is not for everybody. So, we identify, okay, which clients will benefit from it? Which clients should be early adopters? And which clients can we wait and watch? And then the insights are shared across the team so that everybody’s aware of what’s happening, this information.

And another thing is we have Houdini. It’s a YouTube channel which is owned by VideoAmigo on YouTube. And it’s our playpen on YouTube. A lot of our experiments and testing out new features happen there. So, we learn by doing and sharing, and that’s how we keep updated with everything that’s happening.

That’s

Absolutely. Brilliant.

Okay, now that’s giving away the secret sauce, Harshit. I’m pretty sure I signed an NDA when I joined the company that we can’t declare this. No, I’m just kidding.

There is no secret sauce. You are in the business. So, you understand that SEO is marketing grunt work. And YouTube SEO is no different. So, on the operational side, we have this constantly evolving playbook of best practices that the team follows and everybody’s made aware of what to do, what not to do, what’s working, what’s worked in the past doesn’t necessarily work now because of the changes in our economy, right?

So, we constantly experiment, we learn from experiments we update our playbook and we have very high-quality standards that we hold the team accountable for. So, there are processes in place to do quality checks, and buddy checks, just to ensure that our results are really what we promised our clients. from an operational perspective.

But there is a strategic aspect to it as well. It’s possible to give a channel, any channel on YouTube, a search edge. And we call it pre-wiring content to win on YouTube. And we can do this because of our data on any category on YouTube, we can use our data. To recommend what topics should the content be created on.

We can identify the keywords to be used in the content. And when you incorporate these organically in the content, is pre-wired to win. For our clients, we top it with our understanding of the platform, our best practices, and our processes. We can produce fantastic results for our clients.

We’ve gotten our clients to rank number one on YouTube and Google organically for months, sometimes years. So, the ROI on this is incomparable when you take this route.

So, our platform is a platform that helps them understand what. How well they’re performing on search and how well they’re ranking, any client of Touchstorm, gets access to VideoAmigo as part of our contract with them.

And the service layer, because of the service layer, our account team, our client-facing team, uses the Video Amico data and reports to produce insights and analytics that the client can consume regularly.

That’s a good question. I think we do monthly tracking, but I’m going to check back with the team and come back to you on this one. All right.

Trends, I say trends change trends come and trends go and also creators and brands, they interpret trends differently.

Rise in short-form videos, YouTube shorts, TikTok, and Instagram reels, a trend could be trending audio that everybody’s using. These days, I think the Delulu one is trending. It’s all over my feed. And it could be a style sometime back. The Wes Anderson style was huge and it was everywhere.

It could be a type of transition even on YouTube. Some years back, if you remember the draw my life story was a huge trend. Every creator worth their salt was doing it. And I feel that creators can adopt these trends a lot faster. When you consider a brand, especially some of our enterprise-level clients.

They have processes in place. They have SOPs

in place. they have longer production times. And approvals need to be taken at every step of the way. So, the lead time for them is a lot higher as compared to creators. And the kind of trends I talked about, these short-lived trends sometimes would just phase out by the time a trendy video hits.

So, we don’t recommend a lot of these kinds of trends to our clients. Our recommendations are more focused on what are people searching for What are people looking for on YouTube? And we do, we can do this because of the data that we have on video. We are able to identify content gaps in the category.

We can identify the conversations that have started in the industry, the conversations that are picking steam, and the conversations that brands should be leading. Personal finance is a huge segment on YouTube. There are a lot of people talking about personal finance, a lot of people giving information, and, And I don’t negatively mean this, but there are a lot of YouTube gurus that share their knowledge and they have a huge following and people get value out of this, right?

So, that’s why they’re following. But if you look at some of the big brands in the personal finance sector, banking sector. They are closely related and very few of them are leading or participating in these conversations. So that’s an opportunity area that we identify and we advise that, take a lead on.

That’ll help you grow on YouTube, that’ll help you engage with the community, and ultimately achieve your business goals. Yeah, and we do, at Touchstorm, we do trend reports for our clients regularly. And for some of them, we do quarterly trend reports. And brands then consider these recommendations when they’re creating your content, which I said, gets pre-wired to win on YouTube.

Yeah. Agreed. And some trends stick. I don’t know when it started, but ASMR is still popular. So, we suggested one of our clients use it and they produce cooking videos.

