Jeremy Weisz 12:49
So other favorite channels, so Harry Mack, MrBeast, and I just want to point out one of my favorite one videos from him, Marlon was he freestyles for IceCube and Seth Rogen. I don’t know if you’ve seen that one, that one is fantastic. So people can check that out. But, you know, just search on YouTube, probably Harry Mack and Ice Cube, and it’ll show up. What’s, what’s another favorite YouTube?
Marlon Doll 13:11
Yeah, so, I mean, here’s my home page. So you’re gonna kind of see deep this is a very personal thing, being able to see what someone’s YouTube homepage is. But I’d say Coffeezilla is a great one. This guy reviews scams for it. So whether these are business scams or scams via influencers, he has a great format for it, and he does deep research. And so every video you know is going to be really valuable and insightful, and it’s edutainment. And edutainment, I think, is another way that brands can really crush instead of just providing education or entertainment, combining those and making edutaining content that is both valuable to watch but also interesting to watch. It’s engaging, it’s entertaining.
Jeremy Weisz 14:01
It definitely is, I’ve seen his videos as well, very entertaining, it’s just funny the way he does it. But he’ll talk about a lot of gurus, and like some of the ones that he doesn’t love or that he’s found through his research, people are not getting the value that is promised?
Marlon Doll 14:21
Yeah, totally. I can share one that we work on Eckhart. So we’ve been working with Eckhart for over four years now, I think longer, and we went through a variety of different tests. I have a couple of his books. Yeah, no. Nice Power Vow and New Earth. So we split test every thumbnail. And so we’re constantly testing things to see what’s working. And the channels continue to grow like we’ve I think when we started, we’re like 500,000 now we’re like four, 4x that for it, but you can see the thumbnails like are featuring, like a general theme, and we have brand guidelines that we have to adhere to, but yeah, this channel, I think the thumbnails are both inspirational and do a good job of inspiring that curiosity to click for it.
Jeremy Weisz 15:19
Can you break down a little bit about and you don’t have to say specifically, but like one split test that you learn from, because obviously you’re creating the thumbnails you think they’re all going to work right? And this is the same thing with copywriters direct response marketers like even some of the best in the world that I’ve seen will come up with ideas, and one will fall flat, even though there’s genius at what they do. What was like the thumbnail split test that you remember learning from that you were maybe shocked from the results. I can’t believe this one outdid this one.
Marlon Doll 15:57
Yeah, I’d have to pull one up. I don’t do all of the split tests. Usually that is someone from my team. So you’d have to bear with me as I pull something up for it.
Jeremy Weisz 16:10
Yeah, I’m curious. I mean, I won’t put you on the spot if you don’t have it handy, but I’d be just curious to see or hear from you what split test, what worked and what didn’t work in a specific example?
Marlon Doll 16:27
Yeah, so we found that. So there’s a variety of things that we test when we’re testing, and so you have base things like facial expressions, the words that are actually on a thumbnail. And when you’re testing out split test, what you don’t want to do is test so many different things, like you might just test one element. There is a Mr. Beast test that was released where he had his wide expression, where he’d either have a shocked face, whereas, like, and then he had split tests that all of those videos that had that shocked face with a smile, and they actually found the smile outperformed all the shocked face one by good enough margin where they started.
Jeremy Weisz 17:12
I’m surprised at that too, because the shocked face probably sticks out more.
Marlon Doll 17:17
Yeah, totally. I think that it was overdone. And so having that smile was a bit more authentic and refreshing that something I hadn’t seen from his channel before, or at least in a long time.
Jeremy Weisz 17:33
You look at expression, you’ll look at the words, images, anything else of what you are looking to put on there to test?
Marlon Doll 17:41
Yeah. So it can even be other things within the words, so positive and verse negative sentiment, even small things like capitalization can make a difference testing a longer series of words versus a shorter series of words, even if they’re saying basically the same thing for it, having like indicator arrows, like red arrows, or big circles where it’s highlighting something specific in the video. So those all play a difference in that colors and contrast play a role, but mostly it is the things that make the biggest difference is on the symbolism of the video, what is being described visually for that thumbnail.
