7 Things You're Not Doing That Are Killing Your Video Business - Master Filmmaker

What's going on, guys? Welcome to another video. And in this video, we're going to be talking about how to make more money in your video business or as a videographer and some key mistakes you might be making that are costing you a ton of money. If you don't know me, my name is Eric Darren and I run Master Filmmaker where We've helped over 412 video business owners implement sales, marketing and operations processes so they can actually grow their business and build a business that they love, that pays them every single month. And we've been helping those video business owners for the past five years. And in these videos, I want to share with you the tips and tricks that, that I've learned along the way, scaling my own businesses and scaling 412 other video business owners businesses as well. So let's jump in. So number one is picking a niche. Now, I know as creatives, we wanna do everything we possibly can. We don't wanna do one specific thing because that's boring. And while I understand that that's actually what's gonna kill your business. And so that's why creatives, notoriously, are not very good at business, is because they're struggling with jumping from niche to niche to niche. So, like, they'll do one thing and then they'll jump to something else. And then they'll jump to something else. Is every time you jump from thing to thing to thing, you lose leverage on that entire thing that you just left. So let's say you spent like a year working with gyms. Well, when you go to the other thing, you lose all that experience that you had working with gyms. And when you can pick one specific thing that you can go all in on, you build leverage with that one thing and you build leverage by doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I was talking to a client about this the other day. The problem is if you keep changing from thing to thing to thing, and again, you lose all of that leverage. And you're also not as potent to the avatar that you're speaking to. So let's say that you want to go after. Let's say you just serve businesses in general, right? If I just serve businesses in general, it's not as potent as saying I serve gyms or I serve medical companies or I serve any niche that you end up deciding to go with, right? So when you pick one niche, you can establish yourself as an expert. And that's the key. And so the whole point of niching down, the whole point of that is so you can eliminate additional competition in the marketplace. And so if you can focus on one thing, you can be the best video business owner that only works with medical companies, right? Now think about if I said, if I'm going to a medical company and I'm pitching them and I'm saying, hey, we only work with medical. We only work with medical companies to create video content that helps them bring in more patients and more clients and more customers. Now think about if they're deciding to work with someone who only works with medical companies versus somebody who just works with businesses in general, which person do you think they're going to decide to go with? Obviously, the person who only works with medical companies. Now, the second thing you need to be focusing on is getting one to two case studies. So let's say that you're going to go after medical companies, right? So now that you've decided you want to go after medical companies, the second thing you need to do is get one to two case studies. Now you might be wondering, well, why, right? If I'm a medical company and I'm looking to see what type of work you've done in the past, I'm going to look for other medical companies, right? That's one of the reasons that having a niche is one of the most powerful things that you can do. And so we want to get one to two case studies with people who are in that space. And the way that we do that is we just go out and we offer like one small thing for free to them, right? So if you've never worked in this industry, then you're going to need to get these case studies. If you have worked in this industry, then you can probably get by with going to past clients and setting up case studies and going through a case study script, which we give our full clients, and going through that and actually recording a case study, whether it's on something like Riverside, if you're not in person or just going in person and getting that case study. Now that's super important because we want to get like one to two of these, and then that way we have those at our disposal. So then when we go to new clients, we can charge full price and not have to worry about them. And they understand and realize and they have full confidence that we know what we're doing. So if you don't have any of these, you're going to want to offer something for free. Now a lot of people are like, oh, I don't want to offer anything for free. Well, look, if you've never worked in this industry. You're going to need to offer something for free and so you're going to want to do something for free. We could do something like, you know, either a free brand film, something very small, something super easy, you do a brand film or we could do some sort of social content or that you could give them like one free month of your services. Now after we go to these clients, we're going to get those case studies, we're going to film those case studies and then we're going to edit those case studies. Now the next thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to build a retainer based offer. So now that we've gotten some case studies with some people in our space, we've picked a niche. Now we want to build a retainer based offer. And so with this we want to have something where the client is paying us every single month for a number of videos. Now this is where we're gonna get into actually building the packages. And so there's two different types of deliverables. So there's one time and then there's sticky. Now an example of a one time