Video Marketing and Measuring ROI with Chris Schwager

G', day folks, and welcome to another episode of the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. This week we have the first of two episodes I recorded with Chris Schwager from Ridge Films. Now, what's interesting about this interview is that I connected with Chris through LinkedIn. Something we do consistently in the accelerator program is use LinkedIn as a very powerful source of building up connections that can often lead to very lucrative business deals. And our members are often surprised at how powerful that is. Chris and I connected on LinkedIn. He was listening to the podcast, he submitted some questions, we had a bit of a chat, and I'm thrilled to get him on the show. Now, Chris is a pretty fascinating guy, youngest of eight children and an inbound video marketing specialist for Ridge Films in Sydney. Been working since 2002 in the video production industry and Chris is on a mission to have Ridge Films be the premier leading producer of video communications in Australia. Now he advises companies, government and small businesses to maximize their video marketing potential. He started as a video director over 20 years ago, broadening into feature films and video presenting. And his latest viral video on swim survival reached 4 million Facebook fans in the first year. But what's fascinating about this conversation is Chris and I delve into the fact that it's just not enough to just be a video production company anymore. You have to be thinking about how you can demonstrate ROI to clients. He does this very, very effectively, running regular workshops in Sydney and just before we recorded this post a few weeks ago, but just recently he's been announced by Google as the highest rated video production business in Australia on Google Reviews. So, fascinating chat. Chris is a great character and I'm thrilled to have him on the show. So enjoy this first episode of a two part series.

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.

Well Chris, I am really thrilled to have you on the show. We met, I think through LinkedIn some months ago and I've been following what you've been doing with some interest and.

Let'S just get stuck straight in. I think what appealed to me first with you, Chris was not only the youngest of eight, which is clearly quite a big deal to have eight brothers and sisters. We'll come back to that. It's the fact that Ridge Films has been operating for 17 years.

But view the market very differently. I think to Most video production companies.

Tell me the story.

Well, I am the youngest of eight. That made me very hungry. When I grew up, I was always getting fed last. I always had to clap my hands louder and make noise more than the rest of the group. And I think after a while I realized that the people I was really trying to attract were my parents and get their attention. And so we started. I got access to a video camera early, early on. And then it was my senior year, year 12, where I knew that academia wasn't for me and that.

It was going to be the beginning of my entrepreneurial career. And I was actually going to invest my time and energy into producing a yearbook video and sell it. And that's what I did in my final year. And I gave away the HSC for that. And so that was my introduction to the world of.

Video marketing. And from there on it was short films, feature films.

Getting fed up with the fact that nobody listened and that I needed to take on more than just creating content. I needed to be able to find a way to get it to the market. And you know, was on was on a feature film called Gabriel. Whereas A.D. first A.D. that I realized that feature films were all about low budget. Feature films at least were all about hanging in there, you know, and if the garbage needs to be taken out at the end of the night, it's your job. You do the job irrespective of whether it is or it isn't. And that that was hard. While I still had Rich Films, I was testing whether I had a career in feature films. And it was that at that point that I realized that I was going to invest all my time into. Into video marketing, into rich Films, because I knew that with what I was doing, there was a guaranteed audience who were going to pay. You know what I mean?

It's such an interesting point that there's so many filmmakers I speak to who are secretly harboring a desire to be in feature films. And I think that's okay. But they often play like their business pays second fill. It's like, oh, well, I'm just doing this corporate stuff till I get the feature film gig. But you picked up an amazing point there, which is you have a guaranteed audience who'll pay. Why is that important?

Well, look, when I started Rich films, I was 20 something, six, seven. I was single and fancy free. And likewise with the team that we, that we brought on, we were all single. We didn't have any responsibilities really. Just, hey, we're gonna start a video production company. And then you know, we got hooked up and now we've got kids and families and we're all both a bit grayer and a bit balder and it's now time to bank. Do you know what I mean? Like, we've, we've dicked around. Honestly, Dan, I do not know how we survived the first 10 or 12 years we went through the GFC. And the only thing that I can break it down to is that our clients were as dumb as we were and they trusted us to produce content because we hadn't a clue about sales, marketing, finances, how to run a business, any of that stuff. We were creatives and we were approaching everything from a creative like, like, oh my God, if you, if you, you're cr. Crazy not to choose us because look at our content, you know, and that was just the biggest naive attitude that if we build it, people will come. It's like, you got to build it and you got to keep building it and then you got to put an infrastructure in that will enable sustainability throughout your business. I mean, it's just been such a big learning curve, particularly in the last five, six, seven years, that it's not about video or technology anymore. It's not about the, the latest equipment. And I couldn't care less about that. It's now about the marketing outcomes for businesses and how they grow and how they reap their roi. And I don't think even the business community in Australia really gets that yet. I think they're still green and have a huge knowledge, huge ability to learn and adopt these new technologies.

