488. The Secret to Viral Success with Brendan Kane

You see meta, you see Google all investing in hardware. Most of that investment is coming in through some form of glasses. That's where they're kind of projecting out. But that's at least maybe in the short term, three years before there's a product ready to ship. It's more likely it's four to five years. Well, what's the user adoption going to be like? It's not overnight. Five billion people are going to buy a pair of these glasses and transition from a mobile device to glasses. So you're probably looking at a five to ten year timeframe before anything majorly disrupts. And honestly, I'm less interested in trying to predict five to 10 years out on social media and focusing more on what the opportunity is now, because the opportunity now is still absolutely massive. And we know there's going to be some type of crossover. Social media is not going to die. It's just going to be how you consume that content on a different device and that consumption behavior will change eventually, but nobody really knows at this juncture.

Welcome to Marketing Speak, a series of interviews and monologues featuring thought leaders and industry practitioners in search engine optimization, e commerce and online marketing. Here's your host, Stefan Spencer, SEO expert, author, speaker, consultant and Internet entrepreneur. In a world of endless social media noise, virality isn't about luck, it's about science. My guest on today's show, Brendan Cain, is the author of one Million Followers, Hook Point and the Guide to Going Viral. Brendan brings nearly two decades of experience transforming brands and individuals into digital powerhouses, generating over 60 billion views and helping clients build audiences of over 100 million followers. A master of data driven content strategy, Brendan works with global brands like Mindvalley and Fortune 500 companies to crack the code of online engagement. His innovative approach breaks down exactly what makes content spread. Through testing and analysis, he identifies the hook points and story structures that grab attention instantly. In our conversation, we explore the science behind viral marketing. Diving into specific formats and frameworks that drive results, Brendan shares fascinating case studies of everyday creators who've built massive followings by understanding key performance drivers. He breaks down exactly why certain videos get 10,000 views while others reach 10 million, revealing the subtle differences that make content truly compelling. Whether you're starting from zero or looking to scale your existing audience, you'll discover proven strategies to transform your social media presence and build a powerful digital brand that stands out in today's attention economy. So, without any further ado, on with the show.

Brandon, it's so great to have you back on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to connect with you and anybody that's tuning into this.

Yeah. So I'd love to start with a real case study example. And I know you worked with mindvalley and you have some great testimonial quotes from them and I'd love to unpack a bit about how that has been able to turn into a digital powerhouse. I think they've said somewhere that you're their secret weapon. So if you could talk a bit about, without revealing anything that's confidential, what is kind of the secret sauce behind making a brand like mindvalley a digital powerhouse in terms of viral marketing?

So mindvalley, even before I worked with them, they were a household name in the education space and doing really well and doing pretty well on social media. And over the past, I would say six, seven years, we've been building out a creative model. I mean, I kind of started building a version of it when I first started in social media. 2005, 2006, but really kind of dialing in the model and process by which you actually create content, analyze content, understand what content to create and what content to avoid creating. And that's really what we did with mindvalleys. They had a really smart team that was working on their social media efforts and we came in and just restructured the creative model and creative process that they used as they were going through content. Because our team's done about 10,000 hours of research into understanding how and why things go viral. And really it's more about the context of how you're delivering your message and your information rather than the actual content itself. So when you think about somebody like mindvalley, it's not that we change the content and what they spoke about, but more about how they packaged it to really break through in this world that we live in where there's close to 5 billion people on social media.

Let's dive into how they were able to do that. Let's take as an example, if you had any part in this, their AI mastery course, which is pricey, it's like $10,000. And to my knowledge, they weren't offering an AI offering prior to this. This was relatively new in the last couple years. I did sign up for it, by the way, so I've seen the value of that amazing course and I don't know if you had any involvement in getting the word out about that, but I don't know. It was really successful having a three day free masterclass that people could attend and then that led to the nine month long course program and I think they had on at least that three day event, at least, I don't know, 10,000 people or some crazy number like that, live attending a webinar. That's pretty impressive. So is that something that you were involved in, getting that kind of reach and engagement?