deliverable would be something like a brand film, right? So they're only gonna need probably one brand film from you. But an example of a sticky deliverable is something like a social, social content, right? Cause they need more social content every single month. And so those are the two different types of deliverables. And so we wanna come up with a retainer based package. Let's just say that it' a month for the sake of this, right? $5,000 a month. It's 5K a month. Maybe they get 15 social media reels, they get one brand film. I'm just making this up as I go guys. And then Maybe they get 20 photos and then these ones are every month and then this one is going to be your one time, right? So let's just say this is a 5k a month. And then what I typically do is I split it up into 3, 6 and 12, right? So 3 month, 6 month, 12 month. Now this isn't the price you're actually gonna show to the client. What I would do is I do a 3 month here. 6 month, 12 month. Now let's say our 3 month is 15k and then our 12 month, let me do some math here. So 5 times 6 would be really 30k. But what I like to do to incentivize them to go with a longer package, what I typically do is knock some money. So 15k. Obviously 15k times two would be six months, that'd be 30k. So what I do is maybe something like 24k. So it's a little bit less expensive for them to do a six month package with us. Right. So then that gets them to incentivize to commit to a longer term. And then the 12 month would be 24 times 2 be 48. So let's say we call it 42k for the 12 month. Right. And so this is how I incentivize it. And then when I go to pitch, I just say, hey, we have a 12 month, a six month, a three month. Most of our clients do the six month, but which one would you say you're leaning towards? So then I try to incentivize them to go with the six month since that's the middle package and then I try to get them go that way. Right. So that's the third thing we want to do is we want to have a retainer based offer that we can now sell to our clients. Now that we have our retainer based offer, we have case studies and we have a niche now. We need to start getting leads. Now there's two main ways to get leads. There's outbound and there's inbound. Outbound means that you're reaching out to people. This is going to be cold calls, cold emailing, cold dms, reaching out to people that you know. Outbound is really good if you do not have a lot of money but you have a lot of time. That's supposed to be a clock there, Sorry. Inbound is really good if you have some money and you don't have a lot of time. Right. So outbound is going to be good if you don't have a lot of money and you have a lot of time. Inbound is going to be good if you have a lot of money or you have some money, but you don't have a lot of time. Because inbound you typically have to pay for. Outbound you don't have to pay for. And so if you're going to do outbound, you're going to want to reach out to at least 50 to 100 people per day for this to be actually effective. Right. And so we'd want to reach out to 50 to 100 people per day. And then from there we can use things like our old contact list. Right. We can use Instagram, we can use Facebook, we can use LinkedIn. LinkedIn. We like to use something called Walaxi. If I spelled that correctly and that automates the DMs. So that automates the DMs. It DMs a bunch of people in the niche and it automates that and it makes it super easy to reach out to a bunch of people. But you're gonna wanna reach out to at least 50 to 100 people per day and you can use some sort of frame like hey name. We're actually looking to work with a couple more medical companies in the area helping them to achieve xyz whatever the outcome is that you actually help them achieve. I was wondering if you knew anybody who might be interested in something like that. So by asking them if they know anybody here, that relieves some of that sales pressure and makes it a little bit less salesy. And you just say, hey, I'm wondering if you know anybody who might be interested in content to help scale their medical company. Here's some case studies that we've done. So now we're tying back in those case studies that we did before and we're reaching out to 50 to 100 people a day. And you can also use things like Google to just google the medical companies or whatever your niche is in your area and then you can start reaching out to them as well. So that's the outbound side. Now the inbound side, which personally is my favorite, I use inbound for everything that I do. That's how I've scaled my companies, that's how I help our clients scale their companies. Basically what we do here is we want to create some sort of ad, right? We run it towards people who are medical companies. We drive that into some sort of opt in page here where we get their name, email, phone number, and then from there those people go to a video, a value video that talks about what we do, how we can help them, what that looks like. And then below that is a calendar for them to schedule a time to learn more or schedule a demo around how we can help them with our video services. And then from there those people then get on a call and then a percentage of those people turn into clients. And so I don't have to do any reach outs because I'm paying for the reach of this advertisement, of this social ad that's reaching those people and then driving them into our system and then driving them into watch a value video and then booking calls with us. So that's how we book calls. And if you want to learn a little bit more about what that actually looks like, there's a video below this video that Goes to a training that I have that I cover in depth how this actually works and how the inbound system actually works to get you more clients in your video business. Now step number five here is to close those deals over the phone or over zoom. We prefer zoom because you can see them face to face. It builds more trust and it makes it a lot easier. And so there's a couple main steps as