Growth Accelerator 4 - Creating a Marketing System

Howdy, folks. It's Den Lenny. It's Wednesday. It's podcast day, and today I'm going to dig into growth accelerator 4. We have a video business accelerator roadmap. It's nine growth accelerators and over the next few months, I'm going to I'm going to be breaking down each accelerator for you in between our regular guest interviews. Today it's about marketing strategy and how to generate leads. I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

So I want to start this episode with a question. What are you doing to generate meaningful leads in your business? By meaningful leads, I mean, you know, if someone visits your website, is there a mechanism for them to engage with you outside of a simply hey, give us a call or contact us box, which is kind of like, you know, the worst possible thing. Hey, contact us whoever wants to contact anyone about anything. Not really. Doesn't happen. What you want to do is you want to find a solution to your problem. If people are searching, looking for video production companies because at some point in the near future they're interested in making a video. So how could you make that process easier for them rather than just displaying your wares and hoping that if they like it, they'll get in touch? And that, I would say, is what 98% of video production companies do. They go, hey, here's our story. We're passionate about filmmaking and here's what we do and here's our showreel. And if you want to get in touch, you get in touch with us. Very few people will actively get in touch through a contact us box. Now, there may be some exceptions, but I'm talking about to build a consistent business, you need a system for generating leads. And this is something that many businesses fail to understand. They get by by word of mouth. You know, people recommend them and that's a fabulous method of building a business. But all too often I come across businesses who kind of leave it to chance. It's all ad hoc. There's no system for generating leads. So what are you currently doing if someone makes an inquiry on your website and it doesn't become a job? Are you following up? Do you have a scheduled diarized follow up to say, hey, notice you made an inquiry a few months ago wondering did the project go Ahead. And then you can ask them the question, oh, if it did go ahead, did you choose someone else? Oh, yeah, we went with someone else. Then you could say, well, how did that work out for you? Were you happy with the result? Did you get what you wanted? Instead of, oh, why didn't you choose us? It's like, did you get what you wanted? And they might say, yeah, we're really happy. And then you can say, well, you know, if you are looking at further projects, we'd love an opportunity to perhaps talk to you about that. We understand that different companies have different, different skill sets. We have a skill set in A, B and C. And you know, you've got to do a bit of research. You can't just call people up cold. But if you look at their site and think that they're a good match for what you offer, then I would, I would follow up and have that conversation. But it all starts with, how are you capturing data on the website? Now, In Growth Accelerator 3, we talked about educating clients and creating some sort of quiz funnel or video content or ebook or checklist or some sort of giveaway to help the client on advance the next stage of their journey. This is Growth Accelerator 4, which is generate. So how are you nurturing those leads? So it has to start with capturing data. You have to have a method for capturing data on your website. And by data I mean an email address, a name and ideally a phone number. Now I'll give you this. If you ask for someone's phone number on a website, you will have a lower conversion rate. And what I mean by conversion rate is the number of people who will actively leave their details will be lower than if you just asked for an email address. Because if we're just giving an email address away, we're just handing over one piece of data. No one can really kind of, you know, we can choose to delete an email. If we give someone our phone number, they might call us. But having said that, if you are serious about trying to solve a problem and you leave your phone number, you're saying, I want to solve this problem, give me a call. So if someone gets your phone number and they are a good fit for your business.

Then this is where I'll just digress slightly. It's really important to understand who you're trying to target.

