Understanding the “Marketing Triangle” with Matt Smolen. EP #281

G' day guys. Welcome back to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast, video and audio show. This week we are revisiting the second part of our conversation with Matt Smolin from Balloon Tree Productions in Melbourne. Last week we talked about his team and how that had changed and how the culture is enabling him to step back and be front and center with business development. And this week I wanted to talk to him about what does his role look like now, what does he do in business development in his company? And he shares how he spends a couple of hours a day really focused on sales and marketing, talking to people, talking to prospects, talking to clients and how they've embraced cold outreach, front end marketing, using.

Some high value content offers and funnels and emails and advertising and remarketing and all that really juicy technical stuff that when your business gets to a certain size you have to have a strategy for moving into new cold traffic. So I think you'll find this to be very, very useful. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Well Matt, thanks for coming back and sharing a little more of your knowledge. Last week we talked about the team and systems and culture and what I wanted to kick off on the this episode was with now you have this team of four and they're all rock stars and you've got a tight system and you've got a great project management system and a daily sort of climb.

What are you now finding yourself doing with your time? How is your role changing in the business?

I wish I could say it was all PlayStation and sleeping in, but it's not. Then it's lots of big picture work. So what I've really found is I'm always here to support the team. I'm kind of ultimately quality control in a lot of ways. Like I still review edits and things before they go out and just sort of chime in here and there as things. But I'm, I'm very much off the tools. I'm, I'm rarely out on a shoot. I've not touched an Premiere Pro login for about two or three years. Like it's, I'm very hands off and honestly I probably spend most of my time now just talking to clients and prospective clients and really business development is, is the focus. So you know, the, the team are incredibly capable at running the day to day operations and execution of stuff. And there's, there's very little that gives me more joy than to see them just doing stuff. And I, unless like invoices get sent out and I'm like what's this for? It's like, oh, it's this job that we had, we've quoted for, we've shot, we've edited, and I knew nothing about it, which is. I mean, maybe that's a bit of a lie. I'll know about it, but it just, it happens without my involvement. So where, where I kind of have to plug in is kind of bring that business in so that the machine keeps tick. And I've always described, like, I had a background in shooting and editing and I can do most of the roles, but I never thought I was the best at them. I was always kind of the good, the jack of all trades, master of none. But where I found a real passion was people. And as we sort of discussed last week, the team aspect of things, like, I really love growing and developing the team, but the other side of that is the relationships we've got with clients. Like, I don't think we work with anybody that I wouldn't want to just go and hang out with and have a beer or go to a barbecue with. I really pride myself on that because what we do is fun and what we do is, is really entertaining and engaging. We shouldn't be stuffy, like transactional. Hello, sir. Shake your hand and do business. It's like, mate, what's going on? Oh, this is awesome. We're doing a cool thing. Like, it should be that. And, and I'm, I'm the hype man. So I get to go out and like, you know, hang out with clients and catch up, see what they're up to. What are their challenges? What are their problems? What are the success they're. They're dealing with? And, and really just go, well, here's how we can help and support that. Get them all excited about it, then hand it over to the team that can. Can do an excellent job in executing that. So, yeah, it's lots of, lots of hanging out on LinkedIn, lots of going to meetings and chats and coffees and stuff. And I absolutely love it. It's really cool.

Now, you've been running your company for. Is it 13 years or more than that, though?

11. 11 years.

But, you know, I'd say post 10 years, that's an established company. I imagine in that time you have some core great clients who come back to you again and again and some other clients, and there's a bit of referrals go on. But.

Being a coach and working with a lot of businesses, I do, yourself included, is that as the team expands, so does the overhead. And so it's probably not enough just to rely on existing clients. And as wonderful as those relationships are, people do refer, but you know that clients aren't thinking first thing in the day, hey, I must refer some business to Matt. You know, it's, if it comes across their table, they'll go, yeah, they're not doing that. I know, it's crazy, right?

So rude. But obviously, and, and this is a kind of a leading question because we've already spoken about this, but for the, for the sake of those who are watching and listening, in the last six months or so, since we did the Big Picture in the Gold coast, which actually four months ago, but prior to that, we've been talking a lot in the VBA elite about scale, about running the business by the numbers. And I don't want that to put people off. It's not like we lose the fun. But as you scale the team, your revenue has to scale with it, your profitability has to scale with it. So your role does change. But what I've observed with yourself is that you've actually found this kind of hook of excitement around front end marketing, around creating content, around beginning that conversation. Tell me about that journey and how that's looked for you and how you've been able to use all of your skills in the personality of Bloom Tree to create content and conversation that begins to raise awareness of your product in the marketplace.

