A behind-the-scenes lead generation playbook focused on the daily activity that creates pipeline: account research, thoughtful follow-up, personal video, and useful community conversations. This written playbook focuses on the activities and decisions demonstrated in the video, so you can adapt the approach without needing to copy the exact words or setup.
What this playbook covers
The video packages a practical working session around How I Do Video Outreach for Marketing Leads (Step-by-Step). Read it as a guide to the underlying activity: identify the situation, choose the right next move, and build a repeatable way to do the work well.
Build a small, workable outreach block
Lead generation is easier to sustain when the work is specific. Choose a small group of people or accounts, decide why each one is relevant, and give the session a clear finish line. A focused hour of activity is more useful than an abstract plan to “do more outreach.”
Make every touchpoint earn attention
Use a real observation, a shared context, or a useful idea to start the conversation. Short personal videos, LinkedIn messages, and email follow-ups work best when they show that you understand the person’s world, not when they imitate a mass campaign.
Treat follow-up as relationship work
Most opportunities are not created by a single perfect message. Keep notes, make the next step easy, and come back when you have a genuine reason to do so. That approach is especially valuable in Columbus, where the same people often meet again through work and community.
Take the useful part into your own work
Use the framework, then tailor it to your audience, offer, capacity, and goals. The goal is not to reproduce the video. It is to make one useful improvement in your own work.
- Choose ten people or accounts to research this week, then write down one relevant reason to reach out to each of them.
- Reserve a recurring 45-minute follow-up block and send messages that offer context or value before asking for time.
Continue learning
Explore more marketing playbooks from the Columbus community for additional field notes, tools, and retrospectives.
For a local conversation about the work, see upcoming Columbus Marketing events.
Watch the source video
Watch the full recording on Andy the Marketer on YouTube. The complete transcript remains available below for reference.
Read the video transcript
Kind: captions Language: en Hi there, this is Andy. Welcome to day two of recording outreach experiments and taking you along for the journey for accountability. Yesterday we sent over 100 emails to try and book out guests for the podcast. And a light update on that, we have since confirmed uh I think we have over 10 responses and three booked podcasts from that. Let me actually just check my email here to confirm. But today we're going to be doing something a little bit different. So, uh, today we're going to be doing some video outreach and I want to be explaining some of the concepts behind that. So, I have one, Amy, two, three, four. So, four booked podcast meetings from the outreach that we did yesterday. Already starting to see results. And you'll know notice that uh, email, cold email, you get a much, you know, cold email, cold DMs, you get a lot higher latency. So, it's a quicker response. People check their emails more often. Uh, and that we're going to be kind of doing cold email today, but we're going to be doing video DMs. So, process and strategy with video DMs. I've done a little bit of pre-work. I've got 12 companies ready to send video DMs to. And my philosophy with this is that you already you want to reserve video DMs, people that are further down the sales funnel, because these are a time- inensive process. It takes a little bit of pre-work and time obviously to create a custom video DM that and you already have to have a point of contact that you are on a conversation level basis with at their company who is or tangentially related to a decision maker. They need to either be someone who can directly pass along the information that you send them in the video to someone right next to them a trusted person marketing etc. or should be someone who is decision maker directly. So, I have 12 right here. And each of these is a pipeline that I have in folk, but each of these have a person associated with them. And this company is in there twice. So, I actually have 11. And I'm going to be sending 11 video DMs today. I'll include a time-lapse version of what I did yesterday. And I'll show you guys an example of what one of these looks like. I try and keep these around a minute, not much longer. But I record these on tell which is the software I'm using to record this video and then send that over to them afterwards. So as you can see each of these companies has a person associated with it. I've been using folks native enrichment and it gets the email right almost every single time. So a lot of times I'll find these people on LinkedIn. These are people that I've been connected with for a while and that's how I know that they're mid to bottom of the salesunnel and it's a much higher converting video pitch is more welcome. I have experimented in the past with