[00:00:00] Speaker A: So YouTube, it's all about getting the right video in front of the right person at the right time. There's really three main components. There's the hook, educate and call to action. It's a video first strategy. And one thing that going back that I would have loved to have done earlier is documented the journey on video. You need to make sure actually educate and provide real value inside of your ad.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneurs Doc book podcast. I'm your host, Zach Benard. You can find me on social at. It's Zack B. In each episode, I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about the strategies and insights driving extreme business growth.
Today we're joined by Lyric Heck, founder and CEO of AD Outreach, a YouTube ads training and consulting company that helps entrepreneurs leverage the power of YouTube advertising to generate consistent leads and sales. And interestingly enough, he actually started his entrepreneurial journey at just 12 years old when he received his first ipod touch for Christmas and started creating YouTube videos, reviewing apps, which ultimately led him to building app Find, the largest app Review channel on YouTube with over 600,000 subscribers. And now at 28, he runs his company, which has helped thousands of clients generate over $300 million in revenue from YouTube ads and scale his own company to eight figures. That's been on the Inc. 5000 three years in a row, most notably number 60 in 2022. And then he's also the author of Video Authority, the Art and Science of Converting viewers into clients. L. It's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Thanks so much for having me here, Zach. I'm excited.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Me too. Because we've spoken definitely to quite a lot of people in the marketing space. But YouTube is always an interesting one because everyone talks about meta like Facebook ads, but YouTube is is often like that one source that not a lot of people think about, but can actually crush it. I mean, from what I could see from like your experience and background, seems most of your clients are doing pretty well with that.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: But.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: But what I always love to start with the show is if you had to like rebuild like your company from scratch, obviously you've been in space for quite a while. You've been around the block knowing everything that you know, what's like the one thing that you would implement from day one that you feel perhaps a lot of entrepreneurs like completely disregard.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's a video first strategy.
And one thing that going back that I would have loved to have done earlier is documented the journey on video. And I think people want to follow along with that founder growth story, building your business, sharing the successes, sharing the challenges, because people are going to resonate with that, they're going to follow along and all the learning lessons you have along the way, really focusing on video. Like you said, my book's video authority.
That's how you get to showcase your expertise and who you are. So obviously we're gonna talk a lot about YouTube ads and the advertising side of it. But starting over, you know, video and publishing videos, especially with the way these short form platforms work right now it's like free advertising. You put a video out and if you just learn how to craft a hook or have or how to actually tell a story on your video, you're gonna get people watching. And people watching equals future revenue and growth.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people are gonna disregard like the, the video components. I mean you were technically pretty early onto that at 12 years old. I know it wasn't obviously focused on like YouTube advertising and everything like that, but you started pretty early on that and going to like the YouTube advertising side of things. But I'd kind of be curious is, could you like walk us through like how like your company actually works? Like when someone goes to, they want to grow their business with YouTube ads. Maybe they've tried running Facebook ads, they've tried Google Ads, but now they want to go for like YouTube. What's kind of like the process to help them go from like zero tracks, you're generating like consistent like traffic and obviously sales at the end of the day.