Amplify Your Exposure With These Simple Video Strategies with Dennis Yu

People buy you because they feel like they know you. And what do you think is more compelling? A video or seeing a landing page that has a picture of you smiling that could have been years ago. What's more compelling? An email that. Let's say that you want to be a customer of ours and you wanted training on digital marketing, which is what we provide. Right. How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon. For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now, here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo, and today I've got a very fun and exciting episode, or as like we like to say on the show, epicizzle of.

Marketing and business growth advice. I've got Dennis Yu from Blitzmetrics on the line, and Dennis is a guy I've been following for several years now, ever since I discovered him. I think I first came across Dennis on my buddies, Matt Wolfe and Joe's podcast, Hustle and Flowchart.

Hustle and Flow.

Yep. I think that was the first time I ever really discovered Dennis here. And I was really impressed with the stuff you've done. And then I've seen a lot of your work around branding and videos and building connections and building an audience and a platform. And since that is, I think, one of the biggest, biggest things that people can do right now, especially in times of uncertainty, I want to kind of dive into more of your story and what you've done and some of the stuff that's working right now. And I've got a couple ideas of where we can take this, because the other part of my podcast is it's very selfish. I love to ask questions on things that I'm going to go out and implement right away for myself. So, Dennis.

First of all, tell me a little bit about Blitzmetrics, because I've mentioned that and I've followed you guys. I know you've got. I mean, you've worked with some really amazing companies out there. You've got some incredibly big clients, from basketball teams to. You name it. Tell me a little more about that. I know a little bit about you, but I'm not as familiar with Blitzmetrics.

Well, just over 20 years ago, I worked at American Airlines as one of my first real jobs, and I thought, wow, I'M willing to get on an airplane that goes all the way across the planet and trust that it's not going to blow up or crash or have something bad happen. Right? Think about the amount of trust that's required. Or when you go visit a dentist and maybe they put you under and they do some kind of surgery or procedure and you trust that they're going to do that thing right. Or you bring your car to the mechanic and you trust that they're going to do it right. But what happens when you go to a marketer or to an agency? Can you really trust it's gonna be done right?

No, that's one of the hardest things.

Or a lawyer who passes the bar or someone who has some kind of certification to be a chiropractor or to be whatever it is, like a pilot. And I thought, man, this whole thing is missing in the world of marketing. So what if we had real competent people that actually could deliver real results? What would you need to make that happen? Well, you need to have analytics so you can measure everything to see whether it actually happened. It's like a fat man getting a shoe shine. He's kind of trusting it happened. Right? And then two is you need certifications, real training, hands on exercises where people can do the very thing that they're going to do for clients. So if you're Brad taking a class on how to make sushi, I'm willing to get on an airplane that goes all the way across the planet and trust that it's not going to blow up or crash or have something bad happen. Right? Think about the amount of trust that's required. Or when you go visit a dentist and maybe they put you under and they do some kind of surgery or procedure and you trust that they're going to do that thing right. Or you bring your car to the mechanic and you trust that they're going to do it right. But what happens when you go to a marketer or to an agency? Can you really trust it's going to be done right?

No, that's one of the hardest things.

