Product-led marketing is all about letting your product speak for itself. Virtual reality aside, video remains the closest thing we have to experience a product before actually trying it out. But this isn’t bad – video marketing accounts for 82% of internet traffic today.
As the world’s second-largest search engine after Google, YouTube is the ideal platform of choice for SaaS video marketing. This article looks at how you can leverage YouTube in your product marketing strategy to advertise your business, feed your growth funnel, and ultimately increase your customer lifetime value (CLV).
We'll cover:
- Why Use YouTube for Product-led Marketing
- Benefits of Different YouTube Content Types
- YouTube Video Marketing Best Practices
- YouTube Content Ideas for Product-led Companies
- 5 Winning Examples of Product-led YouTube Marketing
- Important Product-led Growth Video Metrics
Why Use YouTube for Product-Led Marketing
Did you know that product videos are the most popular content for B2B companies to create? And if you’re marketing for product-led businesses, YouTube is a particularly useful tool because it touches upon every stage of the buyer’s journey.
In fact, the leading five types of SaaS video marketing for B2B businesses are:
- Product demos
- How-to videos
- Explainer videos
- Webinars
- Training videos
What sets YouTube apart from other video platforms – apart from its sheer volume of users – is the ability to hit all the key steps in a product marketing strategy, from brand awareness, through engagement and acquisition, to onboarding and customer retention.
How?
- Awareness: First off, you can create videos that drive awareness by highlighting how your product solves a prospect's problems, with CTAs in your videos that drive free trials or other product-led models. Then once a user has signed up, you use the same platform with YouTube retargeting ads to convert them into paying customers.
- Engagement: You can provide relevant information that’s similar to a blog but in video format. The type of content can range based on the target audience of your product. Although these are not always product-specific, they can help position your brand as an expert in that area.
- Retention: Finally, informative how-to videos help onboard and retain new customers and keep them engaged to prevent churn. You can add some testimonial videos to post on YouTube and throughout your paid ads to attract more customers and drive referrals.
Now that’s what I call full-circle marketing.
Benefits of Different YouTube Ad Types
A product-led marketing strategy aims to drive awareness, increase trials and conversions, and promote client retention. YouTube has many ad capabilities to help your business grow – and maintain – its customer base every step of the way.
The key stages of your strategy should include:
- Brand awareness
- Free trial, freemium subscriptions, or booked demos
- Onboarding (depending on the Product-led model, this content may come into play before a paid plan is purchased, after, or both)
- Upgrading to a paid plan
- Customer retention
Now, let’s take a look at the benefits of different YouTube content types and their use cases.
1. Build Brand Awareness With YouTube Ads
YouTube offers four types of ad formats that help you boost ad awareness and ad recall for your brand.
You’re going to want to keep a close eye on your paid YouTube campaigns to keep a healthy number of new leads coming in.
Tracking all these metrics – and staying on budget – is made easier with the help of a YouTube dashboard, especially if you’re doing this for multiple campaign types or multiple businesses at the same time.
Once you’ve crossed the awareness stage, it’s time to get them to take action on your website.
2. Get Free Trials & Subscriptions With YouTube Ads
To get viewers to sign up, you’re going to want them to take action. Although you can use all of the ad formats listed above to drive subscriptions, two additional YouTube ad formats are recommended: video action campaigns and discovery ads.
3. Onboarding New Customers
This is probably the stage that differentiates the product-led marketing strategy more than any other growth marketing strategy. SaaS video marketing content helps you automate the onboarding process by creating explainer videos – like how-to’s and tutorials – to demonstrate the value of your product.
This video content helps push users deeper into the product and reach that “Aha!” moment faster – without the help from customer service.
The goal is to get new customers to interact with your product as much as possible to see the value you’re offering–before their trial ends, which makes them more likely to sign up for a paid subscription.
The deeper a user gets into your product, the more likely they will stay. But what happens if they don’t log back in?