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Yeah. So YouTube, it's all about getting the right person. We're getting the right video in front of the right person at the right time. That's the key. And one of the challenges that you have on the other platforms, because you talked about how a lot of people are doing meta and different platforms. I'm not saying those don't work. They do work. We know they work. But the thing is they're very different. On meta, people are just kind of mindlessly scrolling and then they click on something. We've all done it, we all face and you click on some. But it's not the same as on YouTube. People have intent. So that's why meta can work really well for impulse purchases. But if you have a higher ticket offer or a service or consulting or coaching or an agency, we have found that YouTube ads are so powerful because they lean into the education in the learner's mindset. People are going to YouTube to learn. You can get in front of them with the right ad. At the right time, captures their attention, gets them to convert. And so we're going to definitely break down the different frameworks, but in terms of the actual ad itself and then we'll talk about targeting in a second. There's really three main components. There's the hook, educate and call to action. The hook draws in your ideal clients. The educate provides genuine value and then the call to action gets them to actually convert. And the big thing that people miss out on and the big mistake people make is not including the educate. You need to make sure that, that you actually educate and provide real value inside of your ad. That is definitely a key.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Interesting. And because I see like so many ads like on YouTube and I'm like scrolling in oftentimes like you'll see like those 45 second ads that are really just hook and then a little bit of context. Call to action. So what you're seeing is take a different approach, perhaps have a longer like ad creative and then have like the educational component within that and.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Exactly. And that's specifically what works best on YouTube. So a lot of people, they're doing the other model that, that works on meta. Now I'm not saying it works as good as YouTube, especially if you have a higher service based business. Here's the thing, having a hook, hey, do you have this problem, okay, go buy my thing. That works well for an impulse purchase. Which is oftentimes a lot of the things I see being really successful in meta are, you know, e commerce products, quick software, sign up, things like that. But when it comes to a higher end service, things in the thousands of dollars, that's what we specialize in. Many of our clients are, you know, selling something mid or high ticket. Right. Whether it's consulting, coaching, services, agency, whatever it happens to be. What we've found is that's not enough to actually convert those types of people because they're actually looking to be educated. So if you get into in front of somebody when they're on YouTube and if you just say, hey, do you have this problem? Do you want to be, you know, featured in more publications and podcasts? Okay, we'll go sign up and you know, become a client versus hey, do you want to be featured in more, you know, podcasts? Did you know that there's a certain strategy in the way that you reach out to people? And, and by, and one thing that we found is when we send an outreach like this, then we get a higher response rate. Who, like wait, what? And by the way, there's probably dozens and dozens More additional tips that I'm going to share in inside of my free training. So just click the link and you could have a video like that. You see how if you did that, that's going to be far better than, hey, do you want to just be on, you know, more podcasts or get more pr?
Okay, go click this versus hey, are you struggling to get on podcasts? Well, here's a few tips. Tip one, tip two, tip three, okay, and by the way, I've got a dozen more tips on my training. Then on the training, you give them more tips and then you're like, and by the way, this is exactly what we help people with. Let's book a call, let's. Let's talk about to see if this is a good fit. And so it leads people down the value education chain.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: And I think it also speaks to, like, the, the quality of the leads that you're getting because you mentioned, like, the intent. Those people are actively educating themselves. And then if you educate them even further, it's less of just like someone doing, like, an impulse purchase, which, like, yeah, I'm seeing that, like, every single day. With, like, meta, when we run ads, we just have, like, random people booking calls. I mean, not booking calls, but they fill out our type form that I'm looking through. I'm like, yeah, they're definitely, like, not qualified whatsoever. But with YouTube, they're, like, much more, like, qualified. So I'm assuming the, like, quality leads coming through. It's probably, like, much higher. Would you say, like, the close rate even, like, increases when you're speaking with people that come from YouTube outs?
