The Secret To Cheap and Effective Paid Advertising - EP #107 with Kim Barrett

Hey guys. Dan, Lenny here with an episode of how to Scale a video business podcast. Now this week I am going to delve into the archives. I was going through my phone and had forgotten I'd done this incredible interview with a chap called Kim Barrett. And Kim Barrett is a world renowned social media marketer who focuses primarily on Facebook. He's an international best selling author, a speaker and a trainer, having taught marketing around the world and helps businesses grow from six to to seven figures. And his business, your social voice, helps businesses get heard on social media and most importantly build engagement and generate more leads and sales. And I've known Kim for a few years because we're both part of Ben Simkins mastermind. And a few years ago we were in Bintan island for an end of year summit with Ben and a bunch of other smart marketers. And while we were chatting over lunch I said, you know, it'd be really great if we did an interview, Kim.

And so actually on the ferry from Bintan island to Singapore, we sat down for 35 minutes and on the boat had a chat about marketing specifically for video businesses and especially freelancers who are thinking about starting a business or want to move from that freelancer into a more business mindset. Now this was actually recorded a couple of years ago, but I was listening back to it today going this is just as relevant today as it was then, which got me thinking about the fact that you know, and oftentimes filmmakers particularly, we're always looking for something new and in actual fact marketing principles don't change. Target market, know who you're speaking to, have a message and an offer that really targets that that market and makes them feel something, that they want to take some action. So this was recorded on my phone. We had, didn't have any fancy technology, but I think you're going to really, really appreciate and enjoy the content. So I'll hand over to, to the, to the audio now and yeah, I hope you really enjoy it.

So we are currently on a ferry from Bintan island to Singapore. It's a very rocky ferry. I'm here with Lord Barrett of Glencoe, thank you kindly. Also known as Kim Barrett. Kim, why don't you introduce yourself? Let's not go into the Lordship quite yet, but tell the filmmakers who are listening to this podcast what it is you do and how you help businesses get seen and noticed.

Definitely. So essentially we hope this business owners focus on doing what they do best. So we take care of the marketing whether we teach it to them or we do it for them so they can focus on just providing great service to their customers and clients, whether that be through Facebook. We have a separate company that does stuff for SEO and AdWords and allow them to really do what they actually got into business for.

And I think as filmmakers, we particularly are marketing and sales, and business isn't something that comes naturally to us. We really wanted to make want to make films and make great films for clients. So one of the things that I'm always sharing with the guys and the girls is if there's something you can outsource to an expat company, it makes a lot of sense. So what kind of things would, let's say a small video business, one, maybe two employees who are helping businesses make corporate videos. One of the things they struggle with is getting out of this sort of feast and famine of the freelance mindset. So in order to do that, you need to create some consistent marketing. But what are some of the basic things people could be doing to just be more visible online?

Well, the funniest thing that I always find is that anyone that's great at something normally doesn't do what they do for their clients, for themselves. So first of all would be like, hopefully you have a great film of your own. Company would be number one. Because video marketing across the board, everywhere that you can do it is the easiest and most effective way to get in front of people. So I always tell people, step one is have or get created a great video that you can market on Facebook. You can put a onto your YouTube channel, you can have on your website to hold people there, grab their attention. And normally, especially for filmmakers, it's like, well, that's the easy thing. For most other business owners, it's the hardest. But I think any form of video that you can have dramatically increases the interaction with your clients and actually shows your professionalism as well, especially in this business.

Across the board. So having those videos there is step one, because step two is then anyone that watches them, you can then also capture them as a lead after across all the platforms.

So, you know, websites are obviously still important, but I always think of websites now as digital business cards. It's where people go and check you out to check your real. How important is a good Facebook profile, a LinkedIn profile? How important are your public profiles on social.

