How to nurture cold prospects into warm leads. EP #182 - Den Lennie

Howdy, guys. Dan here with this week's episode of the how to Scale a Video business podcast.

Episode 182.

I think it's 182. Let me just double check that 182.

Often these blend into each other. So today I want to talk about something very, very high level that I think will be stretch you a little bit. But I think it's really important to understand if you want to scale your business and reach more clients. And ultimately I think that's why everyone's here, is to get more clients.

But you have to go deeper than just simply wanting more clients.

So what we have to understand is that not every person who is thinking about video is ready for video right now. Seems pretty straightforward. Right? So let me kind of break that down further.

In a perfect world, clients know exactly what they want. So they're in their most aware state being, you know, I know what I want, I know what I want to get it, I know how I'm going to get to do it. These are kind of the ideal clients. These are the clients you want to be kind of calling in your mobile saying, hey Dan, you know, I've got this project, I've got 30 grand, can you do it? But of course, that's not how most business works. It is how business works. If you put the work in and get to that point where you've got a really tight group of customers who just, you know, once you got 20 or 30 clients who just call you and book you all the time, you can, you don't really have to do as much outbound marketing.

But the clients that are in the most aware states have an immediate need or a problem they're looking to solve straight away. They want to fix it now and they want you to solve it. And they're not budget related, restricted. They just want to spend the money and get it done. Which would be perfect really in almost all situations. But of course we live in an imperfect world. The reality is probably more likely you're going to get someone.

In the past you would have sold to anyone that's got a pulse. But you know, that can be very challenging because when you sell to everyone, you end up with a lot of problems. So how do you get someone who's completely unaware to aware? Well, there's a couple of things that have to happen and, and you have to start understanding that people are prospecting way earlier in the, in the conversation that in their mind than before they'll actually come and talk to you. And so I want to introduce you to a guy called Eugene Schwartz. Now, Eugene Schwartz was born in 1927, and he's kind of regarded as one of the best copywriters to ever have lived. Now, a copywriter is someone who, who writes for a living, but they write persuasive words to encourage someone to buy something. Now, that's not to say it's manipulative. It is, it is using psychology to, to trigger a response in someone's mind. But Eugene Schwartz wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising, which, you know, if you can get it now, will cost you a couple of hundred dollars. But it's regarded as the kind of bible for direct response copywriting. Now, you might be thinking, then, I run a video company. I don't need to know about that. Bear with me. Because everyone has to learn how to sell. And where I see the most mistakes happening in video companies is that people are lazy. They just, they're not doing the deep work required to communicate their core message exactly to the right customer. But more than that, understanding that different customers and different prospects on a journey need a different marketing approach to progress them through the journey.

So there are five stages of customer awareness that Eugene Schwartz identified.

From completely unaware that they have a problem that needs solving to most aware, where they know they want you.

With three stages in between, which are problem aware, solution aware, and product aware. So what we have to understand is how do we move people up through the different stages of awareness so that when they are ready to buy video, they automatically think of you? And this is where I see a real opportunity for businesses who understand that you're a marketing business, when you're a video business, you have to be producing content that attracts your ideal client early enough in the conversation they're having in their mind. So what I mean by that is.

When someone is searching for a solution they're looking to learn about, is video the right solution for them? They will start to do some research, and if they Google, you know, video production companies or company video or how to get a video made, they're going to see video production companies pop up in Google. And, and I would say, I would argue that 90%, 95% of those will all be the same. It'll be like they'll all look the same, they'll all say the same things. They don't really offer any help or insight to someone who's browsing. Most video production companies make the assumption everyone understands video and they understand the importance of, you know.

4K or 8K or, you know, you know, gimbals. And aerials and blah, blah, blah, blah. But actually the opposite is true. Most people just want a solid pair of hands. And actually a lot of, a lot of creatives scare corporates because they're worried they'll just get too creative. And we did a podcast on this a while back and you know, you've got to be careful not to allow your own creativity to get in the way of delivering a product or a service to a client. So the five levels of customer awareness.