We had limited involvement in that one. We were a big part of the Social Media Mastery program and we're doing another one with them in May. But we can look at AI as an example of how to approach. What we're talking about is typically if you talk about just AI as AI in general, it's going to attract a specific audience and a lot of people are going to zone out or become essentially uninterested in the subject because it seems too technical in a way. So it's how do you take AI and make it applicable and interesting to the wider possible audience? And Mindvalley did a great job with that and they really leaned into the fact that AI is not going to take your job, it's people that learning AI are going to take your job. So automatically, right there, even if you're not interested in technology or, or artificial intelligence as like a technology platform, you are interested in the applications of how it can impact your everyday life. And that's one of the big aspects of what we talk about with social media is called the generalist principle, is how do you take your subject matter, your expertise, and not just make it interesting to your core audience, your niche audience, which you definitely want to do, but how do you also broaden it out and allow it to connect with somebody that may not be thinking about that subject matter, may glance over it if somebody else is posting about it or just generally just not have interest in it? How can you flip it on its head so people will stop and pay attention and be like, oh, this is something I want to learn, this is something I want to spend a three day seminar in, because it impacts me or it interests me in terms of the way that they've contextually packaged it for the wider audience.

Gotcha. And so when they came to you to be involved in the Social Media Mastery program, which includes the three day event, but also that eight or nine month program or whatever, what was the benefit or the pitch to you and what did they get? What did you get? How did you protect your IP and not just give it away for free to them, but they got what they needed out of it?

Yeah, so there's a few different layers to that. I mean, I've known vishen since like 2017. So there's a long standing relationship that I have with Vishen and Mindvalley and have consulted through Hook Point with his personal brand and mindvalley's brand over the years. He wrote the forward for my second book. So there's a long standing relationship there in terms of why do I do it. I mean, obviously there's a revenue upside because we participate in the success of the program and in terms of protecting our rights and things, we're pretty good because we've invested a lot in our intellectual property. And understand I've filed patents and patent applications and things back as early as like 2006, 2007. So I'm pretty familiar with intellectual property, how you protect that property and make sure it's still a win win for both sides. But in terms of the benefit, there's the revenue upside and there's the exposure upside. You know, mindvalley is a big platform that you can get exposure to a new audience. And I've always resonated with the mindvalley community over the years of speaking at their events and connecting with them. And my whole mission is really to help as many people as possible break through with their message so that they can have the impact that they deserve and believe in.

So is social media mastery, AI Mastery too far afield for spirituality and personal development platform like mindvalley? Is that spreading their brand too thin or kind of going off message?

I don't think so. I think that spirituality and mindset and the things that they talk about is a part of the education ecosystem. Mindvalley is an education company and they have really mastered the art of teaching spirituality and mindset and those elements. And the next logical step is to expand beyond that. With that said is there's a lot of people in that community that can benefit from AI Mastery. They can benefit from social media because a lot of people in that community are solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, yoga teachers, meditation instructors, coaches, things of that nature. And obviously as the world evolves and expands, they're going to need to integrate AI into their skill set, into their organization, into their overall strategy. And the same thing with social media. So the reason that those programs are doing so well is because it's an easy crossover, because it provides a lot of value to that audience, but also allows them to introduce the Mindvalley brand to new audiences, to bring them in to learn those elements as well.

Let's actually move from Mindvalley to another client of yours that I was checking out in the preparation for Our interview. This is a former NFL player who is now into woodworking, John Malecki. So he has a great testimonial about you and about working with your agency, Hook Point. And I was really impressed with his channel on YouTube, with his approach, his style of videos and everything. So maybe we could kind of deconstruct how you helped him change his approach and his style and his hook points and everything. Maybe use as an example a representative video of him before working together and then one after and kind of just deconstruct it for our listener or viewer.

