Build your Organic Marketing Funnel (or Else)

Back in the day, you could assume you’d grow via PPC, and investors would nod and say “OK, sounds good”

But we’re in a Do Not Track era and Google is killing cookies later this year, so you need to know:

Paid acquisition is no longer acceptable as your only means of customer growth. Organic is now required too.

Investors no longer allow you to rely solely on PPC for growth.

It’ll just be incredibly expensive, and likely unscalable.

You still need PPC, but now Organic is a tool you’re required to pull out of the toolset too.

For the uninitiated, here’s a few examples of Organic marketing:

• SEO-centric Blog on your company website
• LinkedIn audience you regularly post to & engage with
• Email marketing list
• Youtube channel

An organic content funnel is not only absolutely critical to survival, investors now expect you to have [at least] one solid, evergreen source of unpaid traffic.

So today I’m going to tell you about one of mine I developed on YouTube.

Most people don’t know this, but…

I have a YouTube channel with over 104,000 subscribers as of writing this.

On average, most channels take 500+ videos to get to 100K subs.

I did it in ~35 long-form videos and ~60 “recycled” shorts from that content.

An extremely uncommon feat.

I’ve spent tens of thousands, and multiple years learning it from the best.

My channel’s not the biggest and baddest but I’d argue I’m pretty qualified to teach you this stuff…

First: skill & strategy are more important than talent.

Here's the distilled version of how I ended up in the top <0.7% of YouTube, step-by-step so you can do it too:

Step 1: Do your research

Google Trends, TubeBuddy & VidIQ helped me tremendously in this process.

First you need to decide:

• Who are you going to talk to? Go about 2 levels up-funnel from your highest/best customer. Think: BEGINNER!
• What are their biggest problems? Do a bit of searching
• Where do they hang out? Which social platform is your target audience predisposed to hang out on? Some audiences will skew toward Instagram, others are super-active on TikTok
• Who else do they watch? Who are their favorite creators on that platform, and how big are those channels’ followings (an indicator of your ceiling)?

My potential-audience research on Google Trends & VidIQ actually changed the direction of my channel:

I discovered that my initial audience idea was super tiny, and found another one more than 10x the size.

Do the research - if I hadn’t, I might still be struggling to get to 1,000 subscribers.

Step 2: Develop your content strategy

Come back to your audience’s other favorite creators, and look at which videos have made them successful. Videos that:

• Are within the last 3-4 months
• Wildly outperformed the views of the channel’s typical video

That should give you some good initial topics to consider.

I’ll never forget my keyword strategy results… they showed there were 3-5 search terms that wildly outperformed others in the niche. The videos I made on those search terms have - as expected - wildly outperformed. 800K+ views, vs. 20K views on other “non-core” videos

Must be a repeatable template you can make 100+ videos about.

• Choose your Length: X-Y minutes long (my most-successful video was under 5 minutes long. Bigger isn’t always better). You’re training your audience. Consistency here is what I struggled with the most.
• Channel archetype: Education (How-to), Entertainment, Connection. There can be a mix, e.g. 80% Education, 20% Entertainment
• Topical vs. Evergreen: News-type videos are only relevant for a day / week etc. I chose to go Evergreen.
• Publish Schedule: How frequently will you post?

Edutainment worked great for me. Others like @redpoint have done extremely well leaning more into their comedy side (even though VC is a “boring” niche, their TikTok growth is awesome)

Never rip off another creator bar-for-bar, but also…

Never feel bad about taking someone else’s highly-successful topic / concept & making it your own.

Just do it BETTER, and…

Step 3: Offer tons of value

Quality >>>>>>>>> quantity. Isolate for the most important topics, check out what others have done on the subject, and do BETTER.

Better comes in many forms:

• Emotional triggers: one company I’m invested in Eterneva has crushed it on TikTok by nailing this. They have more viral TikTok videos than Nike & Disney combined
• Weird / unexpected stuff
• Superlatives: Biggest, smallest, farthest, tallest, etc.
• How-to: Show you’re a superstar - people will show up if you’re the only place to get the ninja tips. Finish this sentence for every video: “Most other channels won’t tell you this, but…”

Warnings:

1. If you phone it in, you should expect to fail
2. Stick with hardcore business focus, and expect to be disappointed. You HAVE to make it FUN!
3. Podcast: Good if you have a long selling process, but most people suck at this format. If you plan to start a pod, speak with Ryan Helms first

Step 4: Build your list, and convert

I always looked at YT as a business endeavor, so eventually the channel needed to wash its face & be profitable. (took some time, but it did)

I wanted people to buy, so the best way to do that…

Give away a ton of free stuff.

High-value lead magnets worked really well for me.

To date I count roughly 24,000 downloads of my lead magnets. These took me each about 2-3 hours’ work to put together.

Because they were really high-value and centered around the highest-value content, tons of downloads meant tons of engaged viewer emails.

One piece of advice I begrudgingly took from the beginning, and it turned out to be some of the best advice I could have received:

Your social media channels are RENTED SPACE and your account can be taken away from you 1,000 different ways.

Own your email list - they can’t take that away from you.

Summary

Like organic SEO, it takes TIME but hard work does pay off.

You’ll just need to let the ROI take its course.

If you’re doing it, here’s a list of video editors I vetted. The ones in bright green

See you next week!