I won't go into them in too much depth today, but understand there are five levels of customer awareness. And so what you want to be doing is moving someone progressively from completely unaware. In fact, I wouldn't even try and sell to people that are unaware. People who are problem aware. They know they've got a problem that they want to solve, but they don't know if video is the right solution. That is the earliest point in which I'd enter a conversation. Even then I'd be a little bit reluctant because you're, you're kind of battling with whether someone's going to do a print campaign or a video campaign. You're trying to convince them to do video. They don't even know if they want to do video yet. At the solution aware stage, that is where I would start entering the conversation in people's mind where they know that video is the right solution for them. They're just not sure what video and who. Now this is the point where you can actually enter the conversation going on in a prospect's mind and become a factor early on in that conversation. And you can do that by simply becoming an authority. So how do you do that? Well, there's a number of channels you're probably working across, but you have to be very, very clear about who you serve primarily and what it is about your expertise that puts you in front.

You know, it's about becoming the author, the authority, excuse me, which is, you know, why I talk about creating things like ebooks and follow up sequences. And there can be an awful lot of resistance from filmmakers on this because it goes in a too hard pile. And, and I often see conversations where it's like, oh, does this work? Does that work? Who's done this? Who's done.

You have to become an authority in the mind of your prospects in the market that you serve. And so you become an authority by publishing something. And so every modern business, including video businesses, have to be content. Publishing businesses, if you want to achieve level success that you aspire to, you have to be creating content. Now that doesn't mean you have to be creating content every day. Um, I mean, yes, you can create articles for blogs that will help your SEO. Um, and if you're uploading videos, you should be uploading them to YouTube and making sure they're optimized across keywords and tags. Um, you know, you want to have some sort of downloadable asset on your website, be it audio, video, PDFs, something that a prospect who is in the solution aware stage, who's looking for a solution, can download something of value. Now, your market will determine what that is. And it's something we talk about a lot in the vba, and that's the value of having weekly coaching calls. We bring these kind of topics up on an ongoing basis. We're constantly looking at this. In fact, one of our members at the weekend put a post and saying, hey guys, I'm looking at all these different marketing opportunities. Which one, it has been working for you. And so conversations begun so that, so that Jamie can shortcut some of his work to getting to the result faster. And Jamie's already running a very, very successful video business and he's always looking for the edge. He's always looking for more. So, you know, posting on LinkedIn, you know, are you posting frequently on LinkedIn? Is your, is your profile articulated in a way that, that says to your prospect of market, we'll help you get what you want.

So, you know, there's a lot of practical stuff, but. And it takes time, you know, and there's a lot of work to do. And I wish I could just say to you, do this one thing and you'll get massive results. It just doesn't work like that. You've got to be doing a number of different things, we call them marketing pillars. You've got to have different marketing pillars supporting your overall lead generation in your business. Otherwise you're just, you know, you're throwing mud at the wall, hoping some of it sticks. And that's really how, I'd say 99% of video businesses operate, word of mouth. And, and that's fine, but it's not predictable and it's not consistent. And what happens is you get busy when you're working and you stop marketing. And then when you're not working, not, not busy filming, you're panicking about the fact you've done any marketing. And it's a roller coaster. And it's just, I see it again and again. I have hundreds of conversations with people and it's the same problem. And until you make a decision to Accept that if you want consistency, you have to be consistent. It's like this podcast, you know, I put out two episodes a week. We're up to 182 episodes. That hasn't happened for any other reason than I have to do it twice a week every week. And that consistency builds value. And we're up around 50,000 downloads now. So it just, you know, it just takes time and consistency and there's work involved, but you have to be clear on who you're serving and why you're an authority in that field. Otherwise you're just fighting the battle with everyone else for airspace. So.