a part of the actual sales call. So there's the intro rapport, Then we check for any partners, are there any other partners that need to be on this call. And then we go through discovery and that's where we're learning more about what they need, how we can actually help, what that looks like, their situation, where they're at, the consequence of if they don't do anything about that problem, what that whole process looks like. And then we're going into diagnosis and this is where we're actually gonna diagnose the problem, understand what we can do to, and show them what we can actually do to help them solve the problem. And then from there, this is the pitch where we're pitching what we do in pitching those retainers. And then there's the collections phase after that. And then there is the, and then we have the objections phase. And so there's inter rapport, partners, discovery, diagnosis, pitch, collections, objections. And then we go through this whole process. If you want to learn more about this, again, there's a link below where I break this whole process down and how we actually go through our sales process. But that is the process we go through on the phone to then get those people from a. An actual call here to a close to deal and an actual client right here. Now the sixth step is now that you have them as a client, we need to optimize the client journey. And so there's a couple different things within the client journey, and there's things called activation points. And this is essentially steps along the journey that the client takes with you where they can activate, where they get some sort of results. So maybe the first thing is they get their videos, then they get some sort of result, and then maybe they refer you to another client. Right? And so these are different activation points that makes the client infinitely more valuable once they start working with you. And you wanna make sure they're hitting those activation points as quickly as. So we want to shorten the time. Again, this is a clock here from when they join with you to when they start hitting these activation points. And then we want to map out like what is the journey With a client when they work with you for three months? What is the journey when a client works with you for six months? And then what does the journey look like when they work with you for 12 months? Now step number seven is where we're actually going to hire a team to start offloading the work so we can buy our time back. And so we want to look at things, what are the things we're actually spending our time on and who should we be hiring first? And typically it looks like this, the first person you're gonna want to hire is some sort of editor. So you can get that off your plate. Second thing you're gonna want to hire is some sort of shooter slash videographer number three. The third thing is you're gonna want to start hiring somebody like an appointment setter, somebody who can actually set appointments and field the leads that are coming in through your inbound system. And then step number four, you're gonna want to hire somebody like a salesperson, someone who can start replacing you, taking the calls, closing these deals, and start closing these clients without you. And then you're gonna wanna hire somebody like an account manager so that someone who can oversee and be a liaison between the editor, the shooter and then the client, that would be the account manager and that would be somebody who would start being a liaison between those things. And then after that, we just wanna look at where are you spending most of your time and how can we start to buy that time back? So we don't have you spending your time on low value activities. We want you only spending your time on high value activities, activities that make you a lot of money. And editing would not be a high value activity. Being a videographer would not be a high value activity. An appointment center wouldn't be high value. Salesperson is higher value. But you could still buy yourself out of that. And then finally, account manager manages the whole thing. And so we want to look at where are the things, where are the places within your business that you're spending a ton of time that are not making you more money. So in short, to summarize, first thing you're going to want to do is niche down. Second thing is get one to two case studies. Then we build the retainer based offer here. And then we work on getting leads either outbound or inbound. And then we work on closing those deals over the phone or over zoom, following the closing framework. And then we optimize the client journey. Figure out where are the activation points, what does that look like, where are the clients out how can we smooth that entire process out? And then we work on hiring a team to start buying your time back. And. And then we just rinse, repeat when it comes to getting leads, taking calls, turning those into clients, turning those clients into raving fans, so clients that love you, and then hiring people on our team to fulfill on the growth that we're getting. And then we just rinse, repeat, and we do this over and over and over again. And we keep doing that until we reach whatever level we want to get to in our business. Now, obviously that's easier said than done, but this is the overarching process of how you can scale your video business, make more money in your video business, and build a business that you love owning because you have team members take care of all the work for you, as opposed to you having to do everything yourself. So if you want to learn more about this process, how we help video business owners, and how we help creative businesses scale, there's a link below to check out a free training and to schedule a time with us and to schedule a call with my team. And we can walk you through how we might be able to help you do this yourself in your business and help you grow your video business. So we'll see you there and I'll see you in the next video. I.