Yeah. So again, as we were talking about with Mindvalley, I think one of the big elements of success, or lack thereof as it pertains to organic social media is really how do you take your zone of genius, how do you take your expertise and again, make it interesting to the core audience you're going after, but also broadening that out. So one of the specific exercises that we do with our clients that our model is really built off of, is really understanding specific formats and structures that have proven success across social media. So our team, as I mentioned, has done about 10,000 hours of research. We've broken down about like 220 of these different formats. So I want to kind of just paint the picture that there's a lot of them out there, but there's specific platforms that work for or there's specific formats that work for specific platforms. And when we're looking at a client, we're trying to determine like, well, what is the best format that will allow them to contextualize their message that will connect with a wider audience. So just to give you an example of a format that everybody has seen and actually was invented pre social media, that was invented, I think it was probably invented by late night talk shows, but it's the man on the street format. You approach random stranger on the street and you interact with them in some way and the story unfolds. So there's several different examples of that. So there is a guy based out of the uk, you've probably seen him, Simon Squibb, where he's stopping people on the street, asking them what is their dream and trying to help them with advice or money to help them pursue their dream. There's another account called School of Hard Knocks. They're approaching entrepreneurs on the street, asking them their business advice and how they can be successful. Then there's like a friend of mine done work with Alex Stemp, who's amassed an audience of 20 million people using it for photography. So he approaches random Strangers on the street offers them professional photo shoots and the story unfolds that way. So that's an example of a proven format or structure. Now I just want to delineate and say, just because you've seen man on the street and you understand that you approach a random stranger on the street, interact with them, does not dictate success. The format doesn't drive success. It's the execution of that format that drives that success. So as we approach our qualitative analysis of something like that, what we'll do is we'll break down, let's just say the school of hard knocks. If we want to dissect and understand their use case of it, what we do is we create a spreadsheet. We take their 10 most viewed videos. There are 10 average and 10 underperformers. And what we're doing is a cross analysis of understanding what are the contextual elements that are showing up in those high performers that are not showing up in those low performers. So what we call is, they're called performance drivers. So we look at things like pacing, tonality, facial expressions, body cues, what's happening in those first three seconds, captions, title cards, hooks, all, all these different elements we're analyzing through this format to dictate if we are to dictate and understand if we are to do this man on the street format, how are we going to actually understand what drives the performance of it? To give a further example that people understand is I went to film school, so that's how I started my career. And when you think about making movies and watching a movie, every movie that you sit down and watch is not good. And especially if you have a favorite genre. Let's just say that your favorite genre is sci fi. You love sci fi movies. Every sci fi movie that you sit down to watch is not good. I mean, I'm sure we've all been there, so what's the difference? Well, it's the casting, it's the dialogue, it's the cinematography, it's the lighting, it's the producing all these different variables.

And the special effects for sure.

The special effects that give that format, that structure of a movie and within that a sub genre, sci fi, the ability to be successful or unsuccessful. We're applying kind of those same principles in a parallel to social media, where most people are approaching social media from the standpoint of anybody can pull out one of these. They can click, record and post something. So they expect it just to work. That's blessing that we have this powerful tool in our Pocket. The downside is it doesn't take a lot of thought. So people think just because they pulled this thing out of their pocket press record and post something that it's automatically going to work. So somebody, you know going back to John Malecki, somebody like him in the beginning, you know, again, he is a former NFL player, but that's not the reason for any of his success because most people, myself included, don't really know John Maleckey as an NFL player unless he played for your team. So I just want to kind of put that aside as some people think, oh, somebody who was an athlete or celebrity and that's the reason for their success. I mean, I worked in Hollywood. I can definitively tell you a lot of actors don't have successful social media channels. It's not a given. So with John, again, as you mentioned, he's a woodworker. He loves building things. So previously, if you look at some of his content and you can look at on the Hook Point website, like, we have a before and after. Is the before is. Is this metal rack good or awful? So who is that going to be interesting to? Well, it's not going to be interesting to the general public, like me. Like, I don't really care about a metal rack. So. So how do you take woodworking, which is super niche, doesn't seem super exciting or sexy or fun to watch, and turn it into something that has the potential to break through, to go viral? So one of the examples we had is I tested turning a free pallet into a $600 table, and it shows an image of him pulling out a wood tablet out of a garbage can. So that's a challenge. Well, how is he going to take this thing out of a garbage bin and turn it into a table? Is he going to be able to be successful? And how's he going to turn it into a $600 table? The first component of it is there's this challenge aspect. Is he going to be able to do it? The second part, it's kind of interesting, is like, I would like to see if I could pull a piece of wood out of the garbage and turn it into a table. Like, there's a clear application there. So again, it's transitioning what we talked about before of just speaking to a niche audience to making it digestible and interesting. And if you watch his videos, even the one where he's taking out the pallet from the garbage and building it into a table, he's not diluting his expertise or his skill set as a woodworker he's just bringing in the widest possible audience and then layering in his expertise. So it introduces people to this brand new world of woodworking. And it's been massively successful in terms of allowing him to build his audience.

Yeah. And so what does he do to monetize that audience? How does he make this ROI positive? Because clearly there's a big investment there.

Yeah, I mean, there's different ways. I mean, I don't know the ins and outs of John's business. We didn't do business consulting for him, but I believe he does some courses. But also just the ad revenue that he can generate from YouTube and then he can do sponsorship deals. But I think it's a great question and the reality is like when you think about ROI for social media, it's as big as you can dream. So, and I'll give you a primary example of this is there is a friend of mine that was one of the original beauty influencers, Michelle Phan. Millions and millions of subscribers on YouTube. Now there's a lot of beauty influencers on YouTube that have millions and millions of subscribers. And most beauty influencers will do brand deals, do sponsorship deals, they'll make ad revenue and that can be like a good six figure a year business for them. Michelle took a different approach. She said, you know what, I'm going to take my audience, I'm going to take my know how and I'm going to form a company. And her and a few of her friends founded a company called Ipsy. That's a billion dollar value company. So you could look at two people with the exact same audience size and the exact same niche. One could build a billion dollar business. One can just do six figures a year. So that's why I say it's kind of as strategic as your mind can think, as big as your mind can think in terms of how you can turn and cultivate your audience into ROI and meaningful revenue. So there's not like a clear cut rule book that you have a million followers or 100,000 followers and you make X number of dollars a year. There's no cap to what you can do with it. I mean, just look at Elon Musk and what he does with his social audience and how he leverages it to push up the value of the companies that he's involved with.