They are, it’s the same retail brand that I was talking about. They have a chain of grocery stores in us and they want to promote e-commerce. through YouTube. Also, that’s one of their goals. And, the ASMR videos that they, we suggested that they do are some of their most successful in terms of taking traffic to their e-commerce and getting that ROI.

So yeah, some trends work. We have to be very strategic in who we recommend and what we recommend to them.

I’m so glad you asked this question, Harshit. At Touchstorm, we are a globally remote company and our employees are spread over 22 companies across the globe. We have native speakers and the capability to speak 28 different languages. So, for clients, we can manage 28 different languages.

And, we have this global expertise and best practices that are shared amongst everyone on our presence across these five continents. And that just makes it possible to bring the regional nuances into play. We are a boutique company, so the team is clean, it’s easier to, talk to everybody because we engage with everybody.

And like you rightly said, local people can understand the nuance of culture and language, and they’re a lot more sensitive to what is happening around them. Yeah. We encourage this. sharing of this information across the company so that everybody learns and grows and is sensitive. And at the end of the day, YouTube is all about being authentic.

And this local talent helps with the global reach. So that’s how we do it.

I would say research. Have your goals defined. That’s the most important thing. Why are you going to spend your money and effort on this platform? And what do you hope to achieve? What’s your outcome expected? And I’ve talked about goals earlier on, so they need to be very clear about that.

And then do as much research as possible. Get as much data around your category, and your competition, and you make informed decisions about where you put your money and effort into. You just mentioned TikTok. And there are conversations in the marketing circles around, TikTok is the best platform right now.

Brands need to be on TikTok. And if you’re not on TikTok, you’re missing out. And I have nothing against TikTok. Not that I’m saying it doesn’t work. Where is the data to support that? So, at that storm, we were looking at, we were into these similar conversations with our clients. They were saying, why focus on YouTube when I can put the same resources into TikTok?

And we said, okay, let’s find data that supports, that makes, helps us make an informed decision. Whether we go on YouTube, whether we go on TikTok let’s decide why we need to do that. And. Have data to back up that decision. So, if you look for research that showed, which platform is bigger in just in terms of the global audience sizes, and there wasn’t any published research when we went looking for it this summer, and so we did the research, we got deep into the numbers.

We dug into the numbers and the published stats around app usage and original research, and you know what we found out globally. YouTube’s audience size is 1. 4 times that of TikTok. Yeah, I’m sure. And in the US, it’s just about 2x. And that compared with the fact that how TikTok comes to view versus how YouTube comes to view.

One second versus 30 seconds. Yeah. The kind of engagement that you get on community building opportunities and YouTube versus TikTok. They are completely different. These are the factors and nuances that we take into consideration when we advise our clients which video marketing platform, they should put their might behind.

Because at the end of the day, everybody has a limited marketing budget and limited resources, and you want to get the most ROI out of it. That’s how we help. And these are important marketing decisions. So, it’s just research and data that will help brands that are getting started or creators that are getting started on YouTube.

What’s going on in your category? What’s your competition doing in what industry, and then informed decisions about what you wanna do, how you wanna grow, and how you want to achieve your business goals?

cheat codes? There is absolutely no silver bullet, I would say in marketing.

Yeah. You can. Search for hacks and you will find the Internet flooded with hacks. But at the end of the day, it is to the grunt work, the research, the finding all the data from reliable sources and making sense of that data, learning to read the data, learning to understand what it’s saying, interpret it, and then make decisions. So sorry guys. There are no hacks. There is no cheap code.

That’s a layered question, Harshit. And like I was saying earlier, the goal is very important. The metrics that you pay attention to are derived from your goal. If a brand or even a creator is looking to build a community, then their engagement, growth rate, and applause rate become important.

We talked about applause rate, earlier on, and it shows them how engaged their community is. And if you’re looking to establish yourself as a world-leading authority on a topic, it could be anything. I don’t know, vintage watches, for example. Then your views become important. Also, the kind of content videos you put out become, if you’re putting short, entertaining YouTube videos TikTok, Instagram reels, then views are very important.

But if you’re putting out long-form videos, say 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, very informative videos. And you’re getting a lot of views because 30 seconds is what a view is counted at. And you might look at those and say, oh, this is great. I’m getting lots of views. And for videos like these, the watch time is at 30 seconds.

And if 99 percent of your audience is dropping off at the one-minute mark, but they aren’t getting the value that your content is going to provide. So, the metrics that people need to track on YouTube differ from brand to brand, from creator to creator, and what they want to do on YouTube, what their goals are, and what they’re looking to accomplish.