Yeah, I think before I go into that, you touched on like really good referrals and existing client relationships. And that is absolutely true. We've got some really long standing relationships. But what became really clear to me is like, that was, that was growing at a rate that wasn't growing with the team. So the team was getting bigger and we weren't getting enough work on top of that to sort of keep up with the scale. And so, yeah, it was kind of going all right. Well, how do you fast track that, that new business growth in a way that we haven't done before? And while I still think word of mouth and referrals are the best form of new business because it comes as a qualified sort of encouragement of your, your services and what you can do. We'd never really spoken to a cold audience that knew nothing about Balloon Tree or potentially nothing about why they needed video production, so, yeah, I had a real kind of focus on it at the start of the year and then through discussions with the group in, in April was just like a real kind of drive to go, all right, let's, let's build out a real wealth of marketing content that Sort of goes, here's who we are and here's what we do and how we can help you in a really unique way. And I think, you know, for us, where we're stylistically niched in terms of we do, you know, fun, humor and wonder, a little bit of goofy parody stuff like we're very kind of left of center, kooky creators. We're not the typical corporate video, you know, wearing button up shirts every day, wear like hoodies, Jordans and stuff like where we're cool, Dan.

Yeah, we know, we know you're cool.

We're very cool. And so building out some marketing for that was, was really designed to, to say, hey, here's who we are and what we do. Really educate an audience, a cold audience about that. But also in a lot of ways you get to a no faster because, because we're not going to be for everybody. We are sillier and we are kookier and that probably not going to fly with, I don't know, a real high end like law firm or something like that. But we might fit with like a, a young youthful brand that wants to do something a little bit more cutting edge on socials or whatever. It'll really resonate. So if we can put all of that marketing out there and, and that resonates with the right people, but also turns away the wrong people, I'm then not wasting time having conversations with wrong fit clients down the line. What it's also done for me is kind of given me a real, a real fun, it's not a side project, but a real fun project to have while I'm talking to clients and having meetings and throwing pictures and stuff out there is kind of going right, what am I getting back from these new conversations and new clients? How are we attracting these people in and how do I then repurpose that into marketing to bring more of these people in. So one of the things was a, essentially an ebook or a high value content offer, which essentially is like a free document that anybody can download in exchange for an email address. They get brought into a little email funnel that sort of shares a bit about us and some client testimonials and why we are good at what we do. But it also provides value in the sense that here's a bunch of things you won't know or mistakes you might make when choosing a video production company. And it's geared towards going, these are things you just got to be cautious of. And if you want to be cautious of them, here's why we're really good at what we do. So it's salesy, but it's giving value you at the end of the day and if, if nothing comes of that, then hopefully we've, we've pointed them in the right direction and they get a good video production, you know, relationship out of it. The best case of that is we get a new client that's already been brought into the way we do things and primed to know, okay, we're not going to be the cheap, cheerful one. We've, we've got a little bit more of a price tag attached because we're an established company. This is the way we work, this is how we approach things. And it really kind of primes them to be like, yeah, cool. If they like all of this, then chances are they're going to be a really good client fit. So, yeah, it's, it's developing all of that stuff. I'm really thinking about an audience that knows nothing about us. Has been really, really fun because in a lot of ways it's like hitting the dating market again where you sort of just say, how do I want to present myself on Tinder and what photo do I want to put out there and how do I attract a really interesting mate? But in this case, it's a business mate.

I think that's an absolutely brilliant analogy. You know, there's a kind of, there's a triangle of marketing, okay. And at the very top of the triangle is awareness. And what we all do as business owners is we have a great set of core customers and when things are going well, we kind of ignore fresh new blood because it's like, well, I've got everything I need right here. Then what happens is relationships change. Clients go in different directions in the coaching space. Sometimes they leave because they've become really successful and they're, they're doing something else or they're moving into a different direction.

But what happens is awareness is the top of the triangle and at the bottom of the triangle is trust. And what we're trying to do is build trust to the point where someone says, oh, actually I trust you enough to want to talk to you about my project. But in the middle, on the other point of the triangle is nurture. And what happens is, I see this a lot as people go, hey, great to connect on LinkedIn. I'm a videographer, do you want a video? And of course, there's no sense of nurture. What a high value content offer does, what an email sequence does is it helps to build the nurture Commenting on Someone's post on LinkedIn, liking it, actually offering some value without asking for anything is what a high value content offer is. And what's really cool about that is I know marketing can be a kind of dirty word for a lot of filmmakers. It's like, oh, I don't want to be salesy, I don't want to be kind of annoying people. The fact is you might annoy some people, but if they're annoyed by a piece of content that actually offers some value, I can guarantee they're never going to spend money with you. So you get to the no quicker. And I think it's that. And we talked about this a lot in the community and at the event we've run, it's getting comfortable with rejection. Not everyone's going to be an ideal client for you. I think the quicker you can get to grips with that and get comfortable with it, the better. Now tell me, did you have any resistance to doing this kind of marketing and what changed?