For example, in my business, I just don't want any old filmmaker booking a call because I just don't have enough hours in a day to have conversations with people. In fact, I had a call with someone who sort of slipped through the net. Prior to this, I didn't have such a good system for filtering, and we had someone. So typically in our accelerator program, we get the best results with businesses who are established, who've been in business three or more years. They're generating any excess of 150,000 US a year. Typically, generally speaking, the ones we have the most success with are already doing three or $400,000, and they want to get up to seven, $800,000, maybe close to a million and above. We tend to work. That's our sweet spot. We have people that are doing more than that, we have people that are doing less than that. It really depends on the individual. But what we don't do is we don't really cater for freelancers just starting out who are making 20 grand a year, because the investment in joining the program will be more than they make in a year. So they have to have available cash flow. And what we like to look at is, you know, someone has to be generating a significant revenue and have existing customers for us to then come in and help them adjust and enhance and solidify what they're doing into systems and processes and, and create that consistency. So, you know, you don't, you don't want to be on the phone to people all day long quoting on videos that you don't want to make. In fact, one of my clients, Edwin, the other day was saying, we have a process in our training about defining your purpose, which is the. What. It's the first accelerator. It's like, what is your personal purpose? What is your business purpose? And we solidify that into a sentence. So our business purpose, for example, is helping video production company business owners succeeded. That's, that's a very clear statement of intent. We tend not to work with freelancers because they're just in a different headspace. They're looking to fill the next job. Business owners are looking to create systems and processes to build a business that can operate without them being on the tools. There's a big shift, significant, but big shift. So you've got to be clear on who you're targeting. A quiz funnel, which we touched on in Growth Accelerator 3, is a great way of qualifying people before they come into your business by asking certain questions. So you can ask questions based on the kind of budgets they've got in mind. And if they're freaking out saying it's under $1,000 and you tend to work at the $10,000 plus point, you can actually put a question there, which pre qualifies people out of the equation. So don't feel you have to ring everyone up. You know, if someone applies to be in our program, but they are not a good fit, we won't ring them up. We'll just send them a series of emails saying, look, this is 20, probably not the right fit for you. Please, you know, kind of listen to podcasts, there's some books, some other resources here you can enjoy and if things change, you can come back to us. So data capture is very important and how you capture that data and what you, what you get your prospect to do prior to giving you that data is very, very important because you want to pre qualify people and not just have them show up and go, hey, yeah, you know, I'm kind of vaguely interested. Let's, let's choose some of your time. And I've had conversations with filmmakers who might spend an hour on the phone with a potential client and then spend an hour doing a quote not to, not to get the job. And they might do that repeatedly. So you've got to be managing your process for who you let into your business. And that all comes down to Growth Accelerator 2, which is define who is your niche vertical, who are you targeting? And you should really target one type of market at a time. But back to Growth Accelerator 4. We're at the generation stage, so once you've captured data, you have to follow up. Now you can do that using automated email software. We use a program called ActiveCampaign and we can set a series of emails to trigger automatically and what's really smart about. And I touched on this in the Educate podcast. What's really smart is you can make it intelligent. You can actually, you know, have an if then scenario. So if they click this link, then send them to that email. If they click that link, then send them to this email. So you can actually be quite smart and clever about how you process that information. But the follow up is important. Now something that I've started doing quite a lot of is sending a video message. So because we are in Australia, time zones can be a bit of an issue at certain times of the day. So rather than phone someone, I will send a video message using Loom. Now Loom is a fantastic bit of software. I use it for a lot of my video production. Now what I do differently is I have a blackmagic web presenter and I have a Canon. I think it's a C100 mark II used to have Blackmagic was doing it. I could also do it with the Sonys, but Basically, I plug that into. Into the blackmagic web presenter. The audio goes through the Rodecaster Pro, and I light it. So we've got a nice shallow depth field. So the image looks really good, but I record it straight into loom. And that means I can send that file to my team and they can edit straight from there. So it's really about kind of efficient workflows. But really the importance of generating leads and following up is all part of a larger marketing strategy. You want to create a marketing system for your business, and. And, you know, sometimes marketing can really freak filmmakers out. But I want you to think of it like this. It's. It's like, I like house analogies. You know, if you have built a house on your own, that's like being a freelancer. You did the brickwork, you did the roofing, you. You did the electrics, you did the plumbing. You learned how to do it yourself, and you did it all yourself. But it took a long time, and you're really happy with it, but it's only you. And your neighbor said, hey, I love what you've done with your house. Could you build me one as well? He tells a few friends, and then, and then there's four or five people suddenly want you to build a house for them, but you realize you can't build it yourself. So as a freelancer, you'd just be like, okay, I'm sorry, I can't build your house, or you're going to have to wait until I'm available to build your house, and it's going to take a lot longer. Now, when you progress into a business owner, you go, okay, well, if I've got five houses I need to build, I could get someone to go and do the foundations on five house, and I could pay someone to build the walls on five houses, and I could pay another person to do the roof, another person to do the electrics, another person to do the wiring. Now, I won't be able to get stuck in and actually get on the tools, but I'll have to coordinate those five things. But I'll make, you know, let's say $10,000 on each house, but I won't have to do any of the hard work. Whereas If I built one house, I might make $15,000, but it will take longer, and it's only me doing it. Now, that's all good and well, but once your friends and family dry up, you're left going, well, I've got all these resources now and no work. So the marketing strategy is like the infrastructure. It's like the road that comes off the highway and drives people into, into the area. And it's like the signage, you know, how are you letting people know that this exists now? It could just be digital signage. It could be a big banner on the street, or you could say, hey, everyone's on Facebook. Why don't we make a video about living in this new estate and post it to Facebook and let Facebook show it to people who are interested in buying a house? That is a marketing strategy. A strategy is how, how can we get people to discover we've got this new piece of land where there's all these houses being built and it's a great place to live. Think of, like, think of your business like that. That's exactly what it is. So you have to create a strategy to attract the ideal clients you want to work with, to bring them into your domain.