Well, the biggest thing to remember is that you're going to be, whether you like it or not, advertising. At some point, you have to do some form of marketing. So it's kind of the same thing as going, well, if you're going to an event and you're going to meet prospective clients. How are you going to dress? Are you going to go in board shorts, thongs and you know, like messy hair, look like you just woke up in bed? Or are you going to present yourself in the best way possible? So I think that it is extremely important to not only showcase yourself and your professionalism, but also to show what value you can bring. And what I mean by that, for example, is Facebook have video covers on your cover profile. They have videos for your profile picture for your business page. LinkedIn is now becoming more of a hub for video as well. Well, so especially for this industry, I think it's hugely important to be able to leverage that and go. Because when they see that they come there, they go, wow, these guys are ahead of the curve. Because not only everyone else has those video cover, especially because you guys are filmmakers, then it's like, well if you have that on this, like wow, like I didn't even know you could do that. I didn't even know that's another application for video and stuff, you know, 30 second highlight reel at the top and like have featured videos and you can actually now.

Segment your profile as a video creator and it gives you like more options to display your video and actually presents it better for those people that create videos. And it's not really for companies, it's more for influencers and things like that. But being filmmakers, that gives you even more opportunity to leverage.

So you essentially you can hack that element of the social profile which is that they're calling video creators, the content creators. But if you're a filmmaker and a video producer, a producer of content for third party businesses, then you can essentially have. That's a great tip. What about, you know, a lot of people get very overwhelmed with. They'll try one thing, they'll try and do some Facebook ads and they'll way too broad targeting and not spend enough budget and have a really crappy offer and then go, oh, I tried Facebook marketing, it didn't work. And then some people will say, well I've heard SEO's dead or you know, I don't want to pay for AdWords. There's a lot of conflicting confusion in amongst the chat rooms and the groups. What's your advice to the small filmmaker business.

Perhaps isn't doing any advertising.

I would say like you said earlier, even if it's a one page website, it's always great to have for authenticity. It's like someone checking your business name certificate, you know, like just to See, you're real. But then I would say choose one platform. I think for most filmmakers, my recommendation would be Facebook or Instagram, depending on what they're most comfortable with. And get to the point where you're kind of like not stalled in growth, but you're very happy with the growth of your business. And then add on additional marketing arm. When you've got a team, when you've got time, you've seen what works, what doesn't work, and start small, you know, you can. Facebook, I think is the best. Or Instagram because they run on the same ad platform to do, you know, 1, 2, 3, 5, $10 a day, you don't have to spend thousands. You can start with that. See the engagement. Get the belief of yourself that it works and then start to extrapolate from there. But I wouldn't say go and do everything. It's like cool. I've done ads for a bit, Facebook ads. I'm getting some consistency now. I want to get my website up and ranking. Let's look at a little bit of SEO. Now I've got that. I just want to get couple of keywords. I want to have an adword running so that I'm seeing it in more places.

And over lunch earlier, we were talking about this before recording and you said, you know, marketing, it's like having spokes of a wheel. You can't have a wheel run on one spoke. And I've heard it referred to as the marketing Parthenon, where you've got lots of pillars. What would be the minimum that a freelance filmmaker who's thinking about doing a bit more production wants to start his own website? You know, they want to start a production company. What would be the minimum recommendation for just making sure there's consistency across social profiles.

Yeah. So for me, and the reason why I like to think of it as like a wheel and spokes is pretty much you can see if you have one, it would flop. If you have two, it would flop three. You could kind of get away with like a little bit of bumpiness. So whether that's just like your website, your and Facebook and Instagram, I probably think that Facebook and Instagram would be the two core ones for filmmakers just because they. They're the most set up to allow you to display your skill. And maybe LinkedIn is a kind of a backend or YouTube, sorry, maybe like those two as the back end. I think Instagram and Facebook would be the best to leverage.

We've actually found a lot of members getting a lot of success with LinkedIn. But it's a very deliberate connection strategy and forming connections with potential clients and building that over time. But that's quite an involved commitment. One thing that I hear a lot and I'm always baffled by it a bit but I'm always curious as to where it comes from is people will say to me, oh, but I don't think my corporate clients will be on Facebook.

