Video outreach usually stalls before the pitch, not during it. If the people who watch your videos reply but most people never press play, the problem is packaging: the subject line, the thumbnail, and the context around the video. Fix that first, and keep sending while you do.
That is the lesson Andy Milligan pulled from his own pipeline while optimizing his video outreach live on camera. Andy runs MMG Design, a web and SEO studio for healthcare brands, hosts the Marketing by Design podcast, and founded the Columbus Marketing Organization. The month before recording, his solo marketing business generated $26,000. If you are still working toward how to get your first client, this is the next layer: what to change once your outreach is actually going out.
Commit to volume before you change strategy
Andy's optimization started with a promise, not a tactic. In a mastermind meeting with other agency owners in the web space, each member made a commitment. His was to reach 50 sent video outreaches, so he could "gather data, assess points in the funnel and ultimately optimize it" (2:36).
At the time he had 35 left to send over the next month, roughly one a day. That number matters because a handful of videos tells you almost nothing. Until you have enough sends, every change you make is a guess. Andy's rule of thumb on camera: "volume is our friend."
He still makes small tweaks to copy and packaging as he goes. What he avoids is changing the whole strategy before the reps are in. The accountability came from peers, which is one reason small groups of people doing the same work are worth finding.
Read your video outreach analytics like a funnel
Andy tracks every video in a dashboard that shows who viewed it, and he watches deliverability to make sure messages are not landing in spam. Each prospect also lives in its own stage in his CRM, from a company he spotted to a qualified contact.
That tracking produced his biggest insight so far. In his words, "the ones that get watched ultimately end up converting, which is a good and bad signal because it shows us that the packaging of the videos is incorrect and I need to optimize them further."
Read that as a funnel:
- Delivered. Did the email reach the inbox at all?
- Opened and watched. Did the subject line, preview, and thumbnail earn a click?
- Replied. Did the content of the video earn a response?
If step 3 is healthy and step 2 is weak, rewriting your script will not help. Work on the subject line, the first line of the email, and the reason the video is worth watching.
Use the 60-second value test
Packaging gets the click, but the video still has to deserve it. Before recording, Andy asks himself: "If I had 60 seconds to deliver as much value as I could to this company, how could I do that?" (4:26)
For a local business website, his answer is specific and technical. On camera, he walks a prospect through two or three fixes:
- Location keywords in page titles and meta descriptions, so search engines can match the site to local searchers.
- Meta descriptions that fit, because, as Andy notes, search results cut long ones off with an ellipsis.
- Service page optimization. Andy calls these "money pages" because people search for a service before they search for a brand. Each should carry the service name, the location, and the company name.
- Real images instead of icons, so the page can carry descriptive alt text for traditional and AI search.
Relevance is not optional. In a June 2025 Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, 73% said they actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. A video that names one fix for their site is the opposite of irrelevant.
Warm it up and keep the ask small
Andy only sends video outreach after connecting with the person on LinkedIn first. He opens by mentioning that connection and any local link, such as both being based in Columbus or a university where Andy had just spoken. As he put it while writing one email, "this is like the warmest possible form of cold email that we could ever do."
The ask stays tiny. Instead of pushing for a call, he closes with: "If it's something that you want us to implement, just shoot me a thumbs up and I'm happy to help you out." A one-character reply is easy to send.
Two smaller habits round it out. He schedules sends for Monday at 8 a.m. instead of firing them off on a Saturday, and he plans to have his assistant reach the same contacts on LinkedIn so the message lands on two platforms. Video is a good format to bet on there, since LinkedIn reports that video viewing on the platform is up 36% year over year.
Build the habit with other Columbus marketers
None of these changes is complicated. The hard part is sending enough videos to know which change matters. Andy got that push from a room of peers, and that is what the Columbus marketing community is for.
Columbus Marketing Organization is a peer community for marketers, freelancers, and service providers in Columbus, Ohio, founded by Andy Milligan. Members share leads, introductions, and job opportunities, including the weekly Columbus Marketing Jobs newsletter.
If you are new to sending videos, start with Andy's step-by-step guide to video prospecting, then fold it into a daily routine with his playbook on how to generate leads. Agency owners can compare notes with his routine for lead generation for marketing agencies.
Video outreach gets better the same way everything else does: reps, honest numbers, and people who hold you to your commitments. Meet them at an upcoming Columbus marketing event, or join the Columbus Marketing Organization community on Skool.
