Trust your instinct but back it up with data 'Shorty' EP#62

G', day, guys. Tuesday here in Australia, which means it's time for a. What we're now calling a shorty. This was a name that came up, actually, while I was recording last week's episode.

I was having a conversation with one of my former clients on LinkedIn messenger, Colin. He went, oh, man, I love your shorties. And I was like, oh, that's a good name. Quite like that. Because they are designed just to be sort of little punctuation marks in your week and a way for us to create more content and hopefully more value. That's ultimately what I'm looking to achieve here.

Is it's more value. I absolutely love recording this podcast. I love the fact that. Well, I'm going to share with you today, actually, some insights. So we obviously started this podcast, gosh, I think October 2018.

And it started where we were putting one episode out every fortnight, and then it was video and audio because, you know, a lot of the thinking at the time was, you've got to be doing video, you're gonna be doing video. And obviously I work in the video space, so you would think that video would be the. The most appropriate mechanism to get our message out there. And then we went audio only. But then we went one episode a week. And then in July last year, we went back to doing video, and again, we were getting some, you know, good advice at the time, and we were trying different things. And the thing when you're. When you're marketing any business is you've got to be testing. And as soon as you start to apply your own kind of thoughts and feelings to marketing, it tends to kind of make things tricky because oftentimes the data, or the data, depending on where you are in the world, will. Will tell you a different story. I think as filmmakers, we're so intuitive, we're so empathetic that we often spend a lot of time feeling and thinking. And I don't discount that, because what I want to share with you today is a kind of story of data meets, you know, emotion and, And. And. And, you know, that empathetic side of. Of life. So we, from July last year, we're working with a podcast company, and we had 5,250 downloads from July 15th last year to, well, pretty much till today, February 11th, which happens to be my birthday. I'm 49 years old today. I keep.

About to go out for lunch with my wife. But, yeah, I don't make a big fuss about birthdays. But so in that time, we were putting out one episode a Week we were doing video and audio and we were pushing it across social media. We spent some money on ads, and in that time we had 5250 downloads. Now, I don't have any data from the previous period, but towards over Christmas time, I just started thinking, you know, where can I provide more value? And I know from speaking to people who love the podcast that they love the fact they're short and they're sharp and they're straight to the point. And I've listened to a lot of podcasts where people just fucking waffle for hours on end telling deep stories about how their day's been. And I don't think anyone cares about that. What you want is come on here, get some great information and move along. And it seems to be working because at the beginning of the year we decided to change things. I just decided that I wasn't going to invest time and effort making video content on the podcast because I just don't think people want to sit and watch me talk to someone on a zoom call. So I made a decision to can the video. And wow, like, I've just checked the stats. So in July to December last year, 5250 downloads. And in the last 30 days we've almost hit 2000 downloads with an audio only show. We're actually at 1914 downloads in the last 30 days, which is incredible. So thank you. Thank you for embracing the show. Thank you for listening, thank you for downloading. I always wanted this to be a really useful, you know, introjection into your week. And now we can go two episodes a week. You know, the shorties are just me sharing some insights and where we sort of guessed a guest each week or I'll do an episode on something specific. So thank you. It just goes to show that you do have to trust your instinct from time to time. In fact, I always say trust your instinct, but back it up with data. So we're virtually at 2,000 downloads in 30 days. That's almost five times the amount we had in the whole of the last period last year. So I guess the lesson here is do trust your instinct. When something doesn't feel right, act on it, even if it's uncomfortable. It was a challenging beginning of the year for us because we changed a lot of different things in the business. But we also realized that we didn't have to spend that money on video podcasts. Now it's not like we were trying to save money because what we've done is we've redirected that money into Writing better show notes. I now have a copywriter who writes our show notes. If you go to the website@danlenny.com you can read the show notes for not the shorties, but the actual main episodes and I think they're really much better. So I'd love to know what you think. Do you, do you watch, go to the website? Do you read the show notes? But also what we've been doing is we've been investing in, built a studio in the garage and I now create weekly content that I push out on social, mostly on LinkedIn where I actually create sort of short videos that we push through Splashio. And I'm going to actually have Gideon on from Splashio on the show shortly to share a bit more about that. Because as a video producer myself, I had clients in the past where we were making a lot of short form, but lots of content. One client, we had 190 videos we made for them and we used to do all of this stuff ourselves and Splashio just enables you to kind of hand it over. So we learned a lot of really interesting lessons in the last couple of months. And it's not been easy. It's been a lot of changes. But the one thing I have realized 11 years into running a business is that the only thing is guaranteed is change. It seems that what last year won't work next year. And that seems to be a theme in business where things are constantly changing. And I think the other big challenge, and we were talking about this in a coaching call this morning. So today's coaching call for the Video Business Accelerator was about direct mail and using lumpy mail and using offline techniques and strategies and tactics to get people's attention. So, for example, you know, connect with someone on LinkedIn, they accept your connection and then, you know, you obviously create content so they can see that and build that know like and trust or you know, the four pillars, as Ben Simkin calls them, of desire, trust, credibility.

And, and, and, and, and desire. And using direct mail to send out notes or postcards or letters handwritten to prospects to begin that conversation, to begin that journey of them getting to know like and trust you. And so, you know, one of the guys on the call was like, oh, this all sounds great, Dan, but you know, where am I going to find the time if I'm on production all the time? And it's true, and it's true for any business. You know, when we are the, the technicians in our business and we love what we do, it is very difficult to let go it's very difficult to kind of say, well, if I go and do that shoot and I do that, I get to keep all the money. And it's a very, very fine line of balance because, you know, everyone has costs and things that you have to pay for. But what I said to Andrew was, you just have to start looking at how can you ease off on a couple of days on a shoot or a couple of days on an edit, and can you outsource that to someone else? And I say this because I've done myself. When I moved from being a DP to me more of a producer, I used to hire other dps, and it was really tough at first because, you know, I love lighting and I love framing. But I realized that to scale, I couldn't do it all myself because there's only so much capacity one individual has, and you will burn out. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. You will burn out if you try and do everything yourself. So what I said to Andrew was, look, find, you know, find someone to help support you with editing so you can free up two days a month. And on those two days, you know, do the business development. Because the question was, you know, can I outsource this as someone else? Which is a great question. But one thing I don't recommend you do is outsource your marketing or your business development, because nobody will.

Nobody will sell you business better than you. There are certainly things you can do to outsource and automate parts of the process. So that was what our call was about today. And we went through some strategies and some systems for not only figuring out what you're going to share, but then working out the workflow. So our workflows are always very simple. It's like, do the work yourself for a month, figure out all of the pitfalls, map it out, and then outsource it. So I have.

One of those label writers, and I've got it on my computer. It says, do it once, record it, and create a system. But what I would say with marketing is that you have to understand your audience better than anybody else. And once you've done that, once you understand your audience, then you can create a system and get support to help you implement some of these strategies. So it was a terrific call today, and I'm really excited. Anything to do with marketing, because it really is. It's your opportunity to put your message in front of the right people at the right time. And think of it this way, if you're not marketing effectively, you're kind of being selfish because there are people right now who are struggling and need what you have to offer, and it's your job as the business owner to actually help them achieve that. So, guys, that's all I've got for you today. My wife is about to take me out for lunch, so have an awesome day. 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@denlenny.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. See you next week.