When I was CMO at a SaaS company, YouTube was the thing I kept meaning to get around to. There was always a more urgent channel to optimise, a campaign to launch, a quarterly target to hit. YouTube could wait until next quarter.

That was a mistake. By the time we committed properly, competitors had already built audiences we had to fight through to reach the same buyers. The compounding advantage they'd built in those early months was real, and expensive to catch up to.

I'm writing this because I see the same pattern repeating across dozens of SaaS companies we speak to at Humble&Brag. Founders and marketing leaders who know YouTube matters, who can see their competitors investing in it, but who keep pushing it to the next quarter. If that's you, this article is the case for stopping that cycle now.

The Ground Has Shifted: Why 2026 Is Different

Five years ago, YouTube was optional for SaaS. You could build a successful company on paid ads, SEO, and content marketing alone. That era is over.

1. AI Has Eaten Traditional SEO's Moat

Google's AI Overviews now appear on the majority of searches. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude answer questions directly, often without a click. The organic traffic that used to flow to carefully crafted blog posts is evaporating. According to TrustRadius, 72 per cent of B2B buyers encountered AI Overviews during their research in 2025, and 90 per cent clicked through to at least one cited source, often a video.

But here's what hasn't changed: people still want to see. They want personality, demonstration, and proof. Search "what is data analytics" today and you'll find an AI Overview that synthesises the answer in a paragraph. Scroll down and you'll find YouTube videos with millions of views. My co-founder Calum built CareerFoundry's video for that exact keyword, and it still generates tens of thousands of views per month years later, driving meaningful revenue every single month. The AI Overview summarises. The video converts.

2. Paid Acquisition Costs Have Become Unsustainable

B2B SaaS CPCs on Google and LinkedIn have roughly doubled in the past three years. Meta isn't far behind. Meanwhile, lead quality from these channels has deteriorated as everyone competes for the same audiences with the same playbooks.

The SaaS companies outperforming their peers right now are those that built owned audiences before the cost crunch. They have distribution channels they control. YouTube is the most powerful owned distribution channel a company can build, because the content compounds rather than depreciating the moment you stop spending.

3. Your Buyers Have Changed How They Research

Gartner's research on B2B buying behaviour makes the scale of this shift clear: 75 per cent of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free sales experience, and recent data from 6Sense shows that buyers define their purchase requirements roughly 83 per cent of the time before ever speaking with sales.

Where are they doing that research? Increasingly, on YouTube. When someone searches "Salesforce vs HubSpot" or "best project management tool for agencies," they're watching 15-minute deep-dives, product tours, and founder interviews. If your company isn't creating that content, your competitors are. And they're winning the deal before your sales team even knows the buyer exists.

What YouTube Actually Does for SaaS Companies

Most founders think of YouTube as a brand awareness channel. That's the least interesting thing it does.

1. YouTube Is Your New SEO Moat

While AI cannibalises blog traffic, YouTube videos are gaining visibility. Google prioritises video in search results, surfacing them in the main results, in the dedicated video tab where competition is thinner, as cited sources within AI Overviews, and within YouTube's own search ecosystem.

A single well-optimised video can drive traffic for years. At CareerFoundry, we had videos published in 2019 still generating 50,000 or more views per month in 2024, each one attributing €20,000 to €30,000 in monthly revenue. A blog post from 2019 would be lucky to still rank at all. The video kept compounding. That's the fundamental difference.

2. YouTube Educates Buyers Better Than Any Other Channel

In SaaS, buyer education is everything. The more educated your prospects are before they speak with sales, the faster they close and the less they churn. YouTube is the most effective buyer education tool ever created because video allows you to demonstrate your product in action, show real use cases and workflows, address objections before they arise, and build trust through personality and transparency.

When prospects arrive at your sales calls already educated by your YouTube content, close rates go up dramatically. We've seen this consistently: companies with strong YouTube presence report 30 to 50 per cent higher close rates on YouTube-sourced leads than on leads from other channels. The education has already happened. The sales conversation starts further along the funnel.

3. YouTube Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost Over Time

Here's the maths that makes YouTube essential: your CAC from paid ads goes up every year. Your CAC from YouTube goes down.

In year one, YouTube might cost you €2,000 per customer acquired, factoring in agency fees and time investment. In year two, that drops to around €500. By year three, you're at €200 because your back catalogue is still driving views, your subscriber base is growing, your videos rank better over time, and your production efficiency improves. Meanwhile, your Google Ads CAC climbs from €500 to €700 to €900.

Every quarter you continue to rely exclusively on paid acquisition without building an owned channel is a quarter in which you're paying more for worse economics. That gap only widens.

4. YouTube Creates a Hiring and Partnership Magnet

Every candidate who interviews at your company has probably watched your videos. Every potential partner, investor, or advisor has likely checked your channel. A strong YouTube presence signals that you're transparent, that you build in public, and that you create value beyond your product. At Babbel, our YouTube presence directly led to brand partnerships with Netflix and Airbnb that would never have happened through cold outreach alone.

SaaS Companies Doing This Well

1. Loom: Became the Category, Not Just a Product

Loom's YouTube channel functions as their product's best salesperson. They create use case demonstrations, async communication thought leadership, customer success stories, and tutorials. When someone searches "how to record screen," Loom owns the results. They've positioned themselves as the authority in async video communication, making the competitive conversation irrelevant for many buyers. The product is woven so naturally into the educational content that the line between learning and selling disappears.