How do you create authority? Well, you create authority by becoming an authority and sharing exceptional value. In fact, we've just literally launched our new website@denleny.com, so I'd love you to go over there, have a check out. There's a brand new ebook we've just created you can download from the bottom of the website. We've got a number of assets on our website that encourage people who have an interest to get something of real value for free. And in return, we get their email address and we communicate with them through email and we make offers and that is how we build a relationship. And I think the first 15 or 20 emails is all just like value with an invitation to come to a call. I'm always very transparent about this on this show. The reason I do this podcast is to generate leads. The reason we built a website with, with download and opt ins is to generate leads. And a certain number of those prospects become leads and certain those leads become clients. And that's how we fund this. We fund this by, by billing a monthly subscription for our mastermind. We have a foundation program we sell and that is how we generate revenue that funds podcasts and websites and all this other good stuff. So how then do you convert that authority? Well, you want people to come back to your website. And your website has to be a place where at least there's a single landing page where you can capture details of the visitor. And I hear a lot of resistance to this. But here's some facts, okay? If you have 100 people visiting your website, the chances are that 99 will leave without taking any action at all. And the one person that remains might click a link and might not. Now, if you have a look at Hotjar or Crazy Egg and you put that software on your site, it's a heat map software and it will show you exactly what people do on your website, how long they dwell for, and where they click on and where they click off. So what you have to do is create some sort of opt in. That's a way for you to say, hey, if you're interested in what I'm offering, I'm going to give you some genuine value for free. And all I'm asking in return is an email address. And an email address is still valuable collateral because people are so distract.

And they may not be that keen to give it away willy nilly because people know they might get spammed. So be careful not to use your own bias because if you're creating real genuine value, then it's not spam, it's valuable, helpful information that helps someone on their journey. And what typically happens is they will remember who gave them value. And if you give people genuine real value in advance and not just like some cursory free stuff, but genuine free value, they're going to read that and go, well, if I get so much value from the free stuff, imagine what it's like when I pay them. And this is a big mistake that I see a lot of people make is they try too hard to just sort of throw an email, an e book out into the market. Cursorily, it's not valuable, it's not designed properly, it doesn't look like it's premium, and then they wonder why it doesn't work. You have to put some money into it. I got my ebook copywritten, I had it designed, I spent a few thousand dollars on it, but I sell a premium service so I want everything I do to be premium. And you. We've just released our new website. We've spent a lot of money on it and had it copywritten and I'm really proud of it. It'll be interesting to see how it converts, but I feel it better represents us and what we're doing than what we had previously. But that's not to say we didn't do, you know, very, very good for the first 10 years with crappy websites. But we're at a point now where we want to scale up. So give great value and it has to be full of integrity. You have to be doing it from a place of great intent and wanting to help people.

Because people are trained to smell bullshit and they know someone's just sort of scamming them for an email address and trying to get something in return. You have to be making sure you're offering genuine value. And once you get the opt in, there's a couple of ways you can do this. Using things like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign or AWeber or ClickFunnels. There's lots of apps you can do it, you know, for 10 or $15 a month, but you know, to do it right. Maybe 50, $60 a month, but. But you know, the number of people you will mature through a relationship. One of the things we do suggest in our BBA is send a weekly email out to, to your prospects saying, hey, here's what we've been doing in the last week. And so 52 times a year you're just putting yourself in front of your clients with interesting stuff. But you know, many people are just too scared and you can't afford to be scared. So.

The other thing you can do is use Google and Facebook and even YouTube, which is part of Google, to retarget ads. So you'll know that that is when you've. We just got solar installed in our house and now I've got loads of solar ads in my feed. It's about people being aware of consciousness, understanding who you are and you're around. And it's to do with the mere exposure effect and it's to do with the number of times someone comes into contact with your brand, product or service for them to feel comfortable, that they feel like they're getting to know you and they're familiar. And so you can use social media retargeting as quite a smart way to do that. So when someone comes to your website and they download an ebook, they start to get a series of emails from you that's continuing the relationship. But then they might see a retargeted ad on Facebook or Google. Maybe they see a YouTube video, maybe they see some case studies and they start seeing other posts. Maybe they go onto LinkedIn. Maybe one of your emails is, hey, I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn.

And they start seeing LinkedIn posts that you push, you can see quickly how that starts to accelerate the process of the exposure to your service and brand. So it's really, that's what a marketing system is all about. So it's about having clarity about what you're offering to who and making sure wherever your prospect might be, that.