Yeah. Which is to put it nicely, rubbish. Basically it's like because everyone thinks of corporations as corporations but someone runs that corporation and makes a decision and they have family, they have friends. Like it's funny, I ran into a guy who we now partner with and he's like I've been watching your stuff on, on Facebook. He's like, has like a sold a half a billion dol mergers and acquisition company in the UK and most people, if I was trying to tell them that that's who I now I'm partnered with in some aspects and he found me on Facebook would be like, no, that's not possible. But everyone is just because the company may be like the head of Rio Tinto still has a facial profile and sends his friend messages. You know what I mean? So they're all there.

The other thing that I've observed and researched is that it's no longer the case that one person makes a decision. Let's say a company's thinking about getting some video made. It's no longer one person. The CEO doesn't say I know Dan. So I'm going to get him to make the videos. He'll pass it down to his marketing division. They'll pass it down to their marketing department and their marketing department will probably say to their marketing assistant or even intern research video companies. And one thing that I, I see a lot of it's very me too websites and me too profiles. It's like, you know, front page. But we're passionate about making films. It's a show reo no lead capture, no sense of perspective. Where's the value for the client?

I teach in my programs that you know, creating lead capture forms some sort of ebook or video series is a great way to build a relationship with someone. And sometimes I hear people saying but you know, but email is dead. And what's your view on you know, front end marketing with a view to getting people offline?

I think it is great and it's very important and nothing's ever dead. Generally when you say, when someone says it's dead it just means that they suck at it and there's opportunity for everybody. Because I remember there was a time when everyone would keep saying, like, with Facebook, there's different ad positions. Just like, oh, newsfeed. The only place, Right Hand Kong's dead. You can't run ads there. As soon as everyone started saying that, I started turning all my ads onto Right Hand Corner because I knew I would get less competition. So, look, I highly believe in taking people off. And I agree with you as well about the whole me too thing. I would say it's even more powerful again, if you can make sure you have your niche. And it doesn't mean that you only work with that type of client. But as soon as you. For example, okay, we only work with small businesses in this sector. For example, if we made films for them or we did videos for them, great. It makes it so much easier when people see a website to identify exactly who you want to work with. Be specific. Like, we have. I have a friend who did that, and he's like, now one of the only filmmakers for Russell Brunson from Clickfunnels. Like, he only works with him. I'm pretty sure Russell owns part of his company, I'm quite sure. But it's just purely from working their process and going cool. And you don't have to not work with anyone else, but it makes it very easy to see that, okay, I work with people that want this outcome and they're in. This doesn't mean to be this industry or this type of person. It's like, cool. And here is the ebook for that type of person. And, you know, we have a generic ebook get five clients than we have. But we have get five clients for yoga teachers. You get five clients for finance brokers. It's just the same ebook with a different cover. But because we specify to them our leads are half the cost on those pages than our general one. And people are more engaged with it because they believe it's specifically for them.

And of course, the added benefit of being niche is that you can target a lot more effectively, because Facebook is a very, very powerful platform, but it's also a huge platform with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of variables. And so if you're trying to target everyone.

It'S like sending a fishing line.

Out in the ocean rather than a very specific net with some bait in it. So how would you advise small business.

Do their very first campaign?

Well, like I said, first of all, you do have to have that niche. And I would. For a lot of people, I think.

They look bigger than they need to be to start off. With, for example, I live in Perth. A lot of people when they live in Perth, even if they're kind of like a national, they can sell things nationally, they'll market to the whole of Australia. It's like, cool. Well, start off in your local area, Perth, or for example, West Perth, and go, cool. Send in the marketing campaign to your ideal market in that area are it's going to be a lot smaller and probably some people would say, you know, it's too small to market to. But realistically, 10,000 people in a suburb or even a couple of thousand if you're like in regional, first of all, a lot of them may already know you. So you're going to get a better result than when you're trying to market to the whole huge area. And that's why like we have, we do some work and we call one of our programs Mogul. And it's like, how can you become a mogul in your industry and how can you like just become that local celebrity? Because it's a lot easier when you're there and you walk around and you do other things. You network and stuff like that and people see more and more of you. It's way easier to convert than trying to market to the whole of Australia and reintroduce yourself.