And you do that through outreach. And outreach is something that you can do in a number of different ways. Social media is one tactic and outreach. I had a great express.

My friend Jeremy Hobbin, I did a webinar recently that I was on and he, and he said, you know, you want to date tactics, but marry strategy. So tactics are everywhere. You know, everyone's like, you know, there's a course for Instagram, there's a course for LinkedIn, there's a course for Facebook, there's a course for this is a course for that. That's just feeding your, your mind with tactics. You have to get clear on a strategy. And strategy starts with you. What do you want? And once you've decided what you want, how are you going to create a business to facilitate that becoming a reality? And once you've done that, pick a market, you are hungry for what you've got to offer. Who can come and fund this investment vehicle of your business by you delivering great value and helping them overcome their problems and challenges through video. And then you will generate income. So the marketing strategy, the outreach comes from, okay, who am I, who am I targeting and where are they now? I would say that the two platforms that are really key for filmmakers in my experience are Instagram. If you're doing a lot of agency work and a lot of more kind of creative work, I would say Weddings. Actually, it's three platforms. Weddings, if you're on Weddings, Instagram and Facebook. And for general corporate business, LinkedIn is an absolute gold mine. And, and the key is to have strategies for each. Now, if I was just to pick one and you were doing general corporate Video. I would say LinkedIn, hands down, we have a training in our program which is a, it's a, it's a, is a messenger profile strategy and, and that is about building your profile in a certain way and having an outreach connection strategy which is formulaic, which is systemized, which builds real relationships with people on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is such a gold mine just now. There is a real first mover advantage. If you get into this now and the clients we're working with who are really, really getting stuck into LinkedIn are seeing massive gains now. It does take some time. There's no quick fix, there's no quick win. There can be, but I would say if you did 30 days of LinkedIn connections, you'd see the benefits 90 days from now. And that's something else that I want to just really emphasize here. In terms of marketing strategy. There's a huge impatience in the video production world where oftentimes I hear stories where people are like, oh, I've got some inquiries. And they think inquiries are sales. You need probably four times the amount of inquiries coming into your business as leads, as real leads, to factor in, you know, one in four sales converting. And I know because that's what I used to do myself, is think, hey, someone's made an inquiry. Hey, if this job happens, I'll be sorted. And it's a shift between that, that freelance psychology, which is ingrained in us, to more of a business owner psychology. So I want you to be thinking about what kind of marketing strategy do you have? Do you have one? And if you're going to pick one, just pick one. But do it consistently. It's the lack of consistency that most people fall down on. They get distracted, they're not focused, they're not spending time effectively following up on their target market because they don't know who the target market is because they're scared that if they go after one target market, they'll somehow miss out on others. And it's just not the case. In fact, if you want to learn more about that next week we've got an incredible episode with Jeff Anderson on going niche. So guys, I'll leave it for you there for this week. That was Growth Accelerator 4 generate. Have an awesome day.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on iTunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.

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