They are seeing you over the hundreds of thousands of other video production businesses that exist. And if you're doing that level of work, then you're very clear and consistent across all socials that you are here for the long run, you've got experience and you're here to build and develop a relationship with them. Because the lifetime value of a video client can be Hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's getting very clear about what your offer is and making sure that you become the number one choice.

When someone's ready to buy. So, you know, if a prospect comes to your website, initially they're just browsing, but if they sign up to your ebook.

You know, and let's say 100 people visit your website and maybe 5 to 10 sign up for your reboot, well, that's a 5 to 10% conversion from cold traffic to becoming a prospect. And a prospect is the first stage where they're saying, I'm kind of vaguely interested in what you've got to offer. So I'm going to give you my email address to see if you are in fact what I'm looking for. But if you try right away to go, hey, buy my video, hey, let's jump on a call. Let us, you know, let's work out how we can help you. It's too soon. You've got to think of it like dating. You've got to take your time. So let's say you've got a hundred people visit your website and 10 opt in for your ebook because you got a great headline, a great offer, and the book is going to be of genuine value. And it's talking to that prospect at the point where they're at on their journey. It's not going into details about how we can use gimbals and, you know, 4K to make your video look great. It's about, you know, why video might be a great solution and here's some examples of where it's worked for other clients. And here's some of the results we've gotten to encourage them down the pathway of here a number of different videos you can make. And, and you know, this is that the details of the ebook have to be related to your market. I can't just give you a kind of a template. We do have in the vba, a process for how to write an e book based on your market. But I can't just say, write it on this and here's top 10 tips and off you go. Because, because that wouldn't be, wouldn't be, wouldn't be realistic.

So, you know, once you've got people opted in for your ebook, you can continue the conversation. And once you get those, say 10 or 20% people subscribing, you might even get as much as 30 or 40% subscribing if it's really good. And maybe, Maybe out of 100 people that visit your website and 30 people opt in maybe three will become customers. That, that's a good ratio. That means, you know, you're actually building a system that will help people become customers. Eventually we might be talking about 90, 120 days, maybe even longer. I've had prospects who downloaded an ebook 5, 10 years ago who decide that this year is the year they want to do some coaching. So, you know, when you, when you weigh up the long term value of a prospect, it's a no brainer. Like you just, you just write the emails once and they run. And I've had email campaigns running for years. And it's a way of just building a conversation so that when people are ready to buy, they think of you. That's essentially what email marketing and ebook marketing is all about. When they're ready to buy, you become a factor in their mind rather than just, you know, pipe picking someone they see. It's like this podcast, you know.

It'S just a way to communicate with an audience. And I think we're over 50,000 downloads now. And we just keep pushing great content out, great value. And if you've been listening for a while, you know, I don't hold anything back. And there are plenty of people who listen to this podcast who will never pay me any money. They'll just take the advice and run with it. And that's cool because the people I'm enjoying working with just now are having phenomenal success in the last week. So we do a weekly win in our group on a Friday in the Mastermind, and last week alone, one client alone had $120,000 a week and another client had $100,000 a month. And these are people who, you know, one guy two years ago was making 100,000 a year, now he's doing $100,000 a month. It's taken two years. He's invested time, effort and money, but he's showing up every time, every week, every month. And he's getting phenomenal success. And that is the people I love working with, people that understand it takes time. There are no overnight quick fixes. But once you build that business correctly, you have phenome. And I tell you, the energy in the group's phenomenal. You know, it's so inspiring.

So, you know, you want to be bringing people into your ecosystem, bring people into your world. And the great thing about an ebook as well, you know, is like if you write it well, if there's five or 10 tips in that ebook, then there's five or 10 blog posts or five or 10 videos or five or 10 emails. Like, it's. It's a system. It. You don't have to create a whole heap of work for yourself. You write the one thing that you understand most about. Well, and that's why targeting your market is so important.