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. That is what we see not just with ourselves, but across our clients. And that's why, you know, we've had people who get, you know, banned on, on Facebook. They come over to YouTube, they're almost like, I kind of need to do YouTube now. And that's not everybody, by the way. And then they start running the traffic, even when they get unbanned on Facebook, like, wait a second, YouTube's so much better. I'm going to shift my budget over to YouTube. It's like, it was a blessing in disguise. And then, of course, obviously, we've got plenty of people that are doing well on Facebook and they're like, hey, I want to now amplify on another platform. And what they're always surprised about is it's not just, you know, people think, oh, I'm going to go on this other platform and I'll get results that are either similar or maybe not quite as good, but I'll be diversified. Or if Facebook gets shut down, I'll at least have YouTube. But then they realize, well wait a second, I'm on YouTube and now I'm getting higher quality leads. And now I have these people that are coming in, they're booking calls, they're converting higher. Here's what I will tell you though. This is the caution I'll share, right? There's the three metrics that we look at and the first metric, you don't want to judge it based on that. So in the past when I started, you know, YouTube ads a decade ago, obviously more than that on YouTube channel, but YouTube ads I've been doing for a decade now, early on you used to have the trifecta, you'd have lower cost leads, lower cost booked calls and higher quality calls that convert into clients. What we're seeing right now is that the initial lead cost can be a little bit higher than meta. Just, you know, again especially if you're targeting people based on quality, it's video, you can have a little bit of a higher cpm. So you might see a slightly higher lead cost initially. However, it's made up for on quality and the cost per book call. So typically what we might see is a little bit of a higher cost per lead on the front end. That's just an email, opt in phone number, whatever happens to be. But again higher quality. Then you go to the next metric, cost per call. That's where we see usually either on par or slightly cheaper with YouTube ads. But then when we look at the actual close rates and roas return on ad spend, that's where we see lower cost per acquisition, higher return on ad spend, higher quality on those calls, higher close rates. And so that's typically what we see is that the, the YouTube traffic on the front end might be a little bit more expensive, but again you're paying for quality.
But then on the back end you actually can get on par or lower cost calls that are higher quality converted, a better rate that then turn into more consistent clients. That's what we see on YouTube today.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Yeah, so there's like the pros and cons like Facebook and like YouTube but from what I can tell, YouTube you're probably going to get a higher like cost per call. But these leads on like the backend are going to end up being more qualified and if you look at their oas, it's probably going to be more like worth your time in the end. Obviously it depends like what you're selling. If you're selling an E Comm product, I mean probably go like Facebook as opposed to like YouTube ads. But something I'd be curious about because I see a lot of people like Twitter x like talk about like YouTube content and you have like this facade more like YouTube ads. And then there's like YouTube content. Would you recommend people to somewhat compliment YouTube ads with content as well? Or is like just doing YouTube ads strictly like totally fine? I guess I'd be curious. Do you see if there's. I mean, I'm assuming there's. There's only pros doing it, but if you've seen like an additional value out of doing that.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So you. I highly recommend having both that since you don't need to. So this is a big question people ask is like, do I need to have content to see success with ads? Well, the way that YouTube ads work is typically, you know, especially because the main in stream ads now, there's other ads now that can appear in shorts. They can appear in the feed as you're scrolling or watching other videos or searching. But you know, the traditional ads are the ones that appear in front of videos on YouTube. They're all kind of combined into a format called demand gen. It's getting a little bit technical, but basically you just need to know there's different types of YouTube ads that run in different places. But in general, people aren't clicking back to the channel the same way that they might on Instagram or Facebook with those types of ads, especially if you educate them in the ad. So we've got a lot of clients where they might have only a couple videos on their channel, um, or really just run the ads and maybe they have one video on their channel just so it's not empty. That just kind of educates on, on who they are and those clients still do really well. That said, so it doesn't hurt you to not have content, but it can help you to have content and can amplify. And the way I look at it is it's like a content flywheel. So essentially you have ads that pull people in.
Some of them are going to convert right away, but those that don't, they're going to start consuming your organic content until ready to convert. And then you have people that discover you through your organic content because by posting that you're gonna have people start watching. You can retarget all of those people with ads to get them to convert. And it creates a flywheel which goes faster and faster over time.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: I can imagine that retargeting ads for YouTube must be crazy compared to like maybe like meta like lookalike audiences and everything like that. Like I can just imagine other must crash here. And we were talking about like when people are on YouTube, they're in like someone like learning mode as opp post being on Facebook, just scrolling, watching a few shorts. When it comes to like scripting, like ad copy, like hooks and everything like that, what's a kind of like the framework they take to drive like value first while still like driving conversion. Because I know you mentioned the education component. Like that's very important. But I'd love for you to like break it down in really like some actionable stuff. Like if someone wanted to run YouTube ads, they're like, hey, I want to try this other platform. Facebook is not been doing too well. What's kind of like the framework if you were to like break it down very simply.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll start with the video again and then I'll. Then I'll get into the actual targeting, which I think is also going to be really valuable to understand. And then I've got a resource I'll give people at the end as well that can help them follow along. So basically, when it comes to writing the script, there's a few different ways that you want to hook and pull people in. So there's a pattern interrupt.
