YouTube's unmatched reach makes it impossible to ignore. The platform boasts a mind-blowing 2.5 billion users globally. In other words, nearly one-third of the world’s population uses YouTube every month.

Yet shockingly, only 60% of B2B marketers harness YouTube's power to distribute content. Most rely solely on YouTube ads. If you don't already have a YouTube marketing strategy — or if the one you have is struggling — now is a great time to develop one.

The reality is that marketers often aren't the ones who need convincing. Instead, it's company leadership that can be reluctant to invest in yet another marketing channel. You might find it particularly difficult to effectively pitch a digital initiative if the marketing budget is already stretched or the executives in your company take a more traditional approach.

Those challenges aren't a reason to abandon your new vision for B2B video content marketing on YouTube. Instead, let them serve as motivation to craft a pitch that presents your YouTube channel as necessary, not frivolous. As you do, remember that the content you're proposing will tell a story, and your presentation should do the same. If you can paint a picture that's both practical and inspiring, you may be well on your way to establishing or reviving a YouTube channel for your B2B business.

Understanding the Audience

Understanding the executive mindset is the first step to making a strong pitch. You may have big creative ideas, but they won't land unless you couch them in terms that appeal to their priorities.

Before you begin, ask yourself these questions:

When it comes to evaluating new marketing proposals, what are the typical concerns of the senior executives in your company?
What do they need to hear from you to back your ideas?
How might a YouTube channel affect your business's revenue, finances, and reputation?

Your answers will help you anticipate why leadership might be reluctant to sign off on YouTube marketing. That way, you can address the issues head-on.

It's also critical to show how your YouTube strategy fits into the bigger picture and aligns with the company's broader goals. To make those points, make sure you walk in with a thorough understanding of the business's current marketing landscape. That enables you to demonstrate how a YouTube channel will integrate with and enhance existing marketing initiatives.

Ultimately, you have two goals. First, craft an inspiring strategic vision that gets your company's leaders excited about the prospect of what you can achieve with YouTube. Second, back up that creative vision by grounding it in concrete data, including actionable insights and projected investment payoff, along with realistic forecasts.

Developing Your Value Proposition

YouTube unquestionably has value for B2B businesses. According to a 2022 survey, it was the fourth most popular social media platform for B2B content marketers, landing just below Instagram and higher than X (formerly known as Twitter).

However, proving that YouTube is popular won't be enough to gain buy-in from executives.

Making a Strategic Case

To get leadership on board, you need to show how a YouTube channel aligns with and supports the company’s overall strategy and goals.

Start with the company’s most essential building blocks, including its origin story, core values, and brand identity, and show how video content can bring them to life.
Evaluate past marketing successes and campaigns and demonstrate how video and YouTube can enhance what’s already working.
Bring in current business objectives related to growth expansion and explain how original video content positions the brand for the future.
Conduct a competitor analysis to show how video gives your brand an edge.

This context lays the foundation of a vision where video marketing integrates with existing efforts to drive your business forward.

When scoping your YouTube channel proposal, be bold enough to get executives excited about the possibilities, but ground it in reality. When outlining the potential reach and impact, connect every idea back to feasible execution steps. Striking the right balance between ambition and attainability is critical to getting leadership to sign off on your plan.

Making the Business Case

Leadership conviction requires proof. Back your vision with solid projections and performance benchmarks for a winning business case. Demonstrate how optimised video aligns to core KPIs, delivering ROI that outpaces investment as engagement expands reach.

Leave no doubt of YouTube’s potential. For example, 92% of marketers say they get a positive ROI from video content and that video helps increase metrics like dwell time, traffic, lead generation, and sales. YouTube videos also tend to rank highly in Google search results and look to be a key component of the AI search experience, aiding SEO efforts.

At the same time, draw attention to YouTube’s long-term value in areas such as:

Market positioning and brand building
Thought leadership authority
Employee recruitment and retention

Once the potential is clearly quantified, the natural next step is mapping out the vehicle to achieve it - a content roadmap that spotlights your vision for the channel.

Outlining the Content Strategy

The stage is now set to define your creative strategy. Clarifying the content direction and unique positioning will allow executives to fully envision - and maybe even get excited about - success.

Achieving Cut Through

With over 500 hours of video uploaded per minute, YouTube's noise level is deafening. This leaves leadership with a lingering question - how will our content be heard?

Executives need confidence that the time and resources invested will pay off with videos that connect with prospects.

Share plans for taking an innovative approach within your industry. For example, you might have ideas for fresh video formats such as short-form educational bursts, episodic deep dives with influencers, or interactive choice-based stories.