Just very quickly. When it comes to web, digital, SEO video, nobody gave out the handbook to businesses and said, hey, this is how you do it. It's been a constant improvement, DIY type of approach to these different digital marketing activities.

With this show and the workshops and online learning and all the wonderful things you can do now. It's about empowering businesses with knowledge that enables them to make the right decisions about their video marketing in the long term.

I agree. You know, it's funny, we recently created a 9 growth accelerator kind of roadmap, if you like, for what are the core elements of building a video production business? And number three is educate. And people look at and go, why do you put educate in a video bus production business coaching program? It's because it's your responsibility to educate the market because nobody else is doing it. And I'll tell you what happened. I used to have an office in Sydney at WeWork and it was an interesting space because I thought, I'll go into WeWork and I'll just kind of, I reckon I'll pick up a bit of business there. And we did, we had a green screen studio there for a while and what was interesting was my biggest competitor in the building was the web design company on the ground floor who had a bit of an agency who did free headshots and were tapping on videos at the end of shoots and clients literally didn't know any better. We're going to, oh well, you can do a video as well. And so I think what happened maybe 10 years ago was people saw video as this kind of luxury item. You know, we'd have a hero video on your website. There was more money around. The GFC came and went that affected everything. But in the meantime everybody got confused. And so I think there's a huge responsibility to educate the market. And that's something you guys do at Ridge, isn't it?

We do, we run workshops once a month and we have done consistently for the last two years. And it's a 90 minute group workshop. Helps businesses, individuals get an understanding of the basics of video marketing. I don't talk about equipment. If you want to learn how to light and do sound, go on to YouTube man, they'll tell you everything you need to know. You know the misconception is that businesses think that video is video. You know, I mean they get an explainer, they put it on their homepage, hey Tick, I've got video. They have no understanding that they're audience is actually wanting to consume them in that fashion and yet they put an explainer video like it's going to solve all the problems of the end viewer and it's not. They need micro touch points of video content to enable their questions to be answered and to alleviate any objections in their buying decisions.

That's its function, you know, I mean like if you're not thinking about how to, how to scale micro content right now with video you are wasting time and you're building redundancy into your video with three to five minute videos that nobody watches because the tension, scarcity is just diminished the returns on long form content and look, argue the point, people will probably be upset about that. But where I play it's all about micro attention and using video as a way to alleviate any objections throughout the decision making process.

Well, I believe the Miwi exposure effect currently says it that product, a consumer needs between 15 and 18 points of contact with a product, brand or service before they are ready to engage with that product, brand or service. So one of the Most powerful things about video content across multiple channels is you can accelerate that process, which I'm guessing is pretty much what you're talking about.

Well, look, it's a tenth of a second to make a judgment call. Something like 80, 90% of your audience is actually going to make a decision about you prior to actually contacting you. Now, if you've got nothing out there, what decision are they making? And yet your competitors are out there blasting content via LinkedIn. They're blasting content on their website, they're answering all those questions that need to be answered and making it far easier for the buyer to make a decision. And so it's, yeah, I'm totally down with the maximizing touch points. And I get a lot of people tell me, but our website doesn't do anything. We don't get that much traffic. I'm like, bull. If people aren't going there and making a judgment call or looking at your Google reviews, they're using multiple areas out in the digital space to decide whether to choose you or not.

Google Reviews are one of the most, if not the most significant ranking metric for local businesses. It's so powerful. You know, five star Google reviews are the gold. And I was at a Google event a few months back and they literally said, not enough people are using Google. My business, Google Reviews are our number one ranking metric. And it's funny, you know, there's a lot of distraction around with different social media channels, but there are some fundamental basics around the principles of marketing which haven't changed in 100 years and will probably not change for 100 years. So tell me, Chris, what was the, what was the, what was the point where things changed for you when you realized you stopped just being a video production company? What was the mindset shift? What happened?

We got so upset by asking our clients why they chose us, thinking that we were different. And they would just simply say, hey, we saw quote A, saw quote B, you were cheaper. We went with you and we realized that we had nothing. We had no point. We could switch on a camera and edit a video. That was all we had. And after 10 or 12 years of that, we, we knew that we had to shake this tree. So we started to invest heavily in education and understanding how we could.