So that's where you say something that they're not expecting.
There's a question hook. What if I love what if hooks? Because it gets the brain thinking.
There's hooks that start with a problem. Are you struggling with X, Y and Z? There's all kinds of different hooks. Those are just a few examples. I'll give you an example of our top performing hook and then I'll give you another example or two just so you can really get the idea. And then, by the way, from there you then educate and then call to actions to provide some type of value and a call to action. So one of our top performing hooks is YouTube ads beat Facebook ads. Let's face it, Facebook ad costs are going through the roof. And even when you have great ads, they're almost impossible to scale. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can use YouTube ads, just like the one you're watching right now, to scale your business to seven or even eight figures.
So let's break down what I did there. YouTube ads beat Facebook ads. Pattern interrupt. Because if you haven't thought about it before, especially if you're running Facebook ads, you're like, wait, what I got to pay attention whether you agree or disagree in that moment. Now it's my option or not my option, my chance, I mean to say, to actually get people to agree with me and understand what I'm talking about. So that pulls them in.
Then I talk about two of their biggest pain points.
Facebook ad costs getting more expensive. And even when you have great campaigns, they're harder to scale. Right. A lot of people have had that experience. They try to scale a campaign that's doing well and then it kind of breaks.
Then I talk about, then I have a little bit of proof, you know, or I answer and, or add a solution. I mean to say I'm going to show you how you can use YouTube ads. The proof is just like the one you're watching right now. It's like, oh, I am watching a YouTube ad right now. Interesting.
That's kind of like only for the type of thing that I there. But again that's where somebody else could say, just like I've done for a thousand other businesses or whatever.
And then, and then after that I then give them their desire to help you scale your business to seven or even eight figures.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Which are ideal clients. You know, a lot of them are looking to either get to seven or eight figures. They're either six or seven figure businesses. And we obviously work with eight figure businesses. But in terms of the majority of people that we're advertising to, they're people that already have six or seven figure businesses looking to get to that next level in their business. Again, we do work with eight figure businesses, but this ad is appealing to those, the kind of core, that core audience.
And so that's the hook.
The educate then will dive into a couple of key components. So did you know that with YouTube ads you can actually target people based on intent? And that's where I get back into, let's face it, on Facebook, people are mindlessly scrolling on YouTube. So everything I shared earlier and then I could talk about and as you know, there's a URL affinity audience. You could target people based on going to specific sites or similar sites.
And then I can get people to convert in the call to action and say there's only so much I can talk about in this video, but I want to break down a full training that's going to show you exactly how, how you can implement this strategy. Or I want to give you my 19 page YouTube ad strategy PDF that you can follow step by step to implement this for yourself.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: I love that. And with like targeting, because I know with like Facebook Stuff, obviously you're, you're the YouTube ads guy. I'm obviously not too familiar with the concept, but with like YouTube, can you go like very heavy with like the targeting based on like audience interest and everything like that? I'd love to hear what's kind of the strategy because I know like when we personally run Facebook ads, we're going to have first an ad set, we're going to look at broad and then we're going to have like an interest stock. But I'm not sure how you would, how you guys structure that with YouTube ads.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so YouTube. YouTube actually has the opportunity to get really specific on the targeting. First off, you actually have household income targeting. So we can target, especially for higher ticket offerings or business owners. We're looking to reach B2B target, top 10% or top 20%, household income earners. But then what we can do from there, and of course we have all the standard location, age, gender, all that other stuff. But when it comes to the actual specific targeting, that's where you can use Google's pre built audiences, which is similar to interest audiences on Facebook. So they have in the market for marketing advertising. They have in the market, I believe they have a, you know, they have a PR one and they have all kinds of different things you do like in market audiences, but you can actually build your own. And this is what we recommend, this is what we call the alpha AI targeting strategy.