Yeah, no, I absolutely did. I thought it was icky and gross and why would you ever, you know, ebook, ew. E stands for ew. But you know, like, I think like anything, I came around to it because I was like, we haven't talked to a cold market before and what is going to get them to click on us versus anybody else? And like we talked about it a lot. Where 95% of the video production company's websites look the same. It's always like we love telling stories and we can't wait to tell your story and it's all, all the same thing, right? Whereas like if you can go, hey. And there is an element of clickbaitiness to it with the like mistakes you might make when choosing a video production company, but they're genuinely mistakes that people will make where they go, I want to pay next to nothing because I've got no budget, but I want, I want the world. And they're burnt by, you know, cheap and cheerful or whatever it is, right? And so if we offer that value there as a way of going, we know our shit and we know what we're doing. But also, here's why you can trust us. It just, it seemed like the most logical version of doing that. What it also did was give us a really good opportunity to extrapolate those, those mistakes or reasons why somebody should choose balloon tree into their own kind of touch points that we can use across some marketing as well. So it's, it's no longer just the one document that lives in isolation. It's now 17 individual pieces of content that we can talk to about, you know, being an end to end video production company or not using templates and doing a tailor made solution. Like all of these things become conversation points. When you're dealing with somebody new that somebody's hang up about, it might be somebody else's complete dream. And it's those moments that you can then have the conversation and understand pain points or objections to what you're doing and have the conversation off the back of that because you have that information. So there was a resistance to it a little while ago, but through just thinking about, all right, we're trying to reach an audience we've never spoken to before. The best way is giving them value with no expectation back whatsoever and then using our own marketing and assets and just content and value offer to, to bring them in closer if that resonates. And so it just seemed to make sense.

Now it's, you know, we often, I think as videographers, if we get back to our base DNA, we make a lot of assumptions that because we live and breathe it, that everybody out on the outside instantly understands every aspect of what we're talking about. And what's really interesting about assuming more of a business development role in your business is you're actually just, actually what you're doing is you're ahead of conversations, you're talking to prospects, you're talking to customers, you're talking to clients. And every single conversation helps you understand another objection that someone has to why they're not doing more video. And I think the more people you speak to, the more you can understand. And really what you're doing with your high value content offer is saying hey, we understand all the things you're nervous about and we can help you feel more comfortable about that because we've done it a million times before. And here's 10 things that we, we can share with you which will make you feel more comfortable. And really what, what we're doing with a high value content offer is just getting someone's attention enough. And the fact is we are pattern interrupting by and saying hey, instead of looking at all these 15 websites that all look the same and are overwhelming and confusing and makes people feel a little bit like they don't understand enough about the craft so they might feel nervous and reaching out. Your pattern interrupting and saying hey, actually here's seven things you should be aware careful of. It is, it is playing to the fear. But we know from testing and we know from the 14, 15 years of marketing I'VE been studying and the hundreds of thousands of dollars I've spent on events and coaches and mentors, that human, human nature is going to be far more motivated away from pain than the gaining of a great pleasure. So it's like if they're looking at a search, and we've done this a few times recently on calls, it's like, let's just search. Video production in Melbourne and 10 or 15 websites all look the same. If something was in there saying, hey, seven mistakes to avoid. When hiring a video production company and you're searching and there's 15 production companies and you can't decipher which one is right for you, there's a very good chance a good percentage of people will be like, well, I'll download this guide and then I'll come back and work out if, if, if any of these actually fit my bill. Because, because we're all. When we make any buying decision. I actually had this yesterday that in the E commerce space, right. An average customer takes 14 days of research before buying a $50 product. So the higher the product price in any service, the longer the lead time is likely to be that someone's going to consider a purchase. And if you think about your own purchasing habits, yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Yeah. And I even think too, like, that's an excellent example because part of developing this was to be like, all right, chances of somebody coming across our website cold is there in that research phase. So they'll most likely be comparing us to a handful of other companies. What makes us stand out? Where are we differentiating ourselves from them? And that's exactly it. Where if you're giving somebody something for nothing. Yeah, it's an email address, but it's kind of just given away pretty freely these days that like all of a sudden they go, oh gee, well maybe what are these other guys not telling me? Or that yep, they know what they're talking about. There's also that kind of mentality of like, if they're giving this away for free, what are they charging for? Like, that's the kind of like, does that. Absolutely psychology too. So yeah, it's absolutely kind of understanding the buyer mentality or the consumer behavior at that stage too and really supporting it. So we've launched the high value content offer and now we're building out a bunch of retargeting sites stuff as well. Where. And it's not to be gross, it's really just to say, hey, you clearly have intent here. And now here's a couple of different things. You can see that will talk to price aversion or end to end production support. Maybe it'll be testimonials and just sort of talking to those objections or concerns or, or whatever to be like you'll be in safe hands with us. It's all about saying this is a really reliable.

