Dane Golden – YouTube Growth and Sales Expert
Dane Golden is a YouTube Marketing Expert and host of the VidAction newsletter and podcast. Dane has a particular focus on helping SaaS entrepreneurs and AI entrepreneurs grow their signups, leads and sales through YouTube ads. He’s a longtime serial entrepreneur who has worked for various startups and founded a few of his own startups, so he knows where a lot of the pitfalls are. Dane likes helping entrepreneurs avoid these problems on the way to success.
Dane is very conscious of several concurrent trends:
- MASSIVE GROWTH OF SAAS AND AI
Because of more powerful tools and lower barriers to entry in low-code development, there’s currently a massive growth in SaaS and AI startups, whether they are bootstrapped or venture funded, and whether they are B2B or B2C. - STARTUPS NEED TO SPEED UP
The pace of innovation is increasing, so there’s a need for these SaaS and AI startups to drive signups faster before the market changes, their funding runs out, or they get beat out by a competitor. - ORGANIC GROWTH ON SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT AS EASY
Organic growth on social media is slower, so you’ve got to pay to play if you need to grow fast. - EMAIL MARKETING IS HARDER NOW
The main email providers – Gmail and Outlook, have become very harsh on their filters of marketing messages, so it’s harder to break though.
SO FAR, YOUTUBE IS STILL A THING
But while this is all happening, people are still currently going to YouTube to learn things. Since YouTube Ads are a part of the Google Ads platform, YouTube is still a great way to reach customers in a very targeted way. Because whether you’re targeting customers by Google search terms, but on YouTube (yes I said targeting them by what they searched for on Google, but instead targeting them in YouTube Ads!), or you’re targeting them by geography, age, or income, etc., YouTube ads can still win for you in this crazy world, if you target right.
YOUTUBE ADS ARE A $30 BILLION BUSINESS
YouTube Ads make their parent company, Google, more than $30 billion each year (as of 2024), and YouTube revenue continues to increase every year by more than 20%. So clearly, there’s a lot of businesses finding value there.
BUT WILL YOUTUBE ADS HURT YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL?
YouTube coaches often say that doing YouTube ads on your channel to grow just subscribers and views is a bad idea, and this is actually true in some ways. However this doesn’t tell the entire story. Because as a small startup, not sure if you’re going to make it or not, growing a longterm YouTube channel shouldn’t be your top priority. Instead, you need to focus on more signups, sales, leads and customers.
While it would be great if you had a year or two to build trust with helpful tutorials on YouTube, most SaaS startups don’t have either this amount of time before their finances are a problem, and they may not have the time internally to spend making videos.
So you have to shortcut the process a bit with YouTube ads, with campaigns that are also designed to not harm the organic growth of your YouTube channel.
Because SaaS startups need to grow user, sales, and signups fast. So while the best way to grow trust on YouTube is to day after day, month after month, year after year, make organic videos, startups usually don’t have this kind of time.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re bootstrapped or self-funded, the nature of business today means you have to evolve quickly and YouTube ads are a way to demonstrate how helpful you are, how knowledgeable you are, how your products can help, and what benefits your products can provide.
Dane encourages people to connect with him on LinkedIn.