Things always take longer than you expect. EP #185 - Shorty

G', day, guys. It's Tuesday 25th May, and this is episode 185 of the how to Scale a Video Business Podcast with this week's Shorty. And I'm just sitting here nervously watching the news unfold because I'm due to fly to Melbourne tomorrow and we're having a get together with our Australian based video business accelerator, Mastermind Clients on Friday. And we're just crossing our fingers that there's been a small outbreak of coronavirus in Melbourne that we're hoping doesn't shut us down. But such are the challenges around this time. And obviously that's not really a huge inconvenience compared to what a lot of people are going through. But obviously we're excited to see each other and hoping that this doesn't get quashed. They've just changed the regulations so restricting public gatherings to 30 people. So just waiting to hear back from the hotel to see if that's going to affect our event. Hoping not, because there's only eight of our nine of us getting together in a room. So fingers crossed that that will happen. But today I wanted to talk about the fact that things always take longer than you expect.

You know, being in the coaching space, I'm always coaching and, and listening to other businesses share challenges and obstacles and, and wins and. But that doesn't mean that I'm immune from like having to kind of go through challenges around learning myself. And you know, whenever we want to learn something new, it's quite a painful process, especially the older we get. We, we kind of, we're so used to doing things with muscle memory that when we have to learn something new, it can be very challenging. And I was going through this myself last week. We were just revising an email ad campaign, sorry, Facebook campaign. And recently, you know, Apple changed some updates in iOS 14, which meant that cookies that were normally used in a lot of marketing activity were no longer going to work. So Facebook had to work at a different way of tracking visitor activity on an ad. This comes around to when you run Facebook ads, you want to track the conversion data, which means if someone visits your website and takes an action and let's say they click on a button that says get a quote and they go to a get a quote page and they fill that out, you would want a piece of tracking pixel on that page. So if you're running paid ads to your site that.

You could know who was visiting your site and taking action. And we were just re resurrecting an ebook funnel that had worked very well for us in the past. We've just recently switched on our new website. If you haven't had a look yet, go and check it out@denleny.com we're really pleased with how that's looking and we're setting up some new marketing funnels. And we were talking this morning on our coaching call about the importance of multiple marketing funnels and marketing infrastructure and what I call evergreen marketing content that will help you to, you know, support someone who's come to your site to look for a solution. And your marketing content, your marketing funnels and your assets and your collateral will help them to make a decision as to whether or not this is the right solution for them or not. And this takes a bit of time to see set up. But a lot of our members in the VBA Mastermind now are getting to that stage where they're very established and they want to refine that process and become more.

Consistent with their marketing approach and their marketing funnels. So I was having to go back through and relearn, I guess, a new way of operating Facebook ads. And we just this wonderful ebook written and edited by my copywriter and her team and new landing pages and thank you pages and all of the kind of the backend marketing technicalities. And so we were running some new ads, but the whole system has changed. So I had to go and spend three days studying this new training. Now I get to work with a fantastic marketer called Ben Simkim and his chief marketing officer, Jeremy Hobbin. Ben's been on the podcast, created this new training for the members of Ben's Mastermind, which I'm a member, a mentor of. And we were able to go through that training. And it really is world class. I mean, this training sells for a couple dollars. It's very, very high end. But I still had to sit through the training and learn it and implement it. And I found that very challenging because so much of what I do is second nature. So much of what I do, I do on autopilot. But it reminded me that things always take longer than you expect, especially when you're learning something new. And I think we as creators and creatives often overestimate what we can achieve in a short time and underestimate what we can achieve in, say, a week. And so I think what happens is we get frustrated. I certainly got frustrated when I was trying to learn this new technique because, excuse me, I was not only trying to learn the technique, I was also implementing it. And so by implementing it, Excuse me. Let's get a quick drink here.

I always do these recordings live. I don't edit them.

Yeah, when I was doing the training, it was, it was like a challenge for me to implement the information. So I had one window watching the training and another window actually implementing. And it's so easy, isn't it, in anything new like software or anything to do with video production that we kind of don't read the manual. We just kind of want to get on with it and figure it out ourselves. But oftentimes that makes things longer and slower. So anyway, I sat through and I did the three days worth. Built like 10 different ad sets with different interest targeting, built seven different images and four different bits of copy for the ads. So what Facebook's doing is it's testing 10 AD sets, seven images and four.

Pieces of copy. So that's 280 variations that it's testing to find out which one's gonna work. And that's where Facebook advertising is very power powerful because if you give it the right information, it will hand out, you know, the right people. And we got a whole bunch of leads come in for the ebook and a really high conversion rate and so that's really exciting. So that's only in the first week and we're only running those ads at the uk. Maybe you've seen those ads for the ebook. Let me know if you have. Have you downloaded the ebook? Let me know. It'd be great to hear how, what you thought of it because that is our front end lead magnet. And a lead magnet is a method of getting your attention, getting someone's attention who doesn't know, and offering them some value. In this case it's, I think it's an 18 page ebook about the eight growth accelerators that we, you know, I found to become a really powerful framework for business growth. And you know, I've just started doing a series of breakdowns of each of those over the next few weeks. And you would have heard one. In fact, there's one coming out on, on Thursday and I'm doing a few more each week. And so, you know, that is a marketing system that is, that is a method get people's attention. So by paying Facebook to show those ads, a percentage of people will download that book. Now we're at a point where 40% of people who are visiting our website are downloading the ebooks. It's very, very successful. And then from the ebook it goes to a quiz and the quiz can identify where it is in your business that you need to focus your attention. And then we're working on some content to follow up with that, to sort of share with subscribers, you know, where if they, if they get a certain score out of 90, what they need to be focusing on their business first. So what we're doing is looking to create some very, very valuable upfront support to help people to figure out where they need to focus their attention. And then coming back to, you know, things always take longer than you expect. We often have unrealistic expectations that we just want to get more clients and if we just did some marketing, get some more clients. But of course, there's so much more to it than that. So what I'm going to be doing over the next few weeks is, is breaking down some of those processes, breaking down some of those insights as to what these eight growth accelerators are. And these are the eight focus areas that I've found that my most successful clients have implemented and really nailed to get the success they want. And none of this happens quickly. You know, it can take years, but would you rather spend years doing the right thing or years doing the wrong thing? If you think back three years ago, where were you? What were you doing? How much have you really evolved in that time? And that's why the accelerator exists. It exists to speed up that process. So, yeah, look out for that on Thursday. The first accelerator is going to be revealed to you then. Until then, have an awesome 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, it'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, then 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.