Jeremy Weisz 18:28
Marlon, can you pull up the Eckhart Tolle YouTube for a second? I want to just take a look at because I know you talk about the header being really important as well, and so I love for you to talk about some of the elements that make that people should consider for the header of their channel, in terms of the banner, yeah, the banner, yeah, yeah.
Marlon Doll 18:32
Yeah, the banner is one of the first things that people see when they come onto a channel, and so it doesn’t need to be too complicated for it. It actually doesn’t play a super big role in whether people decide to subscribe, but it plays some role. So it’s worth having. But basically you want to ideally make it so that people can see what your value proposition is right from when they land on the channel in having either a good picture or your brand logo in there. And previously, you could have called actions, but they don’t work as well now that the sign up links have moved positions, but main thing is that you’re communicating a value proposition.
Jeremy Weisz 19:44
That’s I was going to ask next is what you’ve seen best practices from like a call to action perspective in videos.
Marlon Doll 19:53
Yeah, so call to actions. When you do them at the end, you’re going to miss a large portion of your audience, still important to do, because that audience is most likely to go on to watch another video. But unless the video has a specific goal of getting someone to your website to sign up for a specific lead magnet that you’re referencing in the video, what is most ideal is to get people to go to another video, because YouTube really values people staying on the platform. And when they see people doing that, they’re more likely to give your videos more impressions, because they see, okay, this is creating more session watch time.
So there’s video watch time, and then there’s session watch time. And so if you can get people to create a great viewing path going from one video to another, whether that is through the end screen buttons and a verbal call to action, or through a playlist that can also be an end screen, those are going to start creating that path, and then you’re more likely to have those videos showing up in the suggested feed for videos that people can click next for it, and you’re creating a path for people to go through your channel and Ideally binge through multiple videos and spend more time with your brand, or whether it’s to generate more ad revenue. So I would say that that would be the priority. Rather than getting people immediately off YouTube, is getting people to watch more.
Jeremy Weisz 21:13
Yeah, so creating that path, and one of the ways, is you said creating, like, an end screen, like, so when you’re creating a video for someone, you may create, like, an end screen for them to click to something that’s related, or something they have found after they view this video, this would be a good video, and also a playlist as well.
Marlon Doll 21:32
Yeah, you can do one or the other for it, but ideally at the end of the video, it’s accessible, and you can have something in the description too, like a relevant playlist.
Jeremy Weisz 21:42
Love it. So I know there’s a lot of stuff people can do from an organic perspective, but I know that you also specialize in paid right to put supercharge on things. So talk about some of the paid stuff, because I know there’s various ways of what people can do with paid on YouTube.
Marlon Doll 22:05
Yeah. So for YouTube advertising, where it works best is when you are building an audience organically, and then you’re able to remarket to those audience with ads. That’s like the low hanging fruit of YouTube ads, where you’re going to have the highest return in ad spend because people have already had a touch point. It’s not the first, that works amazingly well. Now, YouTube ads can be the first touch points, but you have to have an amazing video that is almost like a hero video, or via VSL, a video sales letter that really compels people to watch a three minute video.
So Bumper ads like short videos, those are good for the Coca Colas of the world that want to have a quick, succinct message to keep you top of mind. But for someone that is trying to sell a product, you need to be able to hook that audience with the creative to be able to speak to some of the pain points that your target customer might be feeling that they resonate with because if they’re about to click to watch another video, you have to really compel them to keep on and so whether that is providing value or speaking to their pain points and then introducing your solutions that you’ve come across, or what your product does that helps to address these problems.
How these solutions, whether it’s through product or service, solve some of these problems, and then being able to introduce some credibility for it. So being able to show testimonials, reviews, awards, all of that plays into whether someone’s going to trust you for it. And that’s essential for being able to actually create a sale. And then you can have an initial call to action, get people to go to your landing page that is also in alignment with your creative so it’s not a complete disconnect from what they just saw in the video, it has to be a relevant landing page. And then you can continue to have additional problems and solutions, because once you have someone’s attention, if the video is not longer than three minutes, you don’t pay any more in CPMs.
