How to Use YouTube as Part of Your Owned Media Strategy

By: Todd Clouser

"Hey, I just watched Easy Mode and I've been following your content for a while now. Quick Question though. Why not just use YouTube?"

I got this DM last week and it's a really good question.

First, if you want to test out YouTube, you 100% should. I spent the first 10 years of my career building a YouTube channel and had a ton of success doing it.

But YouTube alone is not owned media.

Owned media doesn't mean owning the assets on someone else's platform. It means owning the first party data, just like those platforms do, so you can determine if content is successful.

For example, if your video has 500 views on YouTube, that's not very good by YouTube standards.  But if you're marketing to Directors of Demand Gen at mid-market SaaS companies and you can show that 92% of those 500 views fit that criteria, that's a different story.

That's why a podcast on Spotify or a video on YouTube are not examples of owned media. Those platforms own that data, not you.

However, we can (and should) use those platforms to build our owned audience.

So the real question is, "How do I use YouTube as a distribution channel to build an owned audience?"

Here is a very easy, tactical answer to that question:

It starts with batching your video production.

Batching is a really good way to create content efficiently and cost-effectively. So as we're all in our "Do More with Less" era, start there.

*Side Note: When creating for YouTube, production quality matters. Zoom webinars and podcasts aren't going to cut it in most cases. This is another reason why batch recording works so well. You can rent out an AirBnB for a day or two, find a local production team (or bring your own) and knock out 20+ episodes for a few thousand bucks.

Once you record the content, the distribution is key to making this work.

Throwing all the content on YouTube immediately works hard against you. You need to drip the content out with enough time for the algorithm to test each video with the audience. 

I did a LOT of testing with cadence over my 10 years and found the sweet spot was two videos per week. In my experience any more than that and there was diminishing returns on views. But for this use case, one video per week is a good starting point.

But the beauty of owning your audience is an algorithm isn't going to impact your reach.

So if you recorded 20 episodes over two days, you put them ALL on your owned network the same day you release the first episode on YouTube. And your CTA at the end of your video is, "to watch the full season visit [OWNED NETWORK (link in description)]."

The full season of your show is available on your owned network, but in order to access episodes 2-20, they will need to provide their email.

The following week when you release episode two on YouTube, the audience will only need to require their email for episodes 3-20 on your network. 

You do this for the following 20 weeks and around week 16-17 you record season two and follow the same procedure.

This allows you to take advantage of the discoverability of YouTube and other channels, while still providing your audience a place to consume everything. It also arms you with the knowledge of who is consuming your content so you can get approval to keep going.

This is the B2B equivalent to full time YouTubers using Patreon as a secondary source of income by charging their fans for early access and giveaways. The only difference is we're not looking for $5/month to get early access, we want information.

In my experience if one person asks a question, there's a bunch more that were thinking the same thing. So hopefully that was helpful to some of you.

If you have more questions about turning your rented audience into an owned one or the benefits of doing so, reply to this email or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

- Todd