I did a campaign recently and it was an email campaign, but I also ran ads, awareness ads and video testimonial ads at the same time. And while I didn't convert anyone directly from an ad to a sale, the emails converted into sales. And I'm certain that the combination of the email campaign going and the ad showing up in their feed and I was able to retarget people who had received the email, opened the email, not open the email, click the email. And what I realized and discovered there was it is like the spokes of the wheel. It's about multiple things simultaneously. You mentioned networking. Going to a networking event, but also running Facebook ads and running posts on LinkedIn, perhaps Instagram ads for that target market. You're just going to stand out.

Yeah, 100%.

I want to touch brief on some of the technological sides of what's going.

On in the industry.

Facebook messenger is providing a huge opportunity and I know you guys have been doing a lot of work in that space. What's your thoughts? Where are you going with that? With the messenger bots at the moment?

It's kind of like the early days of any new technology. It's like a land grab. I think a lot of people are trying really hard to build these lists up because it's the same as an email list at the moment. So you get people in, they become a subscriber, you want to. You can send broadcasts out to them. And I feel like now, while it's all available, I can't tell whether it's going to be like that forever, whether they may ever stop doing or anything like that. But the price is so much cheaper to get someone to send you a message versus to put their email address in and opt in for your emailed. And you can also get them on your email list after. But I find it so much cheaper, more efficient. You know, like when you look at your email open rates, if you're tremendous, maybe you're 40, 50% of people open your emails. If you're regular, 10 to 15.

Yeah. I mean, I'm averaging 18%.

Yeah.

And but on messenger, it's 80 to 90% open rates.

Right.

So like you said that campaign before, let's just say it did a thousand dollars and you had 18. If we, you know, times that by 4, then it would have like a 400% increase in your sales just by having more people open it.

So what I'm hearing is that it's not about being attached to any one particular marketing process or technology, but just understanding how can you build, how can you begin a relationship, how can you nurture that relationship and then be in a position where you can make some offers. So obviously a lot of filmmakers are, I want to say that they're open to marketing, they're a bit intimidated by it. And, you know, we talk about running our Facebook campaigns, and certainly we help with some of that in the basic stages. But we were chatting earlier about SEO.

For me, it always makes sense that if you've got a limited amount of time, don't try and do everything yourself.

But I also understand that it's very confusing for a small business filmmaker to go, well, where do I go? Which SEO company do you know? Because SEO companies are hammering your inbox every day saying, let's pay us $1,000 a month. We'll sort you out, rank you. And then there's conflicting information where people are saying, well, SEO is not so important anymore. You're better spending money on paid ads. And for me, there's a lot of confusion. Where could you guys help? Do you offer any kind of services that might be able to help with getting through some of the mud?

Ye definitely we'll have together by the time this is ready for everyone, a page where people can register interest and we'll be able to provide them a full SEO report on what actually is happening on their site at the moment, if they have a site, or what they would need to do if they want to set one up, and then from there what adjustment and changes needs to happen. So we have, I think it's something like a 21 point checklist that our team go through and they kind of give it rankings based on that. Because a lot of people go, oh yeah, it's not important. Or instead, but it's like, well, people are always searching and Google and, and somewhat YouTube as well.

Still are.

Like, I still go to Google to search things. A lot of people still do. So there's, there's, there's money there. And I like to put my buckets, you know, if it's raining outside. How many buckets do you put down if you're drinking rain water? As many buckets as you can. So if people are searching for things, I still want to have, I still want to pop up and be, for lack of better words, like omnipresent. You want to be everywhere.

Yeah.

