YouTube strategist

Your Videos Get Views and Your Calendar Stays Empty

By Stewart Read · UK YouTube strategist

You're publishing. The views are respectable. And you're not getting any leads at all from YouTube.

Almost every founder I speak to describes the same thing, and almost none of them call it a strategy problem. They say they wanted some guidance and some direction. One of them put it better than I could: people don't know what they don't know.

That's the job. A YouTube strategist decides what the channel makes and why, so the people filming and editing stop guessing.

What a YouTube strategist actually does

Five decisions, all made before anyone hits record:

• Which subjects are worth a video. Judged on what your buyers search for and whether the results page can be won, rather than on what you feel like talking about.
• How each one is packaged. The title and thumbnail decide whether the video is seen at all, and they're usually written in the industry's language instead of the buyer's.
• Where the video sends a viewer. A video with nowhere to go is entertainment. Most business channels send everyone to the same homepage whatever the subject.
• What counts as working. Which numbers mean something for your business and which ones are vanity, so the team stops optimising for the wrong thing.
• What to make next, and what to stop making. Decided from what the last batch returned, not from a content calendar written in January.

Filming, editing and uploading are separate jobs. Most businesses already have someone doing them well.

A strategist isn't an editor, an agency or a tool

Your team edits the videos. They can film and edit beautifully and still have no idea which of it brought you a client. That's not their job and it never was.

Most agencies sell production. They make the videos. Better-made versions of the wrong videos change nothing, which is why so many founders come out of an agency contract with a prettier channel and the same empty calendar.

The tools give you a dashboard. YouTube Studio and the analytics suites show you the numbers. Reading them every month, working out what they mean and then deciding what to do about them is still your job, and that's the job you don't have time for.

The two mistakes I find most often

Industry language on the channel, ordinary language in the search bar. One specialist I read had twenty years of experience, a published book and more than 200 videos. She was outworking nearly everyone in her field. Her titles were built around the words her profession uses, and her ideal clients were searching for her exact skill in completely different words, landing on competitors. This fault turns up in professions that look nothing alike.

A winnable subject nobody has claimed. Another business had fifteen years of results and a category their market searches constantly, with real hiring intent behind the searches. The videos ranking for it were years old, from channels whose authority was fading, and no active voice had taken the space. One well-researched video could have started that pipeline.

In both cases the content wasn't the problem. The gap was between what the data was saying and what the owner could see from inside. The person who wrote the titles is the least able to spot that the titles are the problem.

If an agency has already let you down

Assume I expect it. Most founders I speak to have tried one, sometimes several. The complaint is rarely that the ideas were bad. It's that the ideas didn't fit: "that's great, but none of these I can actually do," because they'd have been off-brand, or the scripts felt cheesy to read aloud.

A strategy you won't execute isn't a strategy. Everything I recommend has to be something you'd actually film, in a format you'd actually keep up.

"YouTube doesn't work for my niche"

Sometimes that's true, and I'll say so. More often the channel has been aimed at the wrong half of the market: the people who find the subject interesting rather than the people who'd pay to have the problem solved. Those two audiences watch different videos, and the analytics report both as views.

The way to tell the difference is to check who the videos are built for, which is something you can test in a few seconds before you hire anybody.

What carrying on without one costs

The cost isn't money, it's years. One founder, describing what would have happened without direction: "I could have fumbled around for the next couple of years and made a hundred videos with barely any results."

The other cost shows up in your sales calls. When a prospect arrives knowing nothing about you, the call becomes a comparison: what can you do for me, these other people charge this much, and it turns into a race to the bottom on price. When they arrive having watched you explain your thinking for an hour, that conversation doesn't happen.

Do you need one yet?

Probably not, if nothing is being published. Your constraint is production, and a strategist with no videos to direct is an expensive consultant.

Probably yes, if videos go out regularly and you can't say which ones brought you business. That's a direction problem, and it compounds every month it goes unanswered.

Hiring in, or hiring out

A YouTube strategist on your payroll in the UK costs somewhere around £52,000 to £72,000 a year before employment costs, and you'd be hiring for a skill you can't yet assess. An external one on a retainer costs a fraction of that with no headcount, which is why most businesses under about thirty people go that way.

What I do is read your channel every month and tell you what to make next, why, and what the last batch returned to the business. You deal with me directly. There's no account manager in between, and there's no shared group call.

Send me your channel and I'll tell you honestly whether I think I can help. If your channel isn't ready for a strategist yet, I'll tell you that instead, and what to fix first.