sending these over DM on LinkedIn and I might even as a follow-up method send the video DM to them over LinkedIn as well. So yeah, um I'll start the time lapse here and about midway through I'll cut through and show you guys what one of these DMs looks like and the context behind it so that you can inform your own outreach. And obviously in a few days I'll show the experiments, the results behind these experiments as well. Cheers and let's get to work. Okay, I realize this is likely going to present some logistical issues with recording the video on the same software I'm using to record the outreach videos. So, what I'll do here is I'll play the first outreach that I just sent. I just sent the email to the client and kind of explain the strategy behind it. And that way you guys will be able to see after I explain it why it'll work. So if I look at the most recent one that I just sent, I was already looped in via a warm referral to a healthcare company in Mary'sville, the city where I live. Pleasure meeting you both. I had the pleasure of knowing Andy, the Chamber of Commerce. You would do an incredible job for um MHRBU. And they said, "Thank you. We're juggling between multiple vendors and we looks like we can use some assistance and I'll reach back out." So, what I wanted to do is record a short video going over some of the highest leverage ships that they could fix on their own end and introduce myself, which was really the point behind it to put myself on camera, show my face, and show like a few things. Their website was irresponsive. Changing the logo, orientation, page titles, meta, some small things, show some expertise, and obviously bring my face into it. Um, good news, I can relatively fix these are small, can be relatively fixed quite quickly. No charge or strings attached. and empathize with them. I just know it's a tough position to be in. Know it needs to be done without being able to act on it. Good news is that if they are able to make these changes, they can. And either way, they'll be thinking, "Hey, wow, that was really nice of them to record that video." And if they take me up on fixing them, I could really blow their minds by making these small changes in, you know, 30 minutes. And the odds that they become a client after that is exponentially higher. So if you layer on these multiple things, a warm referral, b showing expertise on camera, and c doing a small amount of work for free, this is a very high likelihood of a conversion. And that's why video outreach like like this works. And it's also why I have chosen to reserve that for people who are in similar situations. Now, none of these are actually other warm referrals uh in terms of the clients I'll be reaching out to today, but they're people that I have connected with on LinkedIn and talked to before. So, it's not like it's a net new cold email. They're seeing my name for the first time. So, I hope this outreach strategy helps and I'll play the video right after this. Let me know if you guys uh do any video outreach of your own. What's worked for you? And I'll keep sharing these experiments on a daily basis. Cheers. Appreciate you guys and see you tomorrow for day three. Hey, Howie and Catherine. I hope you guys are doing great. I'm glad Michael introduced us. I just wanted to record a short video to give you some insight on the website cuz I know you guys are kind of in a transition period right now. Um, and also introduce myself. So, Michael and I met in Mary'sville. We've been we've collaborated on a few projects. So, point of me sending this is to give you guys some small changes that I think are the most urgent that you guys could do yourself and also what I would address first if we were to work together. I know you guys are in a transition period, but the first things that we should definitely do are work on some of the responsiveness. Um 70% of viewers view our sites on mobile and right now it's uh it's not totally mobile accessible. So users scroll through here, half the website is going to be cut off. Uh the site is built on Wix, which isn't the easiest platform to make updates on if it's not built well. The biggest thing I would do is you can do some small updates here is moving this logo to the top left because that's just a general website best practice. Um, and it makes it a little bit easier. Site has a very creative design which is fun to see. But another thing we want to do is we also want to clarify these CTAs. So these calls to action and some of the links are actually broken on here. Um, if I look under the hood, we want to pick some of these small things like these page titles and metad descriptions so that our website can be found by viewers online and make sure that our page titles have some keywords like mental health, recovery, union county, things like that that can draw visitors online to our website. All these are relatively small changes while you guys look for a longerterm partner. Either way, I just wanted to introduce myself. I hope you guys find this helpful. If you guys are ready to get started, I'm happy to go in and make some of these more pressing changes for you guys. Either way, great to meet you guys.