In the world of SaaS, there are various tactics a company can invest in, in order to raise awareness and acquire new customers.
SEO, PPC, and email marketing are only a few of the most prominent ones, but there are always underutilized channels, although they can be of great benefit.
One of them is YouTube, with Slidebean (an online pitch deck creator and service) investing heavily in this channel, which is now its biggest revenue source.
How did it achieve that though?
This is exactly what we’ll break down in this post, in order to examine how YouTube became Slidebean’s main user acquisition channel.
Key Findings
- Slidebean maximized the results from its SEO activities
- YouTube is now the company’s biggest revenue channel
- One particular content format scaled Slidebean’s YouTube growth
Slidebean’s Organic Growth Breakdown
Before we jump into Slidebean’s YouTube strategy, it’s worth briefly analyzing the website’s organic performance.
As a general overview, the website currently receives 163K organic visits per month, according to Ahrefs.
It also ranks for over 84K organic keywords, with many key terms in Google’s top search results, such as:
- Pitch deck
- Pitch deck examples
- Pitch deck template
- Pitch deck samples
- Presentation websites
All of them drive significant traffic to the website.
Would a topic cluster around the term “pitch deck” make more sense for Slidebean in order to build more topical authority?
Potentially yes, but it seems like its SEO strategy has worked really well already, considering the blog section is responsible for 64K monthly visits (or else 39.2% of the total organic traffic).
In fact, the top-performing blog post by far is the one on the best pitch deck examples, which is responsible for 40% of the blog’s traffic!
Image Source: Slidebean
Some of the other top-performing posts are the following:
- 15 Best Presentation Websites Alternatives to PowerPoint in 2023
- 10 Elevator Pitch Examples from Successful Startups
- Best Presentation Software List for 2023
We notice that they’re all list posts; a format many SaaS companies use for great results, just like ExplodingTopics did, as we can see in our previous case study.
Another significant portion of the website’s traffic (26%) derives from the templates section, where users can browse various pitch deck templates.
Image Source: Slidebean
It’s also worth noting that another great tactic Slidebean has followed is creating subdomains of the website to cater to different languages.
For example, users can find the website translated into:
- Spanish (es.slidebean.com)
- German (de.slidebean.com)
- French (fr.slidebean.com)
- Arabic (ar.slidebean.com)
This is, of course, really useful when wanting to attract traffic from different countries.
Last but not least, almost 25% of the total traffic comes from another section called Stories, where according to the website:
As we’ll see later on, this type of storytelling content format has also been used in Slidebean’s YouTube strategy with great success.
In fact, some videos have also been turned into blog posts (or vice versa).
Just to give you an idea, Slidebean’s YouTube video on whether Herbalife is a pyramid scheme has amassed over 160K views!
Image Source: YouTube
People can also find the video in written format in the website’s Stories section.
Image Source: Slidebean
This is a great example of how content repurposing should be done, in order to take as much advantage of a piece of content as possible, in multiple channels.
Overall, this is what Slidebean’s organic performance looks like.
We notice that those three sections (blog, templates, stories) contribute the most to the website’s organic growth, and it’s clear that Slidebean’s SEO strategy has worked well.
However, according to the company’s founder and CEO, Jose Cayasso, on a podcast he was invited on:
YouTube has played a key role in Slidebean’s growth and is a channel most SaaS companies don’t take advantage of enough, so it’s worth seeing what Slidebean has done and in what way.
Let’s get into it.
From One Search Engine to Another: Slidebean’s YouTube Strategy
As we just mentioned, YouTube has played a big role in Slidebean’s growth, not only in terms of traffic, but in actual business impact.
This is something the company’s founder has confirmed in the same podcast we mentioned earlier, where he stated that:
Before we jump into Slidebean’s video strategy, let’s look at an overview of their YouTube channel and what they have achieved so far.
As of February 25, 2023, Slidebean’s YouTube channel has amassed over 435K subscribers with almost 30M total views.
Image Source: YouTube
In total, 292 videos have been uploaded, which means the average views per video are ~100K. On a daily basis, according to VidIQ, the channel receives 53.7K views on average.
However, some videos really stand out, having received more than 1M views, like the one on the real cause of recessions.
According to the founder, the first breakthrough came when they decided to replicate what people were searching for on Google, so their first good video was built and optimized around the keyword “pitch deck”.
Considering YouTube is a search engine just like Google, it makes total sense to follow a similar strategy to what one would use for written content, starting from keyword research and moving on to content optimization.
