The Simple Marketing Equation. EP #334 - Den Lennie

Hey guys, it's Dan. And today I wanted to drop this podcast into your feed because something's been coming up on my discovery calls recently that I wanted to share. That I think is a significant issue that's affecting videographers ability to get work in March of 2024. And it's all about articulation. The big issue is that not enough videographers understand how to articulate the problem they solve for the target market that they specialize in in a meaningful way. And that's what today's podcast is going to be all about.

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 this idea of articulation.

I want to break it down into some really simple steps. Okay? The first one is the purpose of marketing. So in simple terms, marketing is about putting the right message or offer in front of the right audience or market at the right time. Now this is the trifecta of marketing. Before we go into that more deeply, I think there's a bigger pandemic with creative people where they get paralyzed at the thought of self promotion. And when they get paralyzed at the thought of self promotion combined with the need for perfectionism results in them not doing anything or worse, posting something when they feel like it and then nothing for months and then posting again. And so you get this inconsistency with the output and that then directly relates to how busy they are. So when they're really busy, they're not doing any marketing because they're busy. They're riding the wave, if you will, of the busy period. You take that eye off the ball with marketing and then they kind of recover from the busy period because they're burnt out and they come back and there's no work and then they start to panic and so they start to do some marketing. And this is a cycle of failure that keeps perpetuating itself in such a way that you end up with like, just not being able to be consistent. And so the consistency is the big issue. But if you marry that up with the fact that most websites are frankly, you know, self perpetuating.

Galleries of all of the work you've ever done, thinking that if I show everyone all the work I've ever done, they'll, they'll be able to figure out what I do and they'll hire me and that just doesn't happen in real terms. And so what you have to do is break this down. And I see this, this, this problem coming up virtually with every single person I speak to. The reason that you're not busier is because you don't do any marketing. And the reason that you don't do any marketing is you don't actually know who you're talking to. And so what I want to do today was just touch on these three core areas. So number one, what problem do you solve, who do you solve it for? And are you making sure that when they are ready to buy, they are only think of you or you are a key factor in their decision making process. So this is where I want to focus on today. So let's start at the beginning.

Who, who are you, who are you talking to? You can have multiple niches, but I recommend that you focus on one. And that one being the niche that has the most profitability built into it. Now the way we do this in the VBA as we have an auditing process where we get you to go back over the last 12 months, look at every single client you've worked with, look at the amount of revenue that they were billed, and then calculate how much time was spent producing that project, then taking the profit. So take all the hard costs off the project and then divide what's left by the number of days of effort that went into making the project, and you'll get something called profit per day. Now profit per day is a calculation that.

Allows you to see how profitable client is versus client B. And a great example of this would be, let's say there's two projects that are worth $10,000 each. But on one project you made three grand profit, and on another project you made no profit. And that's because you spent too much time, too much labor delivering. And one of the pitfalls of this is when people get excited about a creative project and put more post production into it. And when they put more post production into it, what happens is you burn your profit by over delivering on the creative by, by being a perfectionist, by wanting to polish something to a point where it's beyond the value that was built. So that's the first problem.

So once you identify the most profitable client, then you can say, well, if I work with client a, who's worth $500 a day in profit, or I can work for client B, which might be more fun, but you're only making $250 a day profit and you did 100 days worth of work in that year, while 100 days times 50 or 500, 100 times 500 is $50,000 in profit for the year. If you did the same hundred days, but you work with client B, you would only make $25,000 a year in profit. So, so the simple equation to doubling your business is to find a client who you can work with where you can create more profit per day of input to that client's work. And that will typically be work that's simpler. It might be talking heads, it might be case studies, it might be testimonials, it might be just, you know, training videos. But the point being is there's still creative ways to make that content even exciting for you to film and produce. But more importantly, it's where the money is. And so what you have to do, and I'm not saying you have to do, just do case studies or testimonial videos, but that's just one example. The point being is that you have to know which clients are profitable and which are the most profitable clients, so you can allocate more of your time to them and less time just taking everything from everyone. And one of the other danger areas is clients you've had for a long time who may be on a lower rate than you're charging today and you're too nervous to put their prices up. So that's not a key problem. So problem number one is identifying or opportunity number one is identifying who you want to work with. Then you need to figure out who's the decision maker, who's a decision maker in that industry and do they have money? Because there's no point in chasing clients who don't have any money. From there we're looking at.

The next part of the process which is you've identified, you know, the right offer, the right message, the right audience is like, where are that audience? If you're targeting marketing directors, where are they? Well, I'll tell you what, they're on Instagram, they're on Facebook, they're on LinkedIn on of the above. But you need to identify and decide where are the, where's the lowest hanging fruit for you? And we would always say that the lowest hanging fruit in the corporate space is on LinkedIn. We have a very simple and effective dialed in sort of 10 step process for LinkedIn that helps you to step through identifying the right people, connecting with them in a way that's casual and chill, but moving the sales conversation to message 2 or 3 or 4. So there's a really effective way to do that. And there's a right way and there's a wrong way. From there we move on to the right time. And this is the part that most people get wrong if they've got their self dialed into the right message and the right offer and the right people and the right, right market, that market's not going to be ready to buy when you're ready to sell. So you have to maintain a consistent marketing output through posting, through connecting, communicating, messaging on a daily basis so that when they are ready to buy, they think of you. One of my clients, Grant, has done this extremely effectively in the transport and logistics space. He spent the best part of two years posting on LinkedIn, connecting, commenting, engaging in conversations, and it's taken that long for him to then become the go to guy for transport and logistics and now has big trucking companies, trucking organizations, and has more work than he knows what to do with. And so you've got to play the long game. And one of the things that frustrates me about the coaching space is there's all these offers in the market promising instant results. And whilst there are some hacks that can get you some quick wins, building a business that's meaningful takes time. Building a relationship with your market takes time. It takes effort. People are skeptical. They need to feel like they can trust you and that takes time. But I've got clients that I've worked with for four or five years who've gone from 160 grand a month to 2 million. It's 160 grand a year to 2 million a year. Now that is an extreme example, but it's happened. I have another client who was on 300 grand a year when he started working with us and two years later hit a million. So these processes do work, niching works, but you have to be mindful of any biases you might be carrying around that.

And what's critically important is that you understand this, this trifecta of marketing being the right message in front of the right people at the right time. And you have to dial in the articulation. If that message is off, you're going to struggle to make even 50 grand a year. If you dial that in, the sky is literally the limit. So go and think about how your message shows up. And actually been working recently, we've got a free group called scale your video business and we've been doing weekly calls for a while now and we're working the guy in there called Adam and who's who were doing this on the call live with him. We're helping him re articulate his message so that speaks more directly to a target audience. So if you want to go and watch that call, there's a replay inside the group. Click on the scale your video business community. There'll be a link below this podcast or go to the website dan lenny.com or video business accelerator.com both will take you to the free community. Come and jump on a call, go and watch a replay, come and get some support, get some advice and hope to see you on there soon.

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