To create a frictionless product-led experience, you’ll not only want to keep new customers engaged as they sign up for your platform and draw them back in. That’s where YouTube retargeting comes into play.
You can retarget the appropriate video content to new trial users and direct them to the next steps in your product onboarding. But to do this effectively, you’ll need to track the actions users are taking on your website – like adding their logo and brand colors or adding staff members to their accounts.
Tracking how far a user has gone into the setup process will improve your targeting by allowing you to personalize the YouTube video advertising content, showing them the logical next steps to take and reminding them why they signed up in the first place. Remember that you need a minimum audience size for YouTube retargeting, so the further they get into the process, the smaller that pool will become.
4. Upgrading to a Paid Plan
Converting free trials to a paid plan is closely tied to the previous three steps and is often the biggest hurdle for SaaS businesses to overcome.
Boosting those conversion rates requires a seamless onboarding process, so if you’re getting lots of top-of-funnel leads but seeing a bottleneck in payments, you either have a problem at checkout or your product wasn’t solving the user’s problem.
That’s why it’s important to see how far they’ve gotten to using your product before aborting the trial or never signing up for a paid plan. If there’s a trend where users abort at a certain product onboarding stage, then it’s a sign that something can be broken in your user experience.
YouTube retargeting can help you win back some of these lost leads, as the content you produce can promote lesser-known parts of your product or be used to demonstrate quick wins that benefit the customer.
You can even incentivize them with promotions and use retargeting to get ahead of the canceled trials before losing them to a competitor. A “We’re sorry to see you go – here’s 20% off your first month” or an extended trial offer can help convince a user that’s on the fence or give them more time to try out all the features before making the jump.
5. Customer Retention
It’s a lot harder – and more costly – to find a new customer than to keep a client happy. Companies should dedicate a set amount of their budgetary resources to customer retention and reducing churn.
How?
Creating SaaS video marketing content that educates and inspires is the epitome of social media success – and that doubles for YouTube content consumed by B2B marketing professionals.
Think about how often you have gone out in search of “How to…” for a SaaS product that you use? If you can find that answer and get the result you want, you are much more likely to stick with that software. If you cannot, or if you find a competitor’s video instead, that could lead to a quick decision on which software is better for your needs.
The video above shows just how to achieve the value proposition of saving time using automated client reporting.
Remember – content is king, but video is the Emperor. And in a video Empire, the content you show new customers should be as engaging, relevant, and informative as possible. Creating appropriate video content for each step of the buyer’s journey will help you check all those boxes.
YouTube Video Marketing Best Practices
- Create on-demand videos that offer immediate value to keep them engaged and happy.
- Repurpose the educational videos you create for YouTube marketing for social media, email marketing, and your website’s resources section.
- Don’t bombard your audience with too many messages. If they feel like your company is stalking them, your YouTube marketing strategy may backfire.
- Set appropriate limits on how many times per day or per week your YouTube ad is shown to each user. One great way to do this is to set up a YouTube ad sequence that follows a user along their journey the same way an onboarding email series would.
- Be conscious of your email onboarding email sequences when timing your YouTube retargeting campaigns. You want to enhance the user experience – not bombard customers with too many messages.
YouTube Content Ideas for Product-Led Companies
Let’s take a look at the content you should create at each stage.
These can apply to ads, but you should also create most of your video content for organic purposes. Types of SaaS video marketing content product-led companies can create include:
- Informational/educational videos on topics relevant to your market
- Product demos (overviews & specific features)
- Showcases results achieved using your product
- Getting started guides
- How-to tutorials for complex tasks within the platform
- Expert Q&As
- Announcement and overview of new feature releases
- Testimonials & case studies
YouTube Videos vs. YouTube Shorts
Since YouTube Shorts are quite new, and there is still little competition, you will get greater visibility and more subscribers to your channel.
YouTube Shorts are in the same format as Instagram Stories and TikTok: vertical. They can either be consecutive sets of 15-second videos or one video that’s capped at 60 seconds. If you’d like to get into YouTube Shorts without spending a lot of extra resources, you can repurpose your existing content to fit this video type.
