YouTube strategist Leroy ter Braak explains why most brands fail on the platform, how one soil channel tripled its subscribers, and why he ignores click-through rate completely.
We invited a YouTube strategist onto the show, and he opened our own channel live and told us, in front of everyone, exactly why some of our titles do not work. That was the whole episode, really. I sat there taking it on the chin while Will laughed at me.
Leroy ter Braak works with everyone from solo creators to billion-dollar brands, and he has a way of being brutally honest that I really enjoyed. He asked us early on whether we wanted him to make us cry or sugarcoat it a little. We chose the crying, obviously, because that is far better content.
Why do most brands get YouTube so badly wrong?
Most brands treat YouTube like a family scrapbook, dumping everything from product manuals to office birthday videos onto one channel with no strategy behind it.
Leroy has worked with multi-million and even billion-dollar brands who upload the latest oven manual next to an HR celebration video. Then they turn to people like him and ask why nothing is working. His answer is that YouTube deserves its own strategy, its own team, and its own dedicated time, because it is a discovery platform where people find videos, not a dumping ground for corporate content.
The fix starts with two questions. Who is your audience, and what are your unfair advantages? Leroy told a story about a large publicly traded brand paying creators ten thousand dollars to make product review videos, then making the exact same videos themselves. They were cannibalising their own spend instead of doing something only they could do.
“Make videos that that creator cannot make. Make videos that strengthen whatever you are spending in other places. Let us just write down what makes us unique.”
What actually took one channel from 30,000 to 100,000 subscribers?
Better packaging and sharper ideas took a small soil-products channel from 30,000 to over 100,000 subscribers, while its sales rose 60% month over month.
My favourite story in the whole episode was about a client Leroy calls the soil guy. The channel is John and Bob’s Smart Soil Solutions, run by John Valentino, a man in his early seventies who makes videos about healthier gardens and better soil. Leroy knew nothing about landscaping, which is exactly why the brief excited him.
He described the channel as the first prototype of a race car. The ideas were solid, but the packaging was stuck somewhere around 2017 and the hooks were weak. He rebuilt the whole process, from how they came up with ideas to how they validated them, and within a few months the videos were consistently clearing 50,000 views instead of two to five thousand. The revenue followed, because people started trusting John’s advice and buying his products.
“This is all organic. The only cost he has is paying me and paying his editor that he was already paying before. For those midsize businesses, the opportunity to actually increase your revenue on YouTube is immense.”
How many thumbnails should you really make for one video?
Leroy recommends three to five title and thumbnail concepts for every single video, and his biggest channels sometimes test twenty variations each.
He thinks about packaging the way you think about a product on a shop shelf. The title and thumbnail together tell you what you are going to get before you buy. Before writing a single line of script, he wants three to five titles and three to five thumbnails he genuinely believes in, all based on formats already proven on the platform.
For a big channel earning between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars a month, he might run twenty variations with a team of designers repackaging older videos. For a small channel like ours, he said something that surprised me. Do not test from the start at all. Begin with the one title and thumbnail you have the most evidence for, let it run, and only start testing once the video gains some traction.
When you do test, he uses what he calls umbrella testing. You put up three genuinely different concepts, not three near-identical smiles, and once one clearly wins you start making granular variations of that winner.
Which YouTube metrics actually matter?
Leroy ignores click-through rate and average view duration entirely, and tells creators to watch only two numbers: impressions and views.
This was the part that made me rethink how I look at our own analytics every morning. He argues that YouTube no longer judges a video on any single metric. It looks at everything together and clusters your video towards people who show high viewer satisfaction. So obsessing over a 1.4% click-through rate tells you almost nothing on its own.
He has videos with tens of millions of views and a click-through rate under two per cent. Shown in isolation, a self-styled YouTube guru would tell him to bin the thumbnail. Then you mention the 104 million views and they go quiet. Impressions and views do not lie, he says, and everything else gets murky fast.
“The basis of it all is just make effing good videos. If you make a video people want to watch, YouTube is now at a point where the algorithm will find an audience. YouTube does not give up on your video.”
What is the IDEAL framework, and does it ever fail?
IDEAL stands for Idea, Data, Execution, Analysis and Longevity, and it is the system behind Leroy’s upcoming book, due out late in 2026.
Leroy built the framework by forcing himself to write down a gut feeling he had stopped noticing. A YouTube agency owner once watched him jump across seven channels in five minutes, mumble something, and come back with a title and thumbnail that outperformed everything, and admitted nobody understood how. Leroy realised he did not fully understand it either, so he wrote it down.
Here is how the five steps break down:
- Idea. Audience-first ideation, generating thirty to fifty video ideas a week and choosing the best four each month.
- Data. Checking whether similar ideas have already performed well on the platform before committing.
- Execution. Twisting or improving on the proven outliers rather than copying them for diminishing returns.
- Analysis. Studying the finished video a month later and finding twenty reasons the retention dipped where it did.
- Longevity. Asking whether this video moves you one real step closer to your bigger goal.
Being honest about failure was refreshing too. Leroy said his own biggest mistake was not testing enough and not testing consistently, which he reckons has cost him more than 100 million views over his career. Even with all the data, videos he felt certain about have still flopped for no clear reason. He compared himself to Pep Guardiola, who still gets it wrong sometimes and loses. People pay Leroy because he gets it wrong less often than most.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full conversation on our YouTube channel, and find every episode over at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. You can reach Leroy through his website at leroycreates.com, where he also runs a weekly newsletter with free tips.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where we get marketing and PR leaders to admit the mistakes nobody usually talks about. Leroy roasting our own titles live was one of the more useful hours we have spent on the show.
So here is the question I am sitting with. If a stranger opened your channel right now, would they have any idea what they were going to get, or would they see a scrapbook?
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