Absolutely. Creators are such a huge part of the ecosystem. So how can we ignore them? So, there are two ways we enable collaboration. The first one is the review marketplace. So, this is a platform for brands to source user-generated content.

Creators can sign up for free on the platform and they add their channel. Then our platform identifies the review video. And when a brand is searching for authentic reviews, these Recommendations come up. So, the brand can use this user-generated content by compensating the creator and getting usage rights for the content.

And we manage the entire transaction. The brands don’t have to do anything. We can source the content directly to us. As an add-on, we also allow brands to find several videos. We create a montage and edit it, just package it nicely for the brand. So, they don’t have to do anything, not even post-productive.

They can just take the content and use it in their marketing. Another way that we help the collaboration is we doing influencer marketing campaigns for our clients. But we do it a little bit differently than the norm. Influencer marketing as an industry today is unregulated.

And the influencer marketing agencies and the PR agencies have influencers that are impaneled with them. Sometimes they have their favorites, and they keep pushing the same recommendations to different clients. From a brand’s perspective, I think they get garden fenced in a scenario like that, right?

You have to pick from that list. And very often the data points that accompany these recommendations are their current followers, their current subscribers. Yeah. What is the growth rate of the influencers? Are they on the rise? Are they on a decline? What is their engagement rate? Are the reported numbers inflated using bots?

We know that’s a trend in the industry, right? So for a brand, it’s not possible to just go and do this due diligence on every single influencer. That data needs to accompany the recommendation. And we’re able to do that because of our data capability. We look through the millions of channels on YouTube.

We analyze their growth pattern for creators. And we can predict influencers, even within micro niches that are growing and will continue to be on the growth path. That’s how we recommend influencers to the client.

Absolutely Yes. So, our tools can predict growth. Okay. And we suggest to the brands that, this is a, What the report is showing that this person is on the rise. And it’ll likely continue. So a brand collaborating with such an influencer will get more ROI for their marketing, right? As the influencer grows and sometimes the influencer goes wider, the brand gets even more ROI and that’s happened to us in the past for one of our clients. We collaborated with an influencer who was a rising star. And, she won a YouTube award and a lot of her content suddenly went viral, and then the brand the collaborated content gave phenomenal results.

That’s the beauty of data. It allows you to do this.

strategies?

Yeah. At Touchstorm, advertising and monetization are more about managing our clients’ paid media budgets and doing their paid media campaigns than the other way around. But we do work with clients who are media industry clients, and they want to monetize their content. Our experience working with them is that if you wish to monetize, then the most important thing is my quality content, I don’t mean fancy production, expensive sets, or lots of post-production effects.

Content that provides value. Even Google all their recent updates has been talking about content providing value. That’s what we’re going to search for. That’s the content that’s going to perform well. I mix the same on YouTube. Whatever your niche, if your content provides value to your target audience, then you’re going to show up in search.

People are going to view your videos. You’re going to engage with them. And with this growth, that revenue that you’re looking for will come. Yeah. So yeah, be authentic and give value. And watch the dollars flowing.

Is anyone ever ready for a rapid-fire, Harshit? Yeah,

Okay. Is there a hamper to be won at the end of your rapid fire too? Yeah, definitely.

Okay, let’s go ahead. I’m ready.

Be empathetic. And if you don’t know what the other person is going through. It’s only with empathy that you can collaborate and get the best out of your colleagues, peers, team, anything.

Creative geek.

Oh my God, like I’m going to miss university. One thing that I could change about the world would, again, be empathy. As people, we are not, we look inwards a lot, and we know what we are going through, but we don’t take time to understand what the other person a result, we tend to be judgmental without even meaning to, sometimes.

So just being conscious about it, being empathetic, being kind to others, I think it will go a long way towards making the world a better place. Yeah.

I am spiritual but not ritualistic.

My last Google search? Yeah. Okay. Let me go and see the history.

My last Google search was checking out a brand that recently contacted us via a website. They want us to get in touch for our services. So, I was reading about them and what they do. It’s a family-owned business, a 50-year-old family-owned business based out of the U. S. And they want to expand. They are at the, they are poised for big growth.

So, I was reading all about them. That’s my last Google search. Very boring, isn’t it? But that’s what marketers do. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Harshit. I enjoyed our conversation.