Finally put our stake in the ground and say, we own that.

I talk about it all the time. Point of difference, my clients try and convince me that they have the best product or service. Why you? Well, we've got the best product or service or nobody does it like, it's like Prove it to me. Do you know what I mean? Because everything you're saying is all hearsay until a client actually goes through the process and speaks firsthand and says, yes, that's right, that the only company does that. It's perfect. So I'm not in the business of trying to create unique selling propositions for people, but what I say is, you add video into that mix, then you become what's called a perceived point of difference, because you have it.

You have video, and you're using video to leverage your business, and your clients are not, quite frankly. Therefore, your prospective clients are seeing it. They're seeing it in video. You say it first, therefore, it's perceived as being different. And so that's a lot of what we sort of talk about when it comes to bringing on video marketing and continually adding pieces of value into that video. But for us, at the time when we transitioned and really pivoted the business from video production company into a video marketing agency is that we then knew that we had to stand by the things that we had built and make sure that they become repetitious in our daily communication to the market so that people truly do understand that we are different to video production companies or videographers. And it was our client, actually, one of our clients was financial planning firm rocked up here one day to do their filming. And they said, who are your competitors? And I said, well, video production companies or videographers, what do you ask? And they say, well, we don't think so. Okay, tell me more. You know, this is what Google says, right? We're competing against video production companies. And they said, well, we vetted 12 different companies, and everybody that we spoke to came back with the same thing. What do you want? You know, what would you like? Okay, well, here's a $3,000 video, and you were the 12th, and you came in with the video solutions. You were five times the price. And I was like, oh, but you were five times the price. But we went with you because you were able to provide video solutions that actually integrated into the sales and marketing activity of the business. Now, that was probably the first time after everything that we'd built, that we'd heard it firsthand from our clients and was like, hey, pat on the back. You know.

They were telling us now that we were distinctly different from anybody else that they had vetted. So.

That was both rewarding and.

Took a lot of sweat, blood, and tears to get there. But it was very nice to finally be able to rattle off a whole bunch of different unique selling Propositions and feel confident that they were unique to our business.

You know what I love about that is you are five times more expensive than the next quote and they still went with you. Which I think just goes to demonstrate that sadly. And you can do this as an example, you just Google video production company in any city in the world and up will pop 15 to 20 of the same websites. Me, me, me, me, me. We're passionate storytellers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I don't mean that to be offensive. I mean that that's what I see and that's what clients are seeing. So everyone's competing in the same park when there's no money. But you show them something different, you educate them, you demonstrate that you care and they'll spend five times as much. And have you seen that across the board?

Just what do you mean Crossbow, as.

In, you know, that was the first time who came to you and said you're different. That must have triggered something in you. So you must have gone out the market and taken that from a marketing perspective and gone. Let's push for more of these kind of clients and therefore do more kind of clients like that end up becoming on your radar.

Yeah, look, I think it's one thing for them to say that and it's another for us to look at all the opportunities to make it viable for the business. It's like, okay, yeah, we've done a 20 grand job, like, great, yes, you're telling us we're different, but how do we continually leverage it, involve that through the lifecycle of that client, you know, and so it's not about just, you know, us putting a stake in the ground and putting a USP line together and saying, hey, that's us. Now it's about a whole bunch of different marketing and sales activities that are going to provide an ongoing relationship with our clients that we never had as a video production company. We would just, you know, do the client, hand over the USB stick with a QuickTime file and thanks. And there was very little follow through. And I know, Dan, that you're all about follow ups and follow through. And it's like, I can't stress that enough. I. Six times, you know, it's something like it's easy to buy, to sell, you know, with a client, six times easier to sell the client that's already an existing client. And so for us it was using that principle as well as what are the other feasible options we can give our clients beyond just the video production side of things to enable them an Ongoing sustainable competitive advantage using video marketing. It's not just, oh, they've done the video, then what? Like, you have to be able to help them with implementation, measuring results, strategy. You want to be able to create the cyclical approach to video marketing that shows them how they grow. And that's where I think small to medium sized businesses are willing to go through that process. I think it's a lot harder with enterprise, large corporate type organizations because there's a lot of different fingers in the pies and agencies and marketing coordinators and different people. But small to mediums are willing to give it a crack, do you know what I mean? So now it's about showing them how to optimize and leverage and repurpose content. It's not just, okay, one video, now it's for the homepage, but it's how do you skin that 10 different ways so that you maximize the ROI? You know, that's the thing, like it's all going to come back to roi. So if you're just creating content for the sake of it, I mean, people come to me every day, man. Like, this is why the, the business community hasn't, hasn't changed in their understanding around video. Because the inquiry is still, hey, we need a three to five minute video. We've got five grand to spend and we need it by August. You know, that's the brief. So, you know, as a business, we don't, we don't rely on briefs. We extract the brief from them using questions about what is the problem, what is the purpose, what is the reason why you're doing this? And if we understand that, then we can help them. We can provide video solutions that enable them to do what they need to do and to band aid particular challenges or problems within their sales and marketing. But without that basic understanding, what are you doing, man? Are you just like, oh, yeah, oh, we can do that. We could do an explainer video for you. Yay. It's like, it's not enough now. No, it's just not enough.