So I'm curious, how do you monetize? Because you're running an agency and you're helping millionaires become billionaires. What about you and your leverage to create your own billion Dollar company.

Yeah. So our primary source of revenue right now is through strategy and training of organizations. But now we're at an inflection point where we have a successful and profitable business. So we're looking at certain clients that we will participate in a deeper level and take equity or revenue share upsides into it. There's also some industries or sectors that we're seeing that are very underserved, that we're going to get more involved and create subsets of our business to really go after and own a chunk of that business. So now that we have kind of the agency flowing, we have the team, we have the interest we get, thousands of people reach out to us every month wanting to work with us. We're at this level now where we can selectively choose certain strategic clients or partners that we can invest in. We can take upside by ingraining our organization deeper into their marketing systems.

And so it's not a given that it's just because you have, let's say, I don't know, 20, 30, $50,000 to spend to hire your agency that they're going to be able to hire you.

Yeah, I mean, we're very selective in terms of the clients that we work with. Just in general, we're even more selective if we're taking, instead of paying our full fee, we're taking less of a fee and more equity, or we're investing in it as well. But the reality is we work with people that have the right mindset. I mean, that's the biggest determining factor of us wanting to work with specific clients is we work with people with zero social media experience. It's not about an experience thing. It's not even how big your budget is. It's not how big your team is. It's do you have the right mindset going into this? That social media is a difficult game to play. Like, if you want to play it at the highest levels, hook point. In our organization, we really focus on how do you become the top 1%. If you want to be in like the top 20 or 30%, you can go and find a bunch of different people to engage or just get a regular social media manager. We're in the business of helping people reach the top 1%, get their message to the masses and truly break through. So in that, again, it's not necessarily how big your budget is, how big your team is, your experience level, but it's more your mindset of really going in and putting to work all the things that we bring to the table.

So what if Somebody is on a low budget. Let's say that they want to hire somebody on upwork to do the video editing. They want to hire a different person on upwork or onlinejobs PH in the Philippines to help them with the script writing and the planning of the videos and that sort of stuff. Can this be done on a shoestring budget or do you really need five, six, seven figures to do it right?

No, you don't. We have some clients that shoot their own content and edit their own content. I will say that if you're going to hire people, you need to understand first, what is the format you're going after. That's one of the things that we work with clients on. There's certain formats that are much less resource intensive than other formats that are very resource intensive. So if you're constrained from a budget or resource perspective, it's being really smart with the format that you select. And if you're going to hire people on upwork or something else, you can't rely on them to just execute at a high level. You need to understand the format and the nuances that go into it. We help create the blueprint of it, but you need to understand it if you're going to oversee people and hold them accountable for their performance. Because like anything, even if you just hire an experienced person, it doesn't mean you're going to have success if you don't understand it and oversee it first. We worked with, just to give you an example, a hand doctor with zero social media experience shoots content on her iPhone, edits her own content, and she amassed an audience of 700,000 people. So she doesn't have a big team or an infrastructure, but she took the strategy that we developed for her, the training that we developed, and really took that nuanced approach to understand it. The interesting thing that we see with our clients is people that come from a background like you look at John Malecki, woodworker, a hand doctor, we work with a leather craftsman. People that really come from backgrounds where you have to pay attention to detail in order to master that craft, typically do really well through our programs and on social media because it is about paying attention to detail. But can you be successful hiring somebody in India or Upwork or any of these platforms to support you? Yes, you can. But by the sheer fact of hiring them is not going to dictate your success. You need to understand the strategy and how to oversee them and things of that nature.

And that's where using your guide to going viral or your hook point book or both as kind of a framework or a blueprint for what to do and how to do it and when and where to allocate the budget is probably a good starting point, I would imagine.

All the stuff, the model that I was talking about, they can outline everything in the guide to going viral. And for your audience, if they just go to hookpoint.commsp to stand for your marketing speak podcast. But MSP, they can download the book for free. And all the detail of the model is in that book. So if you like reading books and want to kind of dig in and give it a shot yourself, we don't really hold anything back in that respect.