You do pay more if a video is longer than three minutes. So you may as well continue to speak to some of those value propositions and pain points and credibility pieces for it. So I talk about the creative because it is a fundamental part of YouTube ads to be successful. So there is the creative, and there’s a variety of different ad formats that we’ve been able to be successful with. But then in terms of targeting, so you get quite a bit of options for targeting, because YouTube ads are run through the Google ads platform, and so you can target people based on specific keywords that people are typing in. You can target people based on the types of websites that a viewer might be going to. You can target people based on specific interests for used to be able to target specific YouTube channels and specific YouTube videos, but you can’t really do that anymore.
There’s some workarounds for it, but placements are no longer an option. But aside from the targeting, then you have two main ad formats. There are Bumper ads, as I mentioned, but two main ad formats that we see successful for generating a direct response, whether that’s leads or sales, is you have In-stream ads, which are the videos that play before a video that you’re someone’s about to watch. And you have in-feed ads, and those are the ads that show up at the top of suggested videos on the right hand side or at the top of YouTube search. But for those ones, someone actually has to click the video to watch it, and then it will take someone to the video, and they’re viewing it as if they are viewing an organic video, where, when you have an in-stream ad, they’re viewing it as an ad and it has a link. So each one has different benefits and downsides.
And so we test out both and we see different performance for different types of businesses and different creative for it. But generally those fall under responsive campaigns. If you want to have both of those, both of those types inside of an ad campaign. This is more of a display ad within this. So this is in feed because this, yeah, but it’s not in feed video ad, so it’s more of a display so in this case, there isn’t an ad that is being targeted for that, at least not at the top. There might be more, but usually, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 26:41
What are you mentioning? There’s advantages and disadvantages of each and the in feed is kind of the top of the search. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Or compare when would you use an in feed versus when you would use an in stream as an example?
Marlon Doll 27:00
Yeah, so I would test out both for it, but in stream is more likely to generate conversions at a more profitable rate. So, and it’s not a huge margin. We’ve seen in feed work just as well, but in some situations, but in stream you get a clickable link for it, but you don’t have all the comments from the video and things that you would see organically, as you do in an in feed ad for it when someone clicks on to the video, but you also lose some of that ability to have that call to action link, so, but there are some workarounds for that too.
Jeremy Weisz 27:47
I want to talk about GitHub for a second and some of the stuff you did with them. And I’m also going to pull them up. They have some videos here, and yeah, they have quite a bit of over 300 at this point in time, 380,000 subscribers, which is pretty amazing. And some of these videos have gotten millions of views, like this one, what are some of the things you do with a company like GitHub?
Marlon Doll 28:13
Yeah. So GitHub is obviously a large enterprise brand, so while Eckhart has a great business around and team and team that supports all of this, GitHub is a large enterprise with multiple stakeholders, multiple people that are creating videos for the channel, and so it’s quite a different approach here in this case. So for the channel, we’ve been working with them for now over a year. It just crossed a year mark. And so when you think about the viewership, so, yeah, well, some videos have a million, but some videos have 10,000 or 12,000 there for the one, nine days ago.
Now, the value of a business having a view is a lot more than a gaming channel. So while business channels typically don’t have as much viewership as entertainment channels, the person on the other side watching that is worth a lot more to a brand, because each of those are potential customers or users. So you can imagine, if you have a business that has 115,000 people watching a video, all of those are potential users or customers. And so whether that…
Jeremy Weisz 29:33
You don’t need a lot of traffic for it to make sense. You have people watching it.
Marlon Doll 29:38
Exactly. So we handle all of GitHub optimizations and the split testing, and we have a couple campaigns that we’re really proud of. One is their universe conference. So they run an annual conference, and this has a series of different videos, and so our team was managing on the fly as they were finished filming, we’d have a Quick Edit and then upload those videos with thumbnail and get those out. And the difference from GitHub universe 2022, to 2023 is substantial. We had a massive increase in viewership. Even though there was less videos, we had a huge increase in viewership on the videos from the previous one.