And I want to capture people searching, I want to capture them if they're on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever they are.

And this is why it's so important to clear on your target nature, your specialty. Because by the time you've taken that specialty and you've put it, you've SEO'd it and you put it on your website and you put it on all your social profiles and you've got clarity across your pages and you start to run campaigns and retargeting ads. It's a lot of work.

Yeah.

So just wanted to touch on retargeting because as I understand it, retargeting is a very, very cost effective way to keep your message in front of people. So explain to me what retargeting is for anyone that's not familiar with it and can use Facebook retargeting and Google retargeting.

Yeah, for sure. The easiest way I like to think about it is if you have a shop front and if you imagine someone comes into your shop front and as soon as they do, you put a sticker on them, like a little sticker out in school, you've done a good job. Little sticker. Then afterwards, when they leave, what happens is you imagine then that you pull up, open your computer and you've got a list of everyone collectively as a pool. So a number of people, not their personal information, but you've got a number of people that you've put a sticker on and now you can run ads to them across every like depending on what you put there on many platforms you can do it on LinkedIn, you can do it on Facebook, you can do it on Google. So they're kind of like the holy trinity if you will for retargeting. And what happens is because you have a little piece of code that each of those websites give you on your website, what happens is that Facebook Go and LinkedIn, Google say cool, we've got these audiences now. So 10 people came into your store today. You have audience of 10 people on each of those sites that you can send an ad to. So what happens is when they come and visit and then they see you again, you're automatically reminding them of the reason why they came to see you in the first place. So they're going, oh wow. But secondarily to that they're also subconsciously thinking these guys are everywhere. I just saw them and then I'm seeing them on LinkedIn, I'm seeing them on Google, I'm seeing them on Facebook. That is a really, you know, schmuck operation.

I was running some retargeting ads.

Quite a few years ago actually and the head of PR for Sony Europe was in France on holiday and she messaged me and said just been on a French newspaper site and you've got F Stop Academy ads running. You guys are huge. And I subsequently did considerable multiple six figure gigs with Sony over the following years. Now it wasn't just down to that one thing but if the head of PR seeing me, she's thinking these guys have got something nailed. And so it really, anything you do from a marketing perspective actually reflects to your target market how switched on you are to marketing itself. I feel it's very challenging for a filmmaker to try and sell a marketing video to a small business who's gonna have to then spend time spending money on it to promote it if they're not doing it themselves.

Yeah, 100. Because they're going to be like cool, I buy this video. But then what happens? And you go, well like generally speaking we put it in front of, we put it across four different platforms and we see. Or you can put it across four different platforms and you see an increase in engagement of this X, Y and Z based on the numbers that you do for yourself. Then they'll be like wow, that' okay, that's great, that's irresistible. I'll take that.

And is Google Hyper click still? It's been through a lot of changes in the last few years. Is it Still a valid platform because I hear a lot things about it being really expensive or people saying banner advertising is dead. Is this just something that happens in marketing where people decide that something's not working anymore and try and convince everyone else it's not working?

Well, the reason it stops working is because competition increases and then all the people that again, all the people that suck get suckier. So if you're, if you're paying a dollar, for example, a dollar for someone to click on something five years ago, but your ad wasn't very good, but there's not many much competition so you pay a dollar. Now if you have to pay $100 and your ad is bad, your landing page is bad. It does become expensive because you're going, well I'm spending now a thousand dollars, whereas before I was spending 10. But that just means that all that's happened is the cost has gone up. Your marketing should be at a good enough level so that you can still gets expensive people still make money on Google, AdWords, Google, BBC. But the biggest thing I think is that they don't do it effectively. And that's why you have to niche because for example, filmmakers for like this is random. Like filmmakers for accountants probably have no competition, but filmmakers or small business video production would probably be super competitive. That's because everyone's trying to generalize and spend money on this generalistic stuff where now it's like, well, you don't have to only work with accountants, but you could have 10 sub pages of accountants, restaurants, cafes, whoever you want to work with and dominate those small search volumes which are going to be ridiculously cheap.