Speaking of not holding anything back, I was really impressed that your second most recent book, Hookpoint, is also for free, and I downloaded it right off of your website. What's the monetization or ROI strategy there? If you're giving your book away that you must have spent a lot of time and money to create and put out there, and a freely available book, you don't even have to buy it on Amazon.

Yeah, so I create books for marketing. I don't create books as a revenue stream. Even with my first book, it was never about like, how do I make money with a book itself, but how do I use it as essentially a calling card or for somebody to reach out. I always wanted to build a business where I don't have to, because I've built businesses in the past where you have outbound sales teams, where you're going out there and trying to go and drum up business. It was always just so expensive, didn't really like it. I always wanted to build a business where the inbound is coming in, and with books in particular. My literary agent, he always said that you need to get at least 25 to 30,000 copies in the market for word of mouth to start kicking in. Now the reality is the average published book sells less than 5,000 copies. So rarely do you ever even get a published book that reaches that threshold to really break through. So from my perspective, because I'm not really concerned about making money off the book, I see it as a loss leader. I want to get as many copies into the market as possible.

By the way, how many books did you end up selling of 1 million followers?

I don't know the exact numbers because international is a bit murky, but it's in the several hundred thousand range. It could be a lot more than that. For some reason, I don't really concern myself with it. But International, they do not give clear Reporting with it. On top of that, you will see a lot. Even if you don't give away your book free, people are going to pirate it. And that book has been pirated so many different times. And if you type in YouTube like the audiobook and things are in there, but it's definitely in the several hundreds of thousands of copies that have been.

Sold thus far, that's a good indicator that you have several thousand ratings and reviews on Amazon just for that book. That's really cool.

Yeah, so that's kind of the way that I approach it is I just want to just get in many as many copies out there and you will see people like, even if you give a PDF download, there's people that will want to buy the physical book. The guide to going Viral Audiobook is on my YouTube channel for free. And the interesting reason I did that is because Audible is. There's a really strange thing with Audible. So I did my entire audiobook for this book in AI. So we trained a model, my voice. And the interesting thing is Audible allows AI voice generated books, but acx, the company that interfaces with Audible, doesn't. So we couldn't get it up on Audible. So I'm just like, I'm just going to give it away for free because again, I don't really care. I much rather have more people listen to the book than making money off of it. Just spread as many people as possible. And I think already over 10,000 people have listened to the book on YouTube.

How do you get a literary agent when that's your model? If they're like gonna make a piece on every sale and you're like, well, I wanna give them all away, that kind of takes their motivation away, doesn't it?

Yes and no. Again, it's not that we don't sell our book on Amazon, it's not that we don't make it available on those platforms. You will see that sales increase, word of mouth kicks in and again, you have to think about the fact is a big percentage don't wanna read a PDF or a big percentage will download the PDF and tell their friend, you should check out this book, the guide to going Viral. And they don't just say, oh, here's the PDF, that person automatically, their first thing is to go to Amazon. Like, my behavior is interesting. I don't really read books, but I'll buy a book. So I have a reminder to find podcasts of the author so I can listen to podcasts of the author of it. It's counterintuitive in A lot of ways, but it drives a massive amount of awareness and sales in the long run. But my literary. He's since passed away, but he was kind of a visionary in that way. But the book publishers, I can tell you definitively don't get it. And that's why I self published the past two books is like I just didn't want to kind of go down that path of I'm a marketer at heart and I want to test things, I want to break things and I want to just kind of push the boundaries of getting as many books out there as possible. And the publishers just don't see it that way. And I understand it, I don't fault them for it. They're running a business and they've been operating a business in a certain way. But I just see a lot of their methodologies and philosophies as a little outdated. And I kind of want to pursue different avenues to kind of pushing the books out there.

So you don't have any plans to get a new literary agent then?

No.

How did you find your first one?

It was actually through another literary agent that I knew in Hollywood that was representing like screenwriters and things of that nature made the introduction. But it was good to learn. Listen. It was a frustrating process dealing with publishers. I'll never do it again. But you never learn until you actually do it. And honestly, if anybody listening to this is thinking about writing a book, unless they're writing you a seven figure advance or a high six figure advance, they're not going to do anything for you from a marketing standpoint. But they do make it easier in terms of COVID design, getting an editor, getting it on Amazon, getting it on Audible. It's a lot easier if you have a publisher doing it. But if you can find people like you said on upwork or things of that nature to help you put that together and you feel comfortable kind of doing that, then I'd recommend doing it for yourself. If you have none of that infrastructure, none of that desire to hire anybody to help you with it, then maybe it's a better fit to do it.