And a big part of that, obviously, is the content, but also the thumbnails. We had specific colors and themes for different series of the videos, and also, obviously the optimization and playlist thing that plays a role for it. So those are some of the things that have played a role. We also identify what videos could make great shorts and cut out clips that would be compelling for it. So get GitHub definitely is an inspiring one. They also have some, some amazing, some amazing series for it. So definitely for brands looking for inspiration, GitHub’s a great one.
Jeremy Weisz 31:11
Marlon, I was watching some of your videos. The one that stuck out to me. Where is it? Oh, this one, for common reasons, brands fail on YouTube, right? I like Costco as a brand, so I watched this one. So I want to pull up Costco and have you share a couple things that you see, because I was actually kind of surprised by, Costco is huge, obviously, and your people shouldn’t compare themselves on social media, but I’m gonna compare you to Costco for a second. Your bachelor food channel has more subscribers than Costco does. So what are some of the things that Costco can do to improve?
Marlon Doll 31:57
Yeah, so even when you type in Costco, so Costco has a great presence on YouTube, but it’s not through their own channel, so it’s other people doing hauls, of them going to Costco and purchasing goods. So it’s actually not easy to find the Costco channel, and this video is actually the most successful video on the channel. And if they just did more videos like this. Obviously, there’s a novelty factor of a 93 inch bear, but it actually has a bit of a story, and it’s actually a compelling video where, if you go to the video section, a lot of the videos are just boring.
They either don’t have any dialog, or they’re old, like the tasty style videos of overhead, videos of food going being cooked, but like the viewership and the thumbnails there, it just it leaves room for desire with it, where they could be creating really novel videos, and almost like many, many infomercials about some of The cool products that are at Costco, but just this, this isn’t doing it. Also, a lot of it is really short form. And YouTube kind of prioritizes on longer form content because it generates more watch time for it. And so if you’re going to have a video that is less than a minute, it better be really amazing, or have some morality for or be a YouTube short for it. But if you have a long form, like in terms of long form, wide video, and it’s less than a minute, it’s less likely to be a strong performer for it.
Jeremy Weisz 33:36
Yeah. Thanks for that. It is interesting, because I wouldn’t have known that, but by looking at you can see that they’re very short form, and it’s just like kind of a picture of food. So they should probably be split testing the thumbnails, and may make longer term or longer videos.
Marlon Doll 33:55
Yeah, and obviously food content can do well, I’ve had success in food content, but there needs to be, again, like a unique value proposition or a host to make that engaging, unless you’re adding some novelty factors of using really unique ingredients for it. But how it’s currently done is not working if they, if they did certain trends that are happening in food, and add another unique element, then there’s potential for that food content. But this, it’s probably not even worth the production that’s going into it to put this out.
Jeremy Weisz 34:34
Do you see any companies that are successful kind of with cross promoting? I just remember listening to some uh, pot or episode with Mr. Beast being interviewed, and early on, him and his friends would kind of cross promote each other’s channels. Are there any tips there? Because this sticks out here with Kodiak, right? I would think, oh, if I had a brand in Costco, like I would probably promote the heck out of it, right? So are there ways that people can cross promote, team up with another channel and cross mode each other stuff?
Marlon Doll 35:12
Yeah, it’s a good thing to bring up. So collaborations are one of the most effective things that a creator or brand can do, because you are tapping into an entire audience, that ideally, there’s an overlap with your audience, your target audience, and the collaborators target audience. And where it becomes tricky is generally you need to create multiple videos for it. And so you need to find out, okay, well, you have one video idea. What makes the other video idea unique too, because each video can only be going on one channel. And so when creating that video, you have to think, okay, well, what is going to make each of these videos compelling to watch for it, and what is the unique element that each of your channels combined can add a unique value that you couldn’t do on your own to make something even more compelling.
So we often see this with like building channels where they’ll have their they’ll either do it for an influencer and be able to feature that, and leverage that audience. Or for brands, it’s less common with brands. Usually brands are not doing it with other brands, where there are definitely cases of that, but it’s usually with influencers for it and leveraging influencers audiences, because generally, influencers are going to have a wider audience than most brands.