Choice that you make as a consumer and your money will not get gargled down the drain. You're going to be in safe hands. And so it's been a really interesting thing to think about because yeah, a lot of our work has been referral and word of mouth and a lot of that qualifying of it's a safe choice is done for us by that referral or by that recommendation that now when you're talking to somebody that's going, well why should I choose you over the 20,000 other video production companies, you really have to kind of work hard to establish your you straight cred.

Yeah, but also marketing is not a single point pillar objective. You know, marketing is a sum of the parts. It's a great website and a great, you know, well written website by great copy, you know, that explains the culture and detail of the results you get for clients because that's really what people are looking for. You know, the video is the obstacle in the way of getting the result they want. But it's the LinkedIn, it's the Outreach, it's the fact you have a high value content offer, it's the fact you're running some other stuff. Retarding is people have busy lives. We have to stay as front and center to mind as possible. So we have as many touch points as possible to get the trust quicker. And I think overcoming that icky feeling that oh, it's sleazy marketing. Well, it's actually not. If you're providing value and you know it's valuable because you've spoken to clients, you've spoken to prospects, you know what their pain points are and what you're actually doing is answering the secret questions they're too embarrassed to ask because nobody wants to feel silly. And we go into an environment where, let's say I went into an environment of like coding experts who are coding e commerce websites. And I showed up and I'm like, I've got a product I want to sell and I don't know the first thing about it. I mean I might feel embarrassed just saying I want to just do this. So I might say nothing. And what I'll do is I'll say nothing and then leave because I'll feel like no one's helping me. This is not for me. And so I think the more you can be helpful and you made a great point when you're helpful without charging for it, psychology is going well if this is doing this for free, how good is their paid stuff? It's a very important.

You know, place to be. And, and you're actually running some paid ads now, aren't you? You actually started doing some paid advertising?

Yeah, yeah. So we're, we're sending, we're kind of split testing the, just the main website against a landing page for the high value content offer. It's downloadable from the website just through, you know, links through the various pages. But yeah, seeing what it looks like when you send people directly to a landing page versus the homepage, it's interesting. Like we've been running it for a couple of months now and there's, there's definitely a throughput of traffic and you know, plenty of little downloads or form completions and stuff like that. Where I think it's going to be really interesting is the retargeting stuff because I think it's, it's capturing that, that intent purchaser who's like looking around, shopping around. But then if when they're thinking about it at home and they're you know, on the toilet scrolling Instagram or whatever and my face pops up and say hey, you know Balloon Tree Productions does blah blah blah. All of a sudden you kind of, they're top of mind again and again and again. And so it's, it's that kind of really, really powerful thing of being like we're providing value and a really good solution to what you, what you need but also just reminding them of it rather than being you want to make that impact on the website or with this thing and then hope that that's enough to convert them there. And then if you like you said if you've got multiple touch points where it's your top of mind because you're just, you're everywhere, it just makes it a no brainer about oh my God, these guys everywhere, they do everything, we need to talk to them and take this a step further. So yeah, that's, I'm really excited about kind of moving into that stage because I think that's where we'll find some really, really cool results.

Well, I think you're moving into a marks or mindset which is people are busy. Like we just got a quote for a security door on our garage. Like it's like a mesh screen. So we live in Australia, we Both live in Australia and the summer's coming. Flies become a problem them and. And some fly screens for the windows now I got them around maybe three weeks ago. He sent me a quote a couple of days later and then I got buried in something else. Was like, oh, I had a quick look at the quote, that's fine, I must just pay the deposit and I'll get moving. Three weeks have passed. I go into my inbox which had gotten a little bit in control and I couldn't find the email and I was like, oh bugger. I just like, I thought this was here. Did he text it to me? Did he email it to me? And.