And this is the secret behind the success of our clients is we build our own custom audiences. So Google actually allows you to go in and target people based on your own custom audience. So I can say, okay, I want to reach people that have or actually for you, let's use you as an example, right? So what you can do is you can target people based on a custom interest. So they could be interested in podcast appearances. Guesting on podcasts, you can literally just type that out. By the way, podcast guesting, you know, you could put in interests based around who they are, right? So entrepreneur, there's all these different things that you could put in there. Interest based targeting, it's custom, you can put any keyword. But let's go a level deeper. We could target people based on search terms they've done on not just YouTube but also Google. Google owning YouTube, it's done in the Google Ads platform. So you can target people with exact terms of how to appear on more podcasts, how to get pr, how to get booked on podcasts. If they search that on YouTube or Google, you can have your YouTube ad pop up the next time they open up YouTube.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Can't you do it for, with like YouTube channels too? Like specific if I'm not mistaken or am I like totally off there?
[00:18:53] Speaker A: So there are ways to do it with specific channels. YouTube has shifted to more keyword based targeting.
Just because a lot of people were doing the individual YouTube channels. That was more content targeting in the past, they shifted over. There's still ways to do it now. What we found is doing an interest and then having the name of the channel as a custom interest or what they're searching for. That's going to be better in the current landscape of how YouTube works. But there is one other thing that you can do. You can do URL affinity audiences. So you can target people that are going to specific sites or competitor sites. So you can actually target people based on going to your competitors, going to other websites, or even just going to tools that you know, you know, people might be using if they're interested. So you know, we're filming this on Riverside. You know that a lot of people who are going to Riverside are probably either, you know, interested, either appearing on podcasts or they might have a podcast and so they might be looking for the services that you have. So you could use Riverside as a URL affinity audience for anybody that's going to that site or similar sites. And it'll just kind of combine the other podcast sites and then you now target those people with your ads.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: I love it. I mean, Google is very powerful too. Like I, I, I knew about the component that YouTube ads were around with like Google Ads because we had like one client that wanted to like promote like similar podcast videos, just like grow like the audience. But that's interesting. So you can, you can still like get in front of like the audience your competitors are looking at. Not competitors, but potential clients. When they're looking at your competitors, you can go like very in like the rabbit hole, like pretty in depth here. I love that. And I guess going back to like the actionable like side of things, if, if you had like someone like hey, lyric, like I want to start like YouTube ads, Facebook is not done like very too well. Is there like certain like things that you would recommend them to do before they switch over to like YouTube ads? Put their entire budget into like YouTube ads. If they've been like Facebook, they've been doing like other channels. Is there like certain things they should know before looking at, starting with YouTube balance?
[00:20:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think the big thing is there's a big opportunity. So I would really encourage People like Ether and we're going to give a resource on how they can kind of get started with this. But the big thing that I would look at is education in the ad. That's a big mistake people make. And then when it comes to targeting, building out custom audiences and setting that up, I also have an AI ad targeting software called keywordsearch.com that does AI ad targeting for YouTube and Google Ads. We'll talk more about some of that stuff later. But, but it also has like a five day free trial and there's not really limits on that. So you know, people can go in obviously if they like the software, they can keep using it. But I would go in and build out an audience and you know, actually, and what it'll do is it'll search and it'll find all of your competitor URLs, it'll find different search terms that people might be searching for on YouTube or Google. And then it has a direct sync to Google Ads feature. So you can actually sync those audiences to Google Ads or you can copy them over. And so essentially you have an opportunity to go and target people based on that to write. And also that Software has a YouTube scriptwriter as well. So basically there's opportunities to make sure that you're following the right process and steps in order to set it up. And then in terms of budgets, what I would recommend, so per campaign I'd Recommend at least $25 a day. We've just found under that it's not necessarily going to have the budget to actually start optimizing and testing itself. And then I usually recommend at least two campaigns because if you just have one campaign, you don't know if it's the best or the worst. So you always want to be split testing. So you want to have one campaign versus another. If this one's doing really well, this one's not. Okay, let's cut that one. Let's do another test. Okay, now this one's the better one. Let's cut that one. And then it kind of is like a ladder. You can climb it up and get better and better.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's interesting because I know with like you not YouTube, Facebook, there's like the engine meta update, which I'm sure you've probably heard of, where you need like so many different like creatives, like you cannot just have different hook and then put like the same actual creative within like your ads, which requires more effort people to invest more time in creating actual like quality content. With like YouTube, is it like something Similar, I'm assuming it's. It's probably not like the same thing, but are you testing multiple creatives to see, like, what performs better?