While content originality is key, also communicate rigorous standards geared towards enhancing discoverability and viewer retention. Make sure to communicate a thorough understanding of audience preferences and how the platform works.

For example, you might want to talk about how you will ensure quality standards that produce polished videos that feel reliable. Or how you will implement best practices around tagging, captions, thumbnails, and metadata so content surfaces easily in searches.

Ultimately, the goal is to assure leadership that you’ll create videos that break through the noise while also employing strategic practices that translate to positive results. Give them confidence in both the uniqueness and effectiveness of your planned content.

Content Types and Industry Influence

YouTube videos run the gamut from informative to ridiculous. As such, outline what type of videos you see as being part of your video marketing strategy. For example:

Educational videos
Thought leadership
Customer testimonials
Product demos
Behind-the-scenes videos

Explain why those video types are of benefit to both your customers and meeting your business goals. Thought leadership content, for instance, positions your executives as trusted industry experts, allowing you to both attract viewers and influence trends. Or ‘Behind-the-scenes’ videos offer viewers insider access to your innovation process, nurturing affinity on a more personal level.

Beyond content types, you can also propose any initial ideas you have for any thematic series of recurring segments. This paints a clearer picture of your vision and shows that you have a concrete plan that goes beyond just recording and posting a few clips.

Content Planning and Scheduling

Another point to cover within your content strategy is how often you propose to release content. Explain whether you'll post new videos weekly, bi-weekly, or on some other schedule, and articulate why you've chosen that timing.

Although you don't need to provide a detailed calendar at this stage, discussing issues such as seasonality shows that you're thinking far ahead. You could include preliminary benchmarks to give leadership visibility into how you propose to scale content production. For example, you might want to suggest a target of 50 videos published in the first year, with the release of 1 video weekly. And then break down how you would make that target achievable.

You can also highlight the ways in which YouTube can support existing cornerstone marketing campaigns. As your business adds company conferences, annual campaigns, launches, and flagship pieces of content to the calendar, you can develop videos that correspond with their focus and timing.

Audience Engagement and Interaction

For your YouTube channel to pay off, you'll need viewers to engage. Some of the best ways to accomplish that include:

Integrating interactive elements like polls
Hosting live video sessions such as tutorials, Q&As, or panel discussions
Incorporating feedback from subscribers to your channel

Audience engagement is often a challenge for companies that have yet to build a strong presence, and this might be a stumbling block in getting buy-in. Execs don’t relish the idea of marketing campaigns that solicit participation but result in silence.

Present a plan to build community over time. For example, you might propose a phased approach, starting with standalone content that doesn’t require customers or prospects to participate and shifting toward more interactive elements.

Whatever strategies you choose, tie them directly to your target audiences, what you'll do to exceed their expectations, and how that could influence their purchase decision.

Integration with Other Marketing Initiatives

YouTube is just one aspect of your strategy. Rather than presenting it as another standalone marketing channel, describe how you can create a seamless plan that pulls together all your marketing efforts, such as:

Social media posts
Email marketing campaigns
Paid advertising on search engines
Company events

YouTube content is a great way to enrich these other marketing channels. For example, you might repurpose snippets of longer videos for use on social media or blog posts. This expands your reach through varied formats.

Additionally, having video as part of your mix serves users with different content preferences and learning styles. Some engage more with text, others with visuals; using both allows you to connect with the widest range of prospects possible across channels.

While YouTube will serve as the engine driving your video strategy, explain that you’ll integrate multiple strategies to drive growth. Tell leadership how you can promote your videos through newsletters or seek and respond to comments from viewers on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Measuring Success and KPIs

Securing support for a YouTube channel requires you to demonstrate its value. Be prepared to discuss your approach to setting clear benchmarks, targets, and measurement plans to quantify performance and ROI.

Focus on impact metrics like views and viewership, click-through rates, and audience growth in the first year. Connect these to revenue and timeframes for breaking even on production costs.

Explain how you will track standard KPIs with tools like YouTube Analytics. But set the vision for long term success tracking as well and optimising based on insights gleaned.

Leave leadership confident you have an eye on actively tracking performance and audience response, not merely as vanity metrics but as a means of driving revenue.

Dealing With Objections

When you can foresee what objections leadership will have, it puts you in a much stronger position to address them upfront.

Addressing Resource and Skill Requirements

One point you can't ignore during your presentation is the reality of what a YouTube channel requires in terms of both resources and skills. Executing the strategy you've presented well will take time, technology, and training.

Those essentials might already exist within your company. Many small businesses produce polished YouTube content with a smartphone and some basic computer software.