Or a lawyer who passes the bar or someone who has some kind of certification to be a chiropractor or to be whatever it is, a pilot. And I thought, man, this whole thing is missing in the world of marketing. So what if we had real competent people that actually could deliver real results? What would you need to make that happen? Well, you need to have analytics so you can measure everything to see whether it actually happened. It's like a fat man getting a Shoe shine. He's kind of trusting. It happened, right? And then two is you need certifications, real training, hands on exercises where people can do the very thing that they're going to do for clients. So if you're Brad taking a class on how to make sushi, you'd expect that in that workshop you'd be making sushi because you're going to be a sushi chef. So me as an engineer working at a search engine and building tools, this is before PHP and Apache and WordPress and MySQL and all these things that if you're building, you know, building tools you use, oh so easy. I just go to GoDaddy and I click this, this and this and it's done. Well, it wasn't like that 20 years ago. Okay? It was really hard. You had to know what you're doing as an engineer. But that taught me the importance of training. Like the airline background told me that there's a process where when you have a plane, like a pre flight checklist before you take off, that taught me that there's a process for security. Whether you like it or not, there's a security process to make sure that the flight's going to be safe. There's a process for how you handle the B, there's a process for complaining and sometimes the processes were broken. For example, did you know, and I don't think it's. Well, it might still be true that if you, let's say that someone was rude to you on the airplane, right? Or the bag fell on your head, then you could complain right there at the customer service counter in the airport and they would give you a discretionary 5,000 miles, right? And then you could call in and say, oh, they treated me poorly, the bag fell on my head and they'll give you 5,000 miles. And then you could write in with an email or write in on direct mail and say, oh, they mistreated me and they'll give you 5,000 miles. And because the different groups didn't talk to each other, you would get 20,000 miles, enough for another domestic round trip plane ticket, right? Because the systems were broken. The system wasn't that the system was bad, it's that the rules were wrong. So I thought. So me as an engineer, just pretend maybe you're not an engineer, maybe you're not a math guy, but pretend you are. Just for a moment, how might you approach solving the problem of marketing for small businesses, for local businesses, for chiropractors and restaurants and florists and personal injury Attorneys. Right. How would you apply a process that is. See, a lot of people think bureaucracy is bad. They think like paperwork and all this. It's actually a good thing or it's actually a neutral thing. You actually do need a process. And we've talked about building, you know, video at scale via things like the topic wheel. We've talked about collecting feedback from customers and using that as your marketing. And how do you do that at scale and how do you do it across more channels? So maybe initially it was just the website because that's where things were 20 years ago. But now you have all these social networks and every day there's another network and another app and people come to me and say, dennis, have you heard about TikTok? Dennis, have you heard about this other app? Have you heard about like. No, I've never heard of that app. Well, there's 200 million users on that app. I've never heard of that app. I have so many apps already on my phone. So the way you're able to overcome that is you have a process for how you're collecting content from your customers, so your customers do the work and you have a process for editing and distribution of that content to be able to drive sales for you. And that's the thing. Me as an engineer, I've come from being this Asian math guy of 40 some years ago. I was the kid that you would hate. I would, I would ace the math and I would walk out and everyone would be like, dang it, that Asian kid I was good at. And I went from that guy to being.

That guy who also sort of understands marketing enough to be dangerous.

Yeah. No, and that is actually one of the, one of the key things you don't see that very often. Like, usually it's one or the other. It's like a very kind of left brained analytical person or very right brain, creative person. I know I lean more on the right brain, creative side and whatnot. But yeah, that's a, that's a good double threat there. It is to have both aspects at the same time.

It's like the accountant who can also play the guitar. Right. Or sing. Or like some like left brain and right brain or you know, it's the artist who also can do physics. Right. Or math. It's like, how do you balance both of those? And I think that any entrepreneur, any small business owner now has to be able to connect both sides. Yeah. And if they're not as strong, like, naturally you're gonna have a preference. Just like you're naturally right handed or naturally left handed, but you need someone else who can fill in those gaps. So when you have processes that allow you to hire other people, it's just a dollar a day or just $5 for a task on Fiverr, you can actually balance all these other things. And I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs I know that are just struggling all by themselves and they don't do any marketing or they are the marketing so.

Completely, but they still haven't hired a full time virtual assistant for $500 a month. $500 a month. The person who's there, college educated, do all the stuff that you want. Happy, high integrity, very excited to work for you. A real person just on the other side of the planet that you have to coordinate with and you have to train and you have to give them things to do. Otherwise they don't do anything if you don't tell them what to do. Or fancy hands where I pay, I don't know what I pay per month for like 50 tasks per month. And I have them make phone calls, I have them scheduled meetings, I have them research. I haven't ordered things on Amazon. Right.

Or I used to use fancy hands quite a bit. And I actually, it's. That's cool that you brought that back up because I let that lapse like a couple of years ago. But I love using fancy hands for quick little tasks.

I save two hours a day on stuff that I otherwise would have had to do myself. And if you're honest, whether you know you're watching us live right now or you're on the replay, tell me what percent of your time this is a real answer. This is not hypothetical. What percent of your time, Brad, is doing stuff that is repetitive, that if you had to process, you wouldn't have to keep doing it again?

Oh yeah, yeah, it's. I tried to actually sit down and track that one time, but then I got, I think I got distracted and I stopped. It was a lot. It was a lot.

It's like saying you're too busy to read the time management books.

I know. Exactly.

And for those of us that own businesses or even not, like we're running marketing inside some other company or we're doing some kind of function, employee or not. What percent of the things that you explain to potential customers or clients are things that you explain over and over again? Do you have like a top 10 list of things that you repeat over and over again, like what you do or how your product works or how it's different than Such and such or what it costs or how often does that happen?