I love it. You know, it's interesting a lot of, I have a lot of conversations with a lot of filmmakers and oftentimes they'll say to me, oh, I just want to work with medium to large sized brands. You've got budget. And what you said there was, it's small to medium sized companies who are willing to give it a go. I think what's interesting with that is something you touched on, Chris, which is bigger brands have agencies and agencies are a whole different world of pain. Their Whole strategy for marketing is different. So typically what are some of the kinds of businesses that you would work with, what kind of revenues are they doing and how much are they spending on video?

So we're working with small to mediums typically and they're spending probably on a single video. And we don't typically sell single videos anymore. We're selling payment style plans where they're rolling out anywhere between three and probably on average about 10 videos per year. And so what you have then is this ongoing relationship that you have with them. You're showing them and helping them all the way through to implementation and coming back and repurposing and looking for ways to continually shake the tree. So it's just within the video at the end. The average I think is still the industry standard, I think is still about 7k across the board for video content. I mean that's probably about right. We don't know. We haven't been talking to my business partner saying we should definitely be, we should know that. But you know, the businesses.

That are adopting the agencies are. Yeah, you're right, like are a different kettle of fish. I mean it's what we realized about three or four years ago was if agents, if we were going to work with agencies, we weren't going to be the bottom of, of the food chain. We had to work alongside them because quite frankly we knew more about video marketing and we needed to back ourselves that that was the case and for us to work together on the strategy if need be, or they can take the strategy from there on, man, we need to be able to offer them solutions that are going to benefit both parties to make sure that we provide the best value to the client. So I think early on there's a lot of agencies that were a bit apprehensive about that approach because they're like, oh, what you, you want to work alongside and like work like we've got access to the client. I say yes, it's exactly what we want to do. You know what I mean? What do you know about. Oh, we've got video covered. We've got video covered. It's like what do you know? What do you know about video? I mean the reality is you do not have a video. As I can see as somebody hitting your website for the first time. I can't see any video on your. What do you know about? You know what I mean? Like this is, this is the thing we saw about four years ago. Video production companies were funny, man. Like they were putting a, do a showreel and that was their video marketing. Do you know what I mean? A show reel that told the audience nothing about storytelling, nothing about whether they can actually compose a message, nothing about creating specific content that was going to be suitable to a specific marketing challenge. They were just chucking a showreel out there and go, oh, here you go, it's a show reel and samples of our work. And I was like, nah, man, that's old school. Now, you know, if you're just knocking up a showreel and going, oh, this is okay, like that's fine for a videographer or a cinematographer. But if you're in the video production, video marketing game, you gotta be showing your prospective clients how to do it. Lead by example and therefore making it easy for them to buy from you because they can see that you're already doing it.

I agree. It's an absolute no brainer. This is like, it's the most obvious thing in the world to me yet there is so much resistance from the market to actually do this. And I think it's because it's actually quite a lot of work. And it takes discipline and it takes structure and it takes systemization, it takes investment.

And oftentimes people are unwilling to invest in themselves. They'll happily spend 20 grand on a camera kit or justify the next DJI Ronin gimbal, whatever it's called. Now, the number of people I see posting on social. You've got the latest drone. The last drone wasn't good enough. There's definitely an inner geek in all of us, but it's like being willing to not spend money on gear, but invest in yourself. And we might need to roll this over to another episode because there's a whole discussion I want to have around personal development and investing yourself. So, Chris, let's pause this here because this is just warming up. And guys, we'll continue with Chris next week.

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Sam.