Showing a clear understanding of the internal resources you can tap into might overcome some objections, but be cautious about volunteering other people’s skills, time, and resources. Rather than assuming they’ll be amenable, speak to any employees or departments before pitching their support to get their approval.

However, if leadership lacks confidence in what you can provide internally, you can also suggest ways to involve outside agencies or partners. Bringing in an external creative talent network provides a level of expertise that you may not have access to otherwise. Ballpark cost estimates for bringing in outside support and compare that to the value you project you could gain.

Risk Management as Strategic Foresight

Leadership may worry about brand integrity, for example if controversial content goes viral unexpectedly. You need to make clear you will safeguard the brand from reputational risk.

Detail the quality control standards and content restrictions you'll put in place. Demonstrate how accessibility guidelines will ensure respectful representation. Share contingency response plans that enable rapidly removing problematic videos.

Highlight that permissions and releases will be required before using employee images or footage. Address data privacy strategies for any customer appearance.

Emphasise the importance of clear sign off procedures and detail multi-tier review workflows prior to publication, such as: Creator → Manager → External Collaborator (e.g. client, influencer) → Legal → Executive

By reassuring that you have considered accountability structures, responsive flexibility, and competency around brand stewardship you should be able to ease any worries in the room.

A Measured Approach to Budget Constraints

One of the biggest questions leadership will have about your video marketing plan is how much it will cost. Including projected costs across different scenarios is proof of your thoroughness and strategic financial planning. On the other hand, you run the risk of overwhelming executives with too much detail too soon.

Take a simplified approach in your initial pitch. To secure buy-in, keep the budget summary simple, transparent, and slightly conservative. Rather than laying out lengthy and detailed projections, focus on presenting these costs:

Estimated yearly cost for a reasonable base case scenario
Expected ROI tied to key metrics like leads and conversions
A high-level overview of areas where costs may vary, depending on production quality and video volume, length, and style

The key to the budget component of your proposal is to keep your opening ask and business case clear, understandable, and actionable. Overloading your audience with complex figures could cause confusion or stall momentum.

Focus first on outlining the vision, addressing concerns, and conveying feasibility. Once leadership gives the go-ahead, you’ll have an opportunity to dive deeper into detailed scenarios and projections. Having multiple cost models to reference can aid decision-making as you fine-tune your launch plans.

Learning from the Best

Another way to demonstrate the value of YouTube marketing is by showing examples or case studies from other B2B companies. Even though your industry or creative approach might be very different, presenting successful YouTube channels proves how effective they can be. To best make your point, find channels that align in some way with your proposal, using these examples as a starting point.

Salesforce

If you want to show leadership what it looks like for a company to establish themselves as thought leaders through YouTube, look no further than Salesforce.

Their YouTube channel emphasises customer success stories and thought leadership to solidify their position as a trustworthy voice in the industry. They also use a combination of short and long videos, which allows you to demonstrate the flexibility of the platform.

IBM

The videos on IBM's channel tend to be short and digestible, making informative points in a matter of minutes or seconds so customers can start using them right away.

They have a sleek modern aesthetic that's consistent with their brand, and they often incorporate entertaining moments to keep viewers engaged. All these components together make a strong argument for YouTube marketing as a part of your overall branding strategy.

Microsoft

One of the most notable things about Microsoft's channel is the diversity of content. It shows every aspect of their brand, including product promos and their relevance to different industries.

A number of Microsoft's videos also take a different approach, delving into their passion for humanitarian work and social issues and exploring how technology can help address them. This channel is an excellent way to show how a company's YouTube channel can reflect its values.

Wrapping Up with a Call to Action

When you reach the end of your pitch, the last thing you want to do is walk away with no resolution. Conclude your presentation by laying out what the long term and short term path forward could entail if leadership decides to move ahead, so they understand what expectations and commitments would be.

That might include laying out specific next steps, such as connecting with freelancers, submitting sample scripts, or shooting a pilot video.

Finally, rather than leaving the conversation open-ended, ask for feedback and offer to address any concerns or questions in greater detail. Doing so makes your proposal impossible to ignore and essential to address in a timely manner.

Making the Case for a YouTube Channel

When done right, a YouTube initiative can significantly contribute to your company's marketing and business goals. The key is to show leadership how fruitful video marketing can be.

At 1827 Marketing, we know that diving into a new marketing strategy can be overwhelming. Book a demo to see how we can support your efforts to build a thriving YouTube channel that benefits your organisation and customers.

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How to Craft a Winning YouTube Marketing Strategy for B2B