Now you mentioned earlier those 220 formats and that would include man on the street, reaction videos and kind of documentary style videos, et cetera. Is there a particular format that stands out for somebody like yourself who is a book author? Multiple books really a winning formula for getting your brand and your books out there.

It really depends if you're talking about authors, it depends on the subject matter that you're talking about. And again, it Also depends on the resources that you have available to you and kind of the approach that you want to take. So for me, when I first started social media, I had very little resources. It was just me creating content. Now I have a team. So now we're kind of pushing the envelope. And for me, I'm investing. I've kind of shift my investment in allocation from short form to long form is like I spent the better part of eight or nine years investing in short form content for my brand and kind of focusing that way. And now we have that system dialed in. Now it's a real focus for long form if you have the time and energy and capacity. Long form is always going to pay larger dividends than short form. But there is a lot, again, more work time and resources that go into that.

Is there a platform besides YouTube that is a good fit for long form or is really YouTube the only game in town?

It would just say YouTube pretty much. I mean, listen, Spotify is. And itunes have the podcast element to it, but YouTube's just. There's just the amount of traffic that they have. It just beats everything out.

It's just that, you know, putting your eggs all in one basket is pretty risky.

I mean, YouTube's been around for close to 20 years. I mean, you could point to what's going to happen with TikTok at the time of recording this, we don't fully understand. But listen, I've been doing this for so long and people have been saying that same thing over and over again about the key players. I can't tell you how many times since Facebook started, I saw articles that said, Facebook's dying, it's going away and it just never does. So I'd be a little bit more cautious on kind of like startup apps or startup social communities. I think that YouTube is tied into Google, so it's tied into search. Now some people can say search is going to die because of AI.

Yes, I've heard that so many times. And I have that book, the Art of SEO that I'm known for. People like to really rub that in my nose, like, yeah, your industry's about to die. What are you going to do next? And it's like, no, it's not.

People still search. Exactly. It's the same thing with the big social networks now. Like, when I first started, MySpace and Friendster were the predominant players and they died. But they died because they were the first wave. They didn't really have the level of sophistication of understanding human behavior, how to hooking people into these platforms. User retention, monetization, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they all have a team of behavioral scientists that are just engineering the retention into their platform. So the core platforms now TikTok is going through this governmental issue, but YouTube and Meta with their platforms are not going to face that level of scrutiny. Same with X. Unless something dramatically goes wrong. And if something dramatically goes wrong, then we're all going to have to rethink social media. And at a macro level, I think that the only risk or massive shift or change in social media is what's going to happen with the hardware. You see Snapchat, you see Meta, you see Google all investing in hardware. Most of that investment is coming in through some form of glasses. That's where they're kind of projecting out. But that's at least maybe in the short term, three years before there's a product ready to ship. It's more likely it's four to five years. Well, what's the user adoption going to be like? It's not overnight. Five billion people are going to buy a pair of these glasses and transition from a mobile device to glasses. So you're probably looking at a five to ten year timeframe before anything majorly disrupts. And honestly, I'm less interested in trying to predict five to 10 years out on social media and focusing more on what the opportunity is now, because the opportunity now is still absolutely massive. And we know there's going to be some type of crossover. Social media is not going to die. It's just going to be how you consume that content on a different device and that consumption behavior will change eventually, but nobody really knows at this juncture.

Yeah, it's an exciting time to be alive for sure.

Yeah.

So I don't think you actually specified what does it cost to hire your agency.

I mean, we have different packages. I mean typically it starts at like 9 or 10,000 and then it goes up from there based upon the scope of work. So it's anywhere from like $10,000 to $200,000. And as I mentioned, there's certain companies that we will defer a percentage of that fee for revenue share or equity stake.

How do you arrange that? Is it tying the percentage to certain KPIs or OKRs or milestones of some sort?

It really depends on the business. I have deal advisors that basically structure those deals with companies, people that are far more experienced and smarter than me and just working out what's fair for both sides. I mean, obviously we want to be incentivized to help the company grow because otherwise our equity stake or revenue share means nothing. And we're never going to take a percentage of revenue that we didn't earn. So there's many different kind of structures to it. But I have people that are far kind of more experienced in how to do that than I am.

So what are some of the KPIs that you would recommend our listener implement and track and gauge success and improve based on?