The ones that get watched ultimately end up converting, which is a good and bad signal because it shows us that the packaging of the videos is incorrect.
Frequently asked questions
What is video outreach?
Video outreach is sending a short, personalized recorded video to a prospect instead of a text-only message. Andy Milligan records a quick walkthrough of a prospect's website, names one or two specific fixes, and sends it by email after connecting on LinkedIn, so the message feels warm rather than cold.
How many video outreach messages should I send before changing my approach?
Send enough to see a pattern before making big changes. Andy committed to 50 video outreaches in front of a mastermind of agency owners, roughly one a day, so he could gather data and assess each stage of the funnel. He still makes small copy tweaks along the way.
Why are my outreach videos not getting watched?
Usually it is packaging: the subject line, the opening line of the email, and the reason to press play. In Andy's pipeline, the videos that got watched converted, which told him the script was fine and the packaging was the bottleneck. Mention a real connection and one specific benefit up front.
What should I say in a video outreach message?
Open with how you found them, such as a new LinkedIn connection or a shared local tie. Then give one to three specific, useful fixes in under a minute, like adding location keywords to page titles. Close with a tiny ask. Andy asks prospects to reply with a thumbs up if they want help.
Read the video transcript
Kind: captions Language: en Hey there friends. My name is Andy. Last month, my business generated $26,000 as a solo marketing business here in Columbus, Ohio. This is my channel where I teach you and publish everything that I'm doing and share with you the wins, losses, and lessons. So, if you guys are new to the channel, I have a web and SEO studio for healthcare called MMG Design. I also run a podcast called Marketing by Design. And the CMO is the Columbus Marketing Organization, which is my job board, marketing events and community building mastermind here in the city. So biggest thing that we're going to cover, this is kind of our traditional structure here. We're going to talk live lead genen. So I'm going to update you on my pipeline, all my current efforts that I'm putting into generating leads and moving the business forward, which will be very helpful for you as a marketer. You're trying to do the same. And then two, we're going to build and strategize in public. I'll talk about my plans, things that I am doubling down on, current updates in business and life. And three, we'll go into updates and growth stats. I recently built a handy little dashboard here. help me get a better visibility in terms of tracking everything that I'm trying to track. Super excited and happy for all of this and I love it. So, we this channel right here has 29 subscribers which I will now update and now we can have a fun little growth meter and this is amazing. So, on to the updates. Biggest thing I want to cover today is I am obligated now to record a certain Make sure this is still recording here. Great. I am now obligated to record a certain amount of follow-up videos for my video outreach. I've talked about this in several past videos, but uh I was in a mastermind group last night with a several other agency owners all in the web space. And each of us need to get to my commitment was to get to 50 video outreaches sent so I can start to gather data assess points in the funnel and ultimately optimize it to make sure that it's actually a lead generating activity and once we get some more conversions then I can play with different things see how it works. So what I need to do is essentially uh record volume. So I have 35 more of these that I need to send in order to get to 50 over the next month. So that'll be one a day and I'm going to take you guys along on the journey. Always revisit this dashboard to see the analytics of the people who viewed them. Making sure that we're getting deliverability and that they're going through that we're not landing in spam. So a few things to optimize for there. But all in all, the two things that I my biggest takeaway so far is the ones that get watched ultimately end up converting which is a good and bad signal because it shows us that the packaging of the videos is incorrect and I need to optimize them further. The way I'm tracking all of these right now is in it own group within folk. If I find a company or a bad website, I will add it to the no status folder and then I will move I will attach a contact to each of these based on who they are. I'll go to weed qualified and kind of assess them through the pipeline here. I am just going to pick a random one here to kind of start with to get the ball rolling. Comp drug, I've already assigned people that I know to each of these companies, people that I've connected with on LinkedIn and that I can enrich and get their contact information for because I'll be sending these over email. And starting next week, I do think I will be aligning with my assistant in terms of getting her visibility on this to see the contacts at these companies that I've already sent outreach to and maybe contact them on LinkedIn to kind of create a dual platform effect there that I think could be helpful. So yeah, all in all, let's just get going and quit procrastinating because volume is our friend comp drug. Let's go to their website. They even have one. I'm sure they do. Pre and pin tab so I don't accidentally click into it. Boom. Awesome. Nice little vibe code