You know, and we've done all sorts of things in the past. We've tried bots and all sorts of things, but they're just tactics, you know, and it's very easy to get distracted with tactics. But I encourage you to go and download our ebook on the new website. I think it's at the bottom of the bottom of every page and go through the sequence yourself and see what you think and let me know what you think of it. Because it's designed to be a nurturing process, but it automated. It's slow and steady progress. You know, it's pushing traffic into that offer. We've also got a separate landing page. We're going to be doing some paid ads into that. But the key is you've got to be absolutely clear about what it is you do and who you do it for. You know, in my business, everything we do is about helping video businesses succeed in the business side of, you know, the commercial world of videography and in the corporate world. My book was about that, my podcast about that, the ebooks about that. Everything we do is about that topic. So we attract people who are ready for the next part of that journey. And this podcast, when we first devised it, was a place to come and listen to kind of information around building a video business. And, you know, that's what we've done. And we've had numerous products over the years, but now our core product is just to help people succeed through the podcast and through that, we're hitting hundreds of thousands of people, and that's the goal. And then we work with a small group of people at a very high level to achieve extraordinary results. And we're doing that very successfully. And the new website has a lot of case studies and a lot of testimonials and a lot more coming online. And that's why we've invested in it, because we've been doing a pretty poor job of actually sharing the success of our clients. But that's because we wanted to make sure the success was consistent and we wanted to make sure that our clients who are paying us get the majority of our attention. And that's what we're doing. So.

I'll wrap this up by saying you want to be creating some kind of ethical bribe on your website. You want to become the go to person for your market. You want to become the authority, and it's a critical component. And, you know, it takes time. I mean, we've been doing this 12 years, and I think we've now got the system really dialed in. We know our numbers, we know what our conversion ratios are. We know what it costs to get a customer. We know what it costs to put someone into a funnel. And we understand that there's a cost to acquiring a prospect. And not every prospect that we pay to acquire through marketing and advertising will become a customer. But we know what our ratios are. But it's taken time. But now we can turn ads on and dial up the spend, knowing what our output is going to be on the other end. And that is a consistent marketing system. And that's what I'm working with my VBA clients to build, is that consistent marketing system. And we're seeing some phenomenal results when some of the guys are just taking some of these areas and focusing on them. But the fact that getting weekly coaching and support is what makes a difference. So make sure you think about building some kind of email list, some kind of free giveaway that is of genuine value to your market. You know, and another thing to remember about email is if someone doesn't respond to an email, it doesn't mean they're not seeing it and they're not reading it. And, you know, you might see one in five emails that get sent out, but if you send one email a month, that means that you're only seeing one email every five months. If you send five emails a week, you're going to see the prospects going to see one email a week. Now, I don't imagine anyone here is. Is bold enough to send an email a day. We did it for a while, and it's something we may do again because your audience will want to hear from you. When I, when I talked about dropping this podcast down to one episode a week, Ben, one of my clients was like, I love the two episodes a week. Please don't do that. So we didn't. Because I listen to what my clients tell me, and actually, it's as simple as that. You've just got to give your clients what they want and put them first. And that is the key. But right at the very other end of the funnel, when people don't know who you are, is email is a phenomenal way of bringing people into your world on autopilot. And when they're ready, they'll start to reach out and want a conversation. But. But Most of all, this will feel uncomfortable, okay? And you may not know what you're doing. That's why we have a foundation program. That's why we have a mastermind. And generally speaking, the way we divvy that up is that if you're doing under $10,000 a month, then you'd fall into the foundation program, where there's just some certain things you've got to do before you're ready for the mastermind. And once you're at $10,000 a month and above, you qualify for the mastermind. And it becomes a much more intense ride. Because if you're doing three to five thousand a month and you want to get to ten, there's quite a lot of work to do. But once you get to 10, getting to 20 and 30 isn't as hard as you think once you've got those foundations in place. And that is why we built the VBA foundation program. So most of all, take action today. Pick one thing and do it. And be patient. None of this stuff happens quickly, but if you plan properly and you implement regularly, you will become more successful as a result. And the fact is, it will take time. And if you want help to accelerate that process faster, then please do download our ebook and consume that information. And if you want to have a chat about joining one of our programs, happy to have a call and help you decide whether or not that's the right thing for you. But that's it for me, guys. I will see you again next week. You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support, and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.com 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. And don't forget to share if you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers. You know, if please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. So thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.