So a lot of the work that we do is predominantly video based because video has a higher retention probability than image based. And why retention is so important is that what dictates whether your content gets seen by a thousand people or a million people are the algorithms. And listen, the algorithms are very complex, technical things, but at a very macro level, they're just designed to do one thing, and that's keep people on the platforms longer. The longer people spend on the platforms, the more ads they serve. So thus they're really searching for content that they can see to as many people as possible and hold that attention for as long as possible. So one of the biggest kind of very simplistic things that you can look at is just like how many views is your content getting? If you're not getting views, it's because the algorithms have deemed that you're not holding attention or grabbing attention. So on certain platforms you can dig in a little bit deeper than that. Some of these platforms have a retention graph, meaning they can show you exactly at what point your audience is falling out. Is it at the 5 mark?

YouTube offers that?

YouTube? I believe that Instagram and TikTok have that as well. But you can basically understand where that audience is falling out so that you can get better and better at the storytelling.

And you'd be surprised when you look at the graph and you see 60, 70, 80% of your audience is gone in less than a minute. And it's a hour long video. It's kind of devastating.

Yeah, but that's important information to learn. Again, it's like if you want to play at the highest level and you're stuck at 1,000 views a video, 5,000 views, 10,000 views, that's the reason why. And then you've got to just sit back and understand, well, what am I doing differently? What am I doing differently than the top performers using the same format? Like, if you're talking about podcasts, what happens in my podcast in the first 10 minutes than Joe Rogan or Stephen Bartlett or Lex Friedman or any number of the top 100 podcasts, and that's where it Becomes really a storytelling element or storytelling exercise of what are you doing differently that's causing people to drop off.

What are you doing differently in terms of your own personal brand, your storytelling on your long form videos that you've now really focused your energies on instead of short form?

So we're following a listicle format that a lot of people, we're following it right now. We're probably going to start testing a new format to be defined. But we study in depth the structure. Again, like we do. The same exercise that I mentioned before is we'll take the 10 top performing videos in that format versus the low performers. And again, looking at the elements that drive the contextual elements that drive success in those high performers versus those low performers. And those can be things like the pacing, the tonality. If you're talking about YouTube, it's a thumbnail and headline. What does that script structure look like? What is the promise of value that's being there? How do you pay it off in the end? When do you pay it off? Those different elements as we construct, we spend about three weeks scripting a video before we even shoot it to make sure that all those elements are dialed in. And then as you mentioned, once we start getting data in, we're looking at, well, what's the click through percentage on our thumbnail and headline? How effective is that hook that we created? And then from a retention standpoint, where does it seem to be falling off? And if. Is there a recurring theme on where people are falling off in our script structure? So, so that we can go back and really refine and hone that in.

I know you have a five step framework. I think it's in Hook Point. Right.

It's both in. Because I just rewrote Hook Point. So a new version of Hook Point actually came out a few weeks ago and it is in the guide to going viral.

Yep. And those five steps are so the first step.

We've been talking a little bit about it, but it's the research component. So what we're really kind of doing is going out there and researching what's happening in the larger social ecosystem. So one of the biggest mistakes that people make in regards to social media is they just look at their own content, their own performance. And again, let's just say you're stuck at 10,000 views a video. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again and not try it and learn outside of that scope, you're never going to break through and identify what it takes to succeed at the highest levels in addition, TikTok kind of really introduced this is people will get that one video to go viral, it'll get like a million views, but they have no idea why, so they can't reproduce those results. So the first stop is researching, looking at the larger ecosystem of social media and looking for those formats as we talked about. And it can be as simple as changing your personal consumption behavior of social media from passive to active. So when you're on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever platform you use the most, and you see, oh, that video has 10 million views. Okay, let's click on that creator. Has that creator used that same structure at least five or six times to reproduce similar results? And you keep doing that over and over again until you find a format to be like, oh, that format's interesting to me. I think I want to go after that format. And again, it doesn't have to be a creator doing the same subject matter. Formats like man on the street can be used for many different subjects. So don't pay attention necessarily to the content, but more the context and the structure of it. So once we've identified the format, we go to step two. So we select the format, and that's where we start doing that analysis of that specific format, where we create the spreadsheet and we look at the top performers of that format, the average and the underperformers, and start trying to understand what's the difference between the successful use case in the unsuccessful use case. And then we go, once we have that understanding, then the third step is ideation. Then we can come up with our ideas. Now, most people will start with the idea phase without any idea of a structure, a format, or any of those things. And this is typically why that common reoccurring theme comes up. I have all these amazing ideas, I have an amazing brand, I have amazing message, but it doesn't seem to break through. Well, the reason is you don't have that format or structure, that understanding of what really drives that success. So once we've done our research, we've identified the format, analyze that format, then we come up with the ideas. And then the fourth step is what we call single production planning and iteration, which means we create a single piece of content at a time. Most people want to batch, produce content, but what happens with that is let's say we sit down and create 10 pieces of content. The first piece of content we post fails. We'll the other nine have followed that same model. So what most people will do is they'll just continue to post those other nine without trying to fix the underlying problem. And if you produce a single piece of content at a time, then you can move to the fifth step, which is reviewing the results. And with our model, let's say the video doesn't work well, our model accounts for this and doesn't allow this opportunity loss to happen. Which means if your content follows, you produce a piece of content following this model and it fails to break through, well, what you can simply do is put your video on one side of the screen and then pull up one of those high performers on the other side of the screen and play them side by side and just understand, well, what did I miss? Did I just not execute something properly or did I miss something in that high performer? Maybe I thought that it was really the hook that was driving it, but it was really the tonality that was driving it and I just missed that and I'm going to go fix it the next time around. Or maybe I thought I was doing the pacing correctly, but I was off. Like, my pacing was way too fast. I lost people in it. But if you follow that exercise of putting your piece of content against the high performer, and oftentimes we recommend doing that before you even post it, you will learn where you kind of fell off. In addition, if your video did break through, now you have an understanding of, okay, I followed this model, I followed this process, I understood the things that I needed to integrate in order to make this format work. Now I know it works, so I'm going to go do it again. So you have that fundamental learning and understanding built in.