looking site. Nice AI generated image there. Boom. I think what I also need to focus on too to assess one of our current bottlenecks is just providing as much value as I can in the video. I don't think that's the biggest bottleneck currently because right now that's the packaging and getting watches on the video. But providing say if I had 60 seconds to deliver as much value as I could to this company, how could I do that? So the biggest thing is they need some social proof here on the homepage. Need to work on probably the responsiveness a little bit because yeah, it just totally dwarfs out the background image. They need to have some local optimization here. I'm not seeing any location based words in the Yeah, no location keywords in the SEO hotspots. They probably need to do some service page optimization as well. No metad descriptions. That's a big one. Yeah. Let's get TA rock and rolling and start recording. I am recording these on Riverside, which I've had mixed quality signals with, but I want to make sure that I'm getting these through to you guys here. And recording because volume is the most important thing. It also allows me to record these videos simultaneously as I do the uh recording for you guys. So, I can also capture the same mic. Helpful, helpful, helpful. All good. Good thing is that it hides this and it's currently frozen which is a little bit frustrating. Chris saber details ce saber at compdrug.com. We'll have to use the browser version of TA here. Try again. If it starts freezing too much then we'll have to make amends but Chris is our ICP here. Start recording. What's going on Chris? I hope you are doing well. You and I just connected on LinkedIn which led me here to the comp drug website. Uh, as soon as I saw it, there's two small things that I wanted to run by you because we're in websites all day. My team does this all the time and I just couldn't resist. And I also think if you make these two to three small changes, you'll be able to increase the amount of conversions you get on the site by a meaningful margin. So, humor me while I give you these changes. And if this is something that you want us to implement, just shoot reply with a thumbs up and I'm happy to do that for you. But biggest part here is going to be having location based words in your um SEO hotspots. So, we always recommend that customers have some location keywords in their page titles and metad descriptions. This is really frustrating. Well, welcome to the journey, guys. Showing you all the stuff. Good, positive, glamorous, unglamorous. Guys are here for the whole journey, whether you like it or not. Hey, how's it going, Chris? You and I just connected on LinkedIn, which led me to the Comp Drug website. First of all, we're both based locally here in Columbus. So, I'd have to maybe get a coffee sometime um and connect, but I came to the comp drug comp drug, but that led me to the comp drug website, and there's one or two things that I wanted to get your eyes on that I'm confident can almost double the amount of conversions and increase the revenue that you guys make. Humor me, we do this all day, every day. I've been doing this for almost a decade at this point with healthcare websites. So, um, I hope you take these to heart and if it's something that you want us to implement, just shoot me a thumbs up and I'm happy to help you out. So, biggest thing is going to be a technical side. Your page titles and metad descriptions aren't proper enough to where search engines can essentially scan them and rank. So, yeah, my first recommendation here is going to be technical. We want to have some local location-based keywords. Example, Columbus, where we live. um something that ties back to the industry, a keyword within this page title to be able to make it easier for search engines to recommend the website to local visitors. Also doing the same here in the description and making sure that it's not too long because there's an ellipses and Google search results if it's too long and people can't read the entire description. Other optimization that I would make is on these service pages. These are called our money pages because they can rank naturally for intent because a lot of times people are in the market for our services without being in the in the market for our brand and directly searching for that. So on these service pages you want to make really make sure that these are optimized as well. Having the service name, location, and company name in the title. Just adding this the uh location in here as well. And also having a metad description because this one doesn't currently have one. Also having some images uh opposed from just icons allows you to add alt text and further enrich the page so that it reaches AI people that are searching for you in AI and in traditional search engines. Um so those are the two things that I would fix with. Uh looks like you guys are built on uh a Squarespace site. So that should be relatively easy to optimize uh within there that make it very drag and drop friendly. But website aside, we'd love to connect. I'm glad to be in network and I hope you have a fantastic day. Cheers and talk soon. Bye. Okay, lovely. By the way, I've been loving Tela's updates. They have their mouse text effects and they are really killing the game when it comes to their updates. So, shout out to TA aside from the frustrating things like the software not working well. Um, it's really killing it with these small but mighty updates. Okay, this out. Okay, let's go to our fun little effects here. I don't think I stuttered at all aside from that. Go