Now that we’ve covered the theory of YouTube video marketing, it’s time to explore real-life examples of YouTube marketing in action.
Every type of video content is relevant to different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Here’s how they might fit into your YouTube marketing plan:
5 Winning Examples of Product-led YouTube Marketing
Let’s explore how some product-led businesses are leveraging YouTube as part of their growth marketing strategy.
Monday.com Using Humor in their Advertising
This ‘work without limits’ ad does an excellent job demonstrating all the things that can be achieved by using their product. With over 2.6 million views to date, it’s no surprise that it went viral because of its engaging and humorous content that speaks directly to the need for busy professionals looking for a better work-life balance.
Why it’s great:
- Engaging and humorous content
- Speaks to its audience of busy professionals
- Solves a pain point: better work-life balance.
AgencyAnalytics Using Platform Overview Videos for Onboarding and Retargeting
A great way to explain the value of your product without having to read through the website is by creating a platform overview video.
This platform overview video by AgencyAnalytics calls out the customer’s major pain points and reminds them why they signed up in the first place. Their YouTube channel is a combination of informational demo videos for product onboarding, new feature announcements for customer retention, in addition to tips for marketing agencies, and some short clips from Instagram Reels to add some humor and company culture to the mix.
Why it’s great:
- Provides resources and how-to’s
- Addresses major pain points
- Features a variety of video content types for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Canva’s YouTube Channel Promoting Ongoing Learning
Canva uses its YouTube channel to educate users with new how-to videos every week, keeping them engaged with their product and coming back for more.
With nearly 150K subscribers, it’s a strong indicator that they have a solid base of active customers using and maximizing the subscription of their product.
Why it’s great:
- Post new content consistently
- Answers questions their customers are asking
- Provides immediate value.
ProductLed’s Educational YouTube Videos for SaaS Companies
ProductLed is continually educating SaaS companies on everything related to product-led growth. They have a handy playlist section that organizes the material into different categories for easier browsing.
Their YouTube content is purely resourceful and targeted at their intended audience with videos from ‘How to structure your company in a product-led organization,’ to ‘How to write fail-proof product descriptions.’ This content is pure gold for SaaS marketers and companies alike.
Why it’s great:
- Highly targeted content that is invested in the audience’s success.
- Educational videos provide immediate value.
- Showcases advice from industry-leading experts, and is a go-to place for business professionals.
WeWork Builds an Instant Connection With YouTube Videos
WeWork’s YouTube channel is chock-full of real-life examples of professionals using their platform with videos such as ‘All the ways Caroline works’. Like their Refugee Stories, many of their videos feature real stories that create a personal connection or evoke an emotion.
These stories are not only captivating but also show the value directly while highlighting a positive company culture.
Why it’s great:
- Uses the power of storytelling
- Boosts company culture
- Creates shareable material that evokes emotion.
Now that we’ve covered all the creatives, it’s time to get down to the numbers.
What Are the Most Important Product-led Growth Video Metrics?
Keeping track of your analytics will help you adjust your campaigns as needed, and they tend to fall under four categories.
- Channel Metrics
- Reach Metrics
- Audience Metrics
- Engagement Metrics
But how often should you be tracking your YouTube metrics to get a sense of whether you’re succeeding?
At the end of the day, it’s all about seeing which videos are performing the best and what you can do to improve.
Every industry has its own benchmarks for monitoring its data, ranging from:
- Daily monitoring (did we go viral?!).
- Weekly analysis to make small adjustments and monitor A/B tests.
- Monthly analysis to adjust strategy and assess KPIs.
- Quarterly analysis for an overall view of how you’re reaching your growth targets.
There’s no doubt adding another channel to your growth marketing strategy will take time. You can’t expect to get to 150K subscribers overnight, but with the right approach, YouTube marketing will greatly impact every aspect of your customer journey, hit your acquisition goals, and reduce churn.