If we have a closer look at said video…
Image Source: YouTube
…it’s currently the channel’s second-best performing video with over 1M views.
Why?
For a start, as the founder said, it’s built around a specific keyword (pitch deck) that’s relevant to the product and what people search for, at the same time.
According to VidIQ, this is a keyword with a decent monthly search volume (23.9K) and low competition.
In order to attract viewers who will convert, the following three factors make the keyword perfect for Slidebean to target:
- Relevancy
- High search volume
- Low competition
According to the same tool, the video has achieved an SEO score of 100/100, with many relevant tags (keywords) receiving high positions.
Needless to mention that the video’s description has also been optimized with the keyword.
So far, it’s clear that treating YouTube as a search engine is key to growing your presence in the channel.
In fact, according to Jose Cayasso, a keyword-driven YouTube approach drove their first 30K subscribers.
That was around the time their YouTube SEO strategy had reached its peak, in a sense that Slidebean’s channel was already ranking for all the keywords they were interested in.
After all, pitch decks is a niche subject that only so many people are interested in.
This means that they had to follow a different approach if they wanted to scale their channel, which is exactly what they did.
Slidebean’s Unique Approach to YouTube Content
Here at Minuttia, we’ve stressed the importance of original content multiple times.
Investing in SEO content is great and it should be done, but it can be quite limiting, especially in the new way of doing content marketing.
After all, when wanting to scale and reach new audiences, it’s important to follow a heuristic approach that’s unique and establishes authority in a field.
Of course, the concept of original content can’t (and shouldn’t) only be applied to written content, but to any other content format and channel, just like YouTube and video in general.
This is exactly the tactic that Slidebean has followed.
In the words of the company’s founder in the podcast we mentioned earlier:
By having a quick glance at Slidebean’s YouTube channel, we can easily see what “other things” are.
They refer to types of content that often aren’t remotely connected to pitch decks or presentations, but are unique and drive a great deal of awareness.
A good example is the channel’s most popular video that we saw earlier, on the real cause of all recessions.
The channel’s third most popular video is another great case, and presents the side of India that the West doesn’t know about.
Image Source: YouTube
As it states in the video’s description, India represents 15% of Slidebean’s audience, so a video targeting them means that many will likely convert, through the right CTAs.
As a main point of focus, Slidebean’s YouTube strategy is heavily focused on storytelling, which is actually a prominent original content format.
Videos include:
- How Microsoft ruined Skype
- How 2022 mirrored the dot-com bubble
- The rise and fall of MTV
- Why Forever 21 went bankrupt
These are great examples of storytelling that appeal to a wide audience, hence why they perform so well.
If we dig a little deeper, we can make a list of all the videos that fall under this category, to get a better idea of how much they impact the channel’s growth.
In our list, we’ve excluded videos that are related to pitch decks or anything else that Slidebean offers, including anything closely related to operating a startup, in order to solely see the impact of Slidebean’s “original content”.
What we’ve done is gathered all of Slidebean’s 144 videos that fit the storytelling category (mostly from the Company Forensics series), and added their total views.
What we notice is that this category represents almost 50% of the channel’s total videos, and is responsible for generating over 20M views.
Meaning that over 66% of the total views derive from such videos!
For the record, the rest of the videos come from series such as Startups 101 and other ones related to pitch decks.
This uneven distribution is no surprise, considering the Company Forensics videos target a wider audience.
In fact, according to Slidebean’s founder, this series was a breakthrough for the channel, after its growth had stalled following the heavy focus on the keyword-driven strategy.
All in all, it’s clear that Slidebean has followed a different approach regarding its growth strategy and YouTube has played a key role in it.
This doesn’t mean that YouTube is suitable for everyone, but it’s a channel definitely worth looking into.
Let’s wrap things up with some final words.
Wrapping Up
Undoubtedly Slidebean has done a great job at raising awareness for its product and other services.
As we mentioned, YouTube might not be for everyone; this depends on different variables that a SaaS company should take into consideration, especially the fact that video is the most expensive type of content.
Nevertheless, it’s a great way to scale growth once other channels have been saturated, and the team at Slidebean foresaw this early on.
As long as you find a way to support this type of content and follow an approach that will differentiate you, like Slidebean did with storytelling, then YouTube might prove to be a valuable channel for you!
Feel free to share this post if you’ve found it useful and go ahead and reach out to us if you have any examples of companies you think we should feature in one of our future posts, by sending us an email to hello@minuttia.com.