2. Ahrefs: Turned Expertise Into a Growth Engine

Ahrefs could have been another SEO tool. Instead, they built a YouTube channel teaching SEO, using their own product to demonstrate tactics across more than 400 videos. The product appears naturally because it's genuinely useful for the workflows being demonstrated. They rarely sell directly. They teach. And people who learn SEO through Ahrefs videos tend to become Ahrefs customers. I think Ahrefs has the most elegant product-led content strategy in SaaS.

3. Notion: Built a Movement

Notion's YouTube strategy focuses on productivity, organisation, and building systems rather than product tutorials. They've positioned themselves as the productivity platform by serving their audience's broader needs. The payoff is one of the strongest brand positions in SaaS, with users who are evangelists rather than just customers. YouTube was central to building that community.

"We Keep Saying Next Quarter"

I hear this from nearly every SaaS founder we speak with. The reasoning is always the same: YouTube feels like a long-term play, and right now there are more urgent priorities. Quarterly targets, fundraising, product launches.

Here's what that thinking costs in practice.

Every quarter you wait, your competitors publish 12 to 16 videos. They rank for your keywords. They build subscriber bases. They become the authority in your category. In 12 months, they'll have 50 or more videos and 5,000 subscribers. You'll have nothing. Catching up will take twice as long and cost three times as much. We see this pattern repeatedly at Humble&Brag: companies come to us having watched a competitor build a YouTube presence over the previous year, and the honest conversation is that closing that gap now requires more investment than starting alongside them would have.

Every month your paid acquisition costs inch higher. Every quarter without an owned audience is a quarter of compounding you'll never get back.

There is no fast-forward button on time.

Addressing the Objections

I hear the same five objections from nearly every SaaS founder we speak with. Here's how I respond to each.

"We don't have the budget." If you're spending €50,000 a month on Google Ads, reallocating €10,000 to €15,000 to YouTube will improve your overall CAC within six to 12 months. The real question is whether you can afford to keep paying more for worse leads every quarter while competitors build owned audiences. As we break down in our guide to YouTube agency pricing models, the investment is significant but the maths works once you factor in the compounding.

"We don't have anyone who can be on camera." You need expertise, not charisma. Some of the most successful B2B YouTube channels feature introverted founders explaining technical concepts. Authenticity beats polish every time on YouTube, and if you genuinely can't put anyone on camera, there are formats that work without a host: screen recordings, animations, case study documentaries. We've covered this in our piece on YouTube video formats for business channels.

"It takes too long to see results." Organic YouTube typically takes three to six months to meaningful traction. That's roughly the same as any sustainable channel. The difference is that YouTube compounds. Your Google Ads don't get better with age. Your YouTube videos do. A video published today can generate leads three years from now. Very few marketing activities can say the same.

"Our audience isn't on YouTube." YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users. Your audience is there. B2B decision-makers watch hours of video content weekly while researching purchases. If that viewing is happening on your competitor's channel instead of yours, that's a positioning problem you can solve.

"We tried YouTube and it didn't work." You tried posting videos. That's different from having a YouTube strategy. Most SaaS companies fail at YouTube because they treat it like a content dumping ground: uploading webinar recordings and product demos with no strategy, no SEO, no distribution plan, and no conversion funnel. Then they wonder why nothing happens. As we explain in our breakdown of the difference between YouTube SEO agencies and growth agencies, the strategic layer is what separates channels that drive revenue from channels that collect dust.

How to Start Without Overcomplicating It

Define your channel's purpose. Decide what role YouTube plays for your business: top-of-funnel awareness and education, mid-funnel consideration and comparison, customer onboarding and success, or thought leadership and category creation. Ideally your channel will do all of these eventually, but start with one clear focus.

Commit to consistency. One video per week for at least six months. That's 24 to 26 videos. If you can't commit to that, don't start. Sporadic publishing doesn't work on YouTube because the algorithm rewards consistency and your audience needs enough content to develop a viewing habit. We've detailed the full timeline and what to expect at each stage in our YouTube growth playbook.

Start with what you already know. Your first ten videos should answer the ten questions your sales team hears most often. You're not guessing at content strategy. You're documenting what already works in your sales conversations and making it available at scale.

Decide whether to build in-house or partner with an agency. Building in-house requires a strategist/producer and a video editor at minimum, roughly €150,000 to €250,000 in year one for a team that's still learning. Partnering with a growth agency like Humble&Brag means strategy, production, and optimisation are handled from day one, with 15 years of pattern recognition informing every decision. For most SaaS startups under €10M ARR, partnering makes more sense because you're buying speed and expertise, and on YouTube, the months you save at the start compound for years.

YouTube Is Infrastructure

Twenty years ago, every business needed a website. Ten years ago, they needed mobile-responsive design. Five years ago, they needed a content strategy.

In 2026, you need a YouTube channel. It's infrastructure for how your buyers research, evaluate, and choose software. The companies that build it now will compound that advantage for years. The companies that wait will pay more to catch up and start compounding later.

Your competitors are already publishing. The gap widens every quarter.

If you're ready to stop treating YouTube as optional, we should talk.