I think a lot of filmmakers I talk to are still of the mindset that, you know, you just build a nice website with a nice contactless page and a nice, you know, about us page, etc, etc, it's enough. But what I'm hoping to do with this podcast and all the work that I do is help filmmakers and creators understand that your website is there as virtually a business card. It's just kind of this is where you live and you are who you say you are. But what you're talking about here is multiple landing pages, which we're talking about is just a page that has a headline, some trigger text, bullet points and some sort of value that then compels a visitor to say, hey, this guy seems to know what they're doing and they're relevant to me. I'll opt in to get the ebook and then begin the journey.

I guess the thing I want to understand with Me, as someone who's been doing this a long time, is how do you start something like that when you know nothing and it's really just so intimidating. What would be the most sensible sort of five step process that a business would start? Where would you point them?

Well, I would say, let's just say, okay, they've already got their website, they've been in business for a little bit. So the first implementation step would be look at all the clients they've already worked with. Who was their absolute favorite pool of 5 or 10? What are the commonalities between? Are they all in a certain industry? Are they all a certain type of person? Do they all have something in common? And they will and then go, okay, from that, let me pull the commonalities out. And that's going to be the niche that I'm going to work with. Whether it's demographics, psychographics, whatever, that's going to be my first person. And so then from there I would say that the easiest port of call is, as I said, I think you can, it's better to test something with Facebook before you then go and invest in the SEO, the AdWords, it's a bit more expensive. So you know, and then create an ad or create even just a little piece of content and go, here's three steps, something that again, just using the same example an accountant could do and utilize a video for. And here's what the outcome would be of that step. 1, 2, 3. Promote it out there. See if people like it, you know, and if they do, great, then you've got something. Look for your proof of concept. There's a really cool tool in Facebook called a Facebook lead ad. I like to use those just to test proof of concept because you don't have to set anything up. It's like three minutes to set up a little form in there and automatically captures people's details. If you get one lead, great, you're on the right track. If you get none, something's probably not working and it needs to be revisited. And I use a little acronym called niche offer Copy. So your niche offer is what you're presenting to them. Copy is the way that you've written it and how it corresponds to what they think. So if all three of those things are in alignment, then success, you'll probably at least get a lead. If it has worked quite right, go back and look at it and go, cool. Have I chosen the right audience? Have I targeted them right? Have I given the right thing to opt in for? Cool. You said that you Want to give them a thousand step formula that's going to take them 95 hours to do. They probably don't want to do that. Cool. So re look at how the offer and then as well look at the copy and go.

If they're looking at it on Facebook because it's something that they're going to like and interact with. So don't go something like your business is going to suck and you probably aren't making any money if you don't have a video because no one's going to want to click like on that and opt in and admit that that's what they like. You know, talk about some of the more fluffy things. I always like to. Again, another little tool I recommend to say to people is called the bar test. It's like cool. If you walked up to that person at a bar and you had a conversation and you said what was in your ad, would you either A, be fine or B, would you get like a drink thrown in your face? If it's leaning towards the drink thrown in your face, probably don't say that, probably reword it.

So I'm really grateful for that. Thank you. And folks, you know, Kim, not only a lord, Lord Barrett of Glencoe, he did purchase it, but nonetheless it's still value. You have a square foot of land in Scotland, one square foot. And Kimberly is, you know, one of those guys who's, you may not have heard of him, but the work he's doing. And a rumour has it you've done some work for Gary Vee.

I have done. He did his Australian tour. So we did the promotional marketing for the tour for Gary Vaynerchuk. We also did some promotion for Reese Witherspoon. She didn't end up coming to Australia, but she was doing a speaking tour and we ran the ads for about two months for that as well.

Kim, thank you very much indeed. It's a pleasure to sit and chat with you and thank you for sharing your wisdom with the audience.

Thanks for having me.

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 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, then please.

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