I texted him and he's going to resend it. But I'm like, I just got busy and forgot my intent is still there. And I think where this company of perhaps, I mean he's somebody I know so he'll still get the business. But how many companies are doing that? Doing the first touch point in video and then going, well, they never got back to me so they don't want it. Whereas a bit of retargeting, a bit of follow up, getting out of your comfort zone to just go and say to, you know, touch base and say hi again. Like there's so much business opportunity gets completely left at the first touch point. And I think what's really cool is that you are with the team that you have in place now and the structure and the systems and the culture, you can spend time on this because just as we wrap up, how much time are you spending on marketing now and business development? Because I think this is really interesting just like how much time you have to spend.

I was told by a very well known marketer friend of mine who said then it will take 10 times the effort you think it's going to take to get the result that you want. What's your experience been like?

Yeah, yeah. I mean I got very lucky that when I caught the bug to build out this high value content offer and sort of revamp all of that, we were in a reasonably quiet period. So I just went hell for leather and in a couple of weeks built out this whole thing and it was really, really quickly came together now looking at like, all right, we're now starting to see results and things from the website and how do we kind of move that in a way that better reflects what we want to achieve from conversions and whatever? I'm probably spending a good couple of days a week on it, cumulatively at least a couple hours a day for sure. And it's a mix of LinkedIn outreach and sort of getting on there and reaching out to potential clients, writing scripts, developing some other stuff, reaching out to past clients and having conversations with them. That, that, that's all kind of feeding into, all right, our language, the way we talk to them, what worked really well for them, what maybe didn't, or why they chose to work with us.

Working on. On developing that suite of retargeting material and, like, versioning of stuff as well. I think, you know, it's very easy to be like, we'll make one or two videos and then we're done. But I've kind of built out probably 25 different things that some of them are short, some of them are longer, some are for, you know, real snappy TikTok retargeting. Like, what does that look like for a video production company? And it's not about thinking, okay, well, we don't necessarily think that our audience are directly on TikTok, but it's. The marketing person at the company uses TikTok when they're at home switching off. And if they've come to our website and we retarget them on there when they're guards down and they're at home, and then it reminds them of this thing to do. Like, so constantly just trying to interrogate. All right, here's where our plans are at. What else haven't we thought of? Or what does it look like if we did X or. Yeah, and just experimenting and trying and seeing what. What happens. We had a shoot day last week where we. We batched a whole bunch of stuff of me for our retargeting. And they're all different pairs. There's a Sesame street one. There's a Better Call Saul sort of used car salesman. I'm dressed up as a cookie. I'm dressed up as a milk carton. Like, there's just oodles and oodles of chaos going on. But until you put it out there and see what resonates, we don't know if it works or not. Might be an overwhelming response that's like, this is awful. Why is this guy dressed as a cookie talking to me? And be like, cool. We don't do that next month and we move into more of the testimonials or case study stuff. But I think that because we do things differently, what we need to market should be different because that'll resonate or not, and that'll just be our target demographic and market the ones that it does resonate with. So, yeah, it's plenty of time, but plenty of fun too.

You know, it's interesting, I was talking to a friend of mine Yesterday who's a YouTube marketer and he used to work for a very, very famous Internet marketer and been doing it 30 years. He said a lot of them, you know, infomercials and stuff and they had a front end $27 ebook offer. So there's. This is a different environment. But yeah, they tested 142 different bits of creative on YouTube ads. Yeah. To get to about 10 that generated $3 million in sales.

Crazy.

So you know that when Ben said to me about, you know, it takes 10 times the effort to get the result you think you're going to get. Most people give up because it gets too hard. But with marketing, what you're essentially doing is using the Internet to knock on doors for you to get no's quickly and the feedback is very, very cool. Now it can get expensive. You've got to be mindful of the budget. But there's never been an easier time to get your offer in front of the target market. The hard part is getting your offer to resonate with your exact target market. But I think you're well on the way, mate. And if you've got 20 bits of content, you know, that's, that's, that's the right approach, is to keep going with that, mate. Thank you so much. It's been really cool talking to you. I know people will get a huge amount of value from this and.

We'Ll link to Balloon Tree in the post below and we'd love to have you on the show again at some point in the future.

Thanks, Dan. It's always a pleasure chatting with you and yeah, would love to come back.

You know what's really cool is that when you talk about this stuff, you realize how much you've achieved and how much you're doing.

Yeah, I also was like half stepped out of myself and I was like, man, I sound really smart, don't I?

That's cool. This guy's really going places. Thank you so much. You're still cool. I think what will be interesting is if people watching or listening to this go to bloomtree productions.com and.

See what happens when you click on you just visit the website, what starts to follow you around the Internet and I think that will be interesting.

Yeah, Good luck to you. I'll see you on the, on Facebook soon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Come on.

Thanks, Dan.