to Ooise. I believe they have mouse effects in here now if I'm not mistaken. Maybe I am. They had way effects, zooms, advanced zoom settings, shrink camera during zooms. Okay, you know, auto uh desktop apps only. Great. Never mind, though. Okay, let's go ahead and undo that zoom. I'm spending way too much time on this. Sorry, guys. Sorry. Humor me. Dang. I thought there was mouse effects. That was really It's probably just for the the desktop version, which I hadn't thought of because it wasn't working. So anyway, let's just disregard that for now. Use this subtitle style. I love this size slightly larger. No, that's not right. That's not the same. Okay, we're done with this one. Share. Change the video name. Copy that. Command C. Share email. Show play button. Interesting. We have a new UI on this stuff. That is not what I clicked on. That is BS. Website video for Chris. This is What do I going on here? Oh my god. Lot of going on here, guys. Copy content. Yeah, I know you're not working. Not going to lie, guys. We may be approaching a bottleneck here with recording on multiple softwares at once, which is really unfortunate. Great. We just got charged probably like $130 from Sen, which I wasn't anticipating. I should have sent a notification there, but oh well. From Columbus. Fantastic. Okay, let's go ahead and get the video in here first. C. I think he's from Columbus. Or if not, his company should That's Padawaska. Close enough. I should just spoke at Otterbine. That'll be a good thing to mention in the email. So, as you guys can tell, this is like the warmest possible form of cold email that we could ever do, which I think is ideal. You and I just connected on LinkedIn and we're both based locally here as well. Exclamation point. I saw you went to Otterbine and I also just spoke there last week for the entrepreneurship program. So I would love to connect with you sometime, dude. Whisper flow. Come on, man. There we go. Okay, let's head back to our pipeline and see of the ones we have gotten opens from so far. I wanted to reidentify the ones that worked. So, the one's name was K. Honest thoughts. Have to follow up with her again. We're two phones deep here. I'm going to go away from that to the website for comp drug drag. share one or two helpful tips that I think could at least double the amount of inbound customers you guys get from the site to cent fantastic cable at contract.com. I'm loving the looks of this one. I have high hopes. I am going to schedule this for Monday at 8 cuz it's currently Saturday when I'm recording this. So, boom. We are getting our reps in outreach sent. Okay. So, unfortunately TA or Riverside cut out on me there at the end. I ended up sending three more outreach videos in total and I'll show you guys some of the insights there. Uh like I said, I'm currently recording on Saturday, so all those will go out on Monday and still kind of chipping away at getting our 100 reps in here before we can make any strategic recommendations or change too big of things of strategy. I know I'm making small tweaks and changes to copy and packaging and things like that based on where you know the past videos performance and where I think the current bottleneck is. But we'll keep you guys posted. I will get notified as soon as these videos are watched. So, it's a really good mechanism there to have ready and just kind of have more visibility into how they're performing. Uh, I also did some brand growth stats and updates. Got a couple new subscribers on this channel. A few new subscribers on the main channel. I think we're at 412. We can check the main YouTube channel. See how many subs we are at. 412. Yeah, 412 subscribers, 503 videos. We if if we ain't nothing but consistent, you guys. Uh that's why I love you. It's for some reason it says we had 1,000 views on the 10th. I'm not sure where that came from because I'm looking through here and I'm not seeing perhaps they came from shorts. Maybe we had one kind of pop off there somehow someway. But um yeah, I that one kind of popped off. 3K views. A lot of these are older videos when I was a lot skinnier before I started getting jacked. But yeah, so brand stats, um steady growth across all channels, um which is good to see always. For some reason, it tracked a big spike there on LinkedIn, 7707. Let me check in here. something attract 8,500. It should be 7700. No 7069. Boom. Yeah, but at least it won't have that false spike there, which is a good thing. But yeah, I'm I'm loving this chart. It's reinforcing to check in on and I love it. So, uh, growth stats, uh, building and strategizing in public, some accountability things on my end. I want to rent out the bottom two bedrooms in my apartment. So, I'm doing some listing qualifying some leads that I've gotten through Zillow and Spare Room and other platforms. Keeping an eye on that. Um, also want to stay consistent with the video outreach as well. Need to schedule my next Inerson event. I'm currently building out additional pages of the uh CMO website here and using um codeex to help me kind of build this out. I want to add a new page for the new event that we just had and qualify signups for it and also have a landing page to send people to with a few of the testimonials that I've gotten. So, amazing stuff there. And yeah, near time accountability items, keep tracking the growth, keep going. Um, and on your guys' end, too. Feel free to drop a question in the comments. I answer, read, and respond to everyone. So, I look forward to it. Keep hammering away. I appreciate you guys. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.