Jeremy Weisz 36:46
So that company would create maybe a specific video with that influencer, and then the influencer would publish it on their channel.
Marlon Doll 36:54
Yeah. So we did it with a few companies, but one is a haircut brand called Briogeo, and we would find influencers that it wasn’t just like a video of the influencer talking about the product, it was actually using the product and creating, like a value based ad, like a how to for it, that, yeah, actually provided value to the audience. And then we could actually post a version of that on the briochio channel, and the creator would have their own version too for it.
Jeremy Weisz 37:26
I’m going to pull it up here, because I remember seeing it on your page here. Here it is, right here. This is what you’re referring to, yeah. And then it kind of leads me to Marlon BBTV, and what you did there, and what you learned while you were at BBTV.
Marlon Doll 37:49
Yeah, so BBTV was not my first role working with YouTube. So before that, I went to film school and I studied entertainment business management, and so learning how to produce in all aspects of the entertainment industry kind of was the foundation for getting started on YouTube. And I had my own channel that was creating funny videos that were designed to sell a product, but through value based content. So like how to speed read, how to lucid dream, and then we would sell a product at the end of that. And so that was my first foray into YouTube and then some music channels. But then I worked at Broadband TV, initially in sales, but then my role became managing some of the channels, and not only from a channel management point, but also from strategy to Content ID, so managing the rights for and providing consultations to really large artists and publishers record labels for Like MrBeast. Sorry, not MrBeast, like Logic and Matt decent record label, World Star hip hop.
So there’s quite a few on the music side for it. And my goal there was become the most knowledgeable person about YouTube. And so I paid for courses. I signed up for a course with Tim Schmoyer. Tim Schmoyer had a video channel called Video Creators, and would teach about YouTube. And so I would just study YouTube and try and become the most knowledgeable person about it. And that led to starting my own YouTube channel, Bachelor on a Budget, to be able to put some of those things into practice beyond what I was doing with my own work. And so that was a big, big step into that. And from there, that led to someone asked me to do a presentation on YouTube and how I grew my channel and what I knew.
And then that led to some consultancy for its and these were businesses, and that very first business that we started working with went from a consultancy to managing their channel. And we actually still work with that channel today, but that was the founding of the agencies, seeing that brands were not doing YouTube well, and there were so many opportunities to apply the things that we’re working for YouTube and YouTube best practices for these brands, because YouTube, we feel, is the most valuable social platform for it.
Jeremy Weisz 40:30
Love it. Marlon, first of all, I have one last question, but thank you for sharing your journey and lessons has been hugely valuable. I want to point people to check out vireovideo.com to learn more and check out more episodes of the podcast. My last question is just mentors. And mentors could be someone you learn from personally, or could be distant mentors, meaning there is a book or a resource that you just have found valuable throughout the years. Who have you considered some of your personal or distant mentors and what you learned?
Marlon Doll 41:11
Yeah, one of those is Chris Gower. He is the founder of Wider Funnel, which is the top CRO agency in the world, so conversion rate optimization. He has since sold that, but I was fortunate to be connected to him, and he was graceful with his time and being able to provide great insights of what it looks like to work in a world class agency. And so that’s inspired me to do more, more mentorship and teaching where I can provide value. But that’s, yeah, he’s one that comes to mind.
Jeremy Weisz 41:51
Do you remember any specific lessons maybe that he imparted on you, or that you just observed from Chris?
Marlon Doll 42:01
Yeah, one thing that he shared is actually how he shared insights. And so he never wanted to give me the answer of, like, if I’d ask a question, it was more getting me to share those learnings or come to those realizations through that mentorship. And so, I think he, it’s called gestalt of being able to share those insights, without being able to be direct and be able to have someone actually figure it out themselves, like this is what I did for it and not saying this is what you should do.
Jeremy Weisz 42:47
Love it. Well, well, I want to be the first one. Thank you for sharing. Everyone, check out vireovideo.com, and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Marlon, thanks so much.
Marlon Doll 42:57
Okay, thank you, Jeremy.