Can you take a video that you kind of misfired on, delete it and then make the tweak and then republish it, or once it's out in the wild, you're kind of done, you have to start over with a new one?

No, you can. YouTube is a little bit more difficult. YouTube actually has a tool built in where you can actually cut pieces out of a video. So if there is something that you saw that just is killing the retention, you can cut it out. In addition, the thumbnail, you can a B test and you can always integrate and introduce new thumbnails into it. Short form's a little bit easier in that in terms of what you're talking about taking it down, cutting it, and re uploading it. YouTube, I think that they're a little bit more kind of aware of it and they rather you test these elements first before you go to that level. But yes, you can. If it's a really small change. You're like, if I just did this, I think it would really perform, then yes. But if it's a full restructuring to the piece of content, you just got to kind of look at it and determine is it better to create this from scratch with this learning, depending on the amount of time and energy and resources it took to do it.

Well, this has been fascinating. I know we're up on time. If our listener wants to get your latest book again, we want to give that special URL out.

Yeah, it's hookpoint.comm as in Mary, S as in Sam, and P as in Peter. So msp and then if they wanted.

To hire your agency, it's just hookpoint.com.

Yeah.

And then where's your favorite social platform for you personally to send people to, to follow you and be amazed with what you're publishing?

I think it would be good for people to check out my Instagram channel because I do a lot of these quick breakdowns of what's the difference between a video similar, same creator, very similar nature, that generated like 100,000 views versus 10 million views there. Those videos are typically less than 60 seconds.

Those are great, by the way. I've seen a number of them.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, so that can kind of at a very macro level, they can dive in super quick and understand a little bit more about what we've talked about today. And then on LinkedIn, I have a newsletter that we release every week as well, so they can connect there.

Yeah, awesome. I recently subscribed. All right, well, thank you so much, Brendan. This was fabulous. And thank you. Listener, reviewer. Please do something with this. This isn't just edutainment. This is for your betterment and the betterment of the world. So apply it in your business, apply it in your marketing, and make the world a better place. We'll catch you on the next episode. I'm your host, Stefan Spencer, signing off.

If you liked this interview with Brendan Cain, then check out my previous interview with him, episode 301@marketingspeak.com 301. If you want to hear more conversations like this about creating content that tricks truly connects, then I recommend episode 403 with Pamela Wilson, episode 445 with Andy Crestadena, and episode 465 with Bjork Ostrom. Also, I invite you to check out the show notes, transcript, action based checklist and all the URLs mentioned in this interview with Brendan Cain at marketingspeak.com 488. If you enjoyed this conversation. Please share the episode and more importantly, the entire show Marketing Speak with a friend. It'll really help this podcast grow, grow and reach an impact. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Marketing Speak podcast. This is your host, Stefan Spencer. I'm the founder of the SEO agency NetConcepts, co author of the Art of SEO and author of Google Power Search. In addition to this podcast, I also host Get Yourself Optimized, which is about up leveling your life, relationships, peer group, career, business, and spirituality. If you want more traffic and you want to work with me and my team, visit www.netconcepts.com. the site also contains a wealth of resources that include online courses, screencasts, webinars, white papers, articles, and more. To reach me directly, email stefantephenspencer.com or visit my personal website at www.stefanspencer.com. until next time.