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Like what.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: What does that kind of look like on YouTube?
[00:22:55] Speaker A: It's more about the hook. So it's the first, you know, usually really it's like the five seconds that matters the most, but really the first 30 seconds, it's really the hook is the big thing. And what we're doing is rapidly testing different hooks, but you also don't need as many as on meta Meta. It's just the creatives kind of die out quicker versus on YouTube. You have a little bit of a longer life cycle. We've got plenty of clients that are running the same creatives for years. I do recommend though, doing three to five different variations. So, you know, when you create a new video, you want to film a few different hooks at the beginning. So we film the hook. Educate, call to action. We'll film different hooks, then it'll flow into an educate and a call to action and we'll string them all together to create different ad variations.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: I love that. So, yeah, it's a bit different from Facebook, but requires like less creatives and everything like that. I mean, obviously you still want to test to see what performs, what doesn't perform, but I love that. And anything that you feel like. I've not asked you like, about YouTube ads that you think would be valuable for listeners, like, know about and just want to make sure that we're covering all bases here and if there's anything else valuable you think we should cover, I'd love to dive into it.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I think one other thing we kind of alluded to it is retargeting, but that's a massive opportunity. You could also have a lower budget on the retargeting than some of the more traditional ads. So there's definitely a good opportunity on retargeting to test out YouTube ads, run it on that side.
One other thing that we didn't talk about as well. So, yeah, with retargeting, basically anybody who. Not just the people that are going to your website or opting in, but haven't become a client yet, but you can even retarget people that are going to your YouTube channel or watching your videos or liking your videos, you can actually sync all the different audiences with people interacting with your videos and retarget those people as well, which not a lot of people know about that. So that's a big opportunity too.
And then one other thing that I think is pretty valuable in addition to the retargeting is to also know that there are different formats. I alluded to this earlier, but it's not just the standard YouTube in stream ad anymore. You also have YouTube shorts so you have an opportunity to run short form content. Still following the hook, educate, call to action just in a little bit more of a condensed way. But I would definitely not sleep on that. There's definitely big opportunities there as well.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: I love that. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. And then I know you mentioned quite a lot of resources that all definitely want to put like in in the bio here, but if anyone wants to get in touch with you, what's like the best way to do so.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so. Well, of course one of the big resources is our 19 page YouTube ad strategy PDF. You can just go to adoutreach.com giftado u t r e a c h.com g I f t adl.com gift it's our 19 page YouTube ad strategy PDF. I also have my book coming out, Video the Art and Science of Converting into Clients. It's coming out at the start of the new year here. You can go to video authoritybook.com to either sign up for the wait list or once it's out it'll redirect to Amazon and you get your own copy of the book.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: There you go. We're going to put all those links in the description because I know you mentioned quite a lot of resources that I know will definitely be valuable to everyone here. So great you're that. Everyone head over to edoutreach.com if you want to learn more. And for listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You can also find more
[email protected] where we're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build their thought, leadership and business by getting them on podcasts and launching their own podcasts. Until then, keep pushing and we'll see you in the next one.