Yeah, quite a bit.

So imagine that you could cut that all away because you automated it, because you pre recorded it, because you had assistants that were following processes where you, you demonstrate like in a zoom call, you just like, what I'll do is I'll go on a zoom call or a loom and I'll, I'll record, okay, this is how I do this one thing I do. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And this is how I do it. And I try to explain in detail why I'm doing it the way I'm doing it, to try to give as much context as possible. And then another person on our team turns that into training. And then that training goes out to all these other people to try it. I like to do this kind of three strikes rule where if I have training that I think super clear and it's super good, and I think like, there's no way people will mess this up because I got every little detail in there and then I put it out there. I'll give it to fancy hands or I'll give it to one of our VAs, or I'll give it to one of the other people on our team here in the us.

It usually fails because they get stuck at some point I was like, that's obvious. How did you get stuck at this one thing? It's so easy, right? But I gotta not say that because it sounds, you know, condescending or insulting. I have to remember that there's that most of the stuff that you and I know, the stuff in our head that we think is obvious, it's not obvious. You think it's obvious. It's not obvious. You need to write it down. Be as specific as possible. Remove all subjectivity. Okay. If you look at the like things like checklist manifesto, like in hospitals, the procedures they have to scrub down before they do a surgery. These are cardiologists and people that are surgeons and they're following a checklist on exactly how they do something. And that was the number one thing that's prevented a lot of unnecessary hospital deaths. Millions of hospital deaths per year have been prevented because of those kinds of procedures.

What if planes from falling out of the air? I know in the aviation, you know, world checklists are super duper important for those reasons.

Yeah. I was in Kuala Lumpur three months ago in what used to be the world's tallest building in the Petronas Towers and the KL Tower. And I remember going all the way up to the something crazy like the 130th floor looking out all the cross. And I thought, you know, what if the wind blows really hard? Am I afraid that the thing will fall over and I'm just going to die? And all these things you take for granted, right. When you get in your car, you trust that the brakes are going to work. You trust all these other things are going to work. And you know why? It's because there's systems. That car, whether it's built by Tesla or gm, has systems behind it. So why wouldn't you systematize your business? Anything that you've done three times, you then should write out or more or whatever. That's repetitive. You should write out how it is step by step, then give it to one of your other people. Or if you don't have someone, hire somebody. Or give it to Fiverr or Fancy Hands or hire someone on upwork, whatever. Or your son or daughter. Right. Guinea pigs, and have them do it. And if you can have three people follow that thing that you did, then you have a checklist and now you can start to repeat it.

Yeah. And that's one of the things. So, like, I appreciate the need for systems. I'm terrible at following them. Like, if you give me a system or procedure, like I'll, I'll go off the rails. But, but I love, I'm good at creating them to a point. I've gotten a lot better for exactly like the reasons you mentioned as well. Like, I got my first virtual assistant back in maybe 2008. And then I would, I would realize, yeah, this was clear to me. But you've got to take an extra step. You got to continue to spoon feed all the little details because the stuff that we take for granted doesn't with them. But now, you know, and a recent hire that I made is a, you know, one of her biggest skill sets is it's project management and it's systems creation and it's. And also like hiring and gathering resources. So I want her to make sure that, like when I have something to do, she doesn't necessarily need to do it, but I want to make sure whatever gets done is documented. And then she goes out and hires the right person and gets them trained on the systems, et cetera. And that has taken so much.

Off of my plate.

Yeah.

And allowed me to be more creative, which is where I want to be anyway. Now that is one of the things when I was talking to Joe and Matt and they were like, yeah, man, Dennis has got like these amazing Systems and workflows for stuff. I want to get to those in a moment, but I also want to talk about, you know, get into the areas where I'm also familiar. And I kind of want some nuance on like, video creation and, you know, using these to not only build your audience, your brand, your platform, and using it to connect with people, because you are. You have done this in a masterful way. I'd love for you to share with the audience kind of the general philosophy behind that or the overall strategy, but something that I haven't really seen as much as the workflow and like, how to make sure that, you know, we're all creating amazing videos on our phones, for instance. And then how do you manage all that without getting just completely inundated with overwhelm?

So, Brad, this is something we talked about a bit earlier, and it's something that no one ever asks. And the fact that no one's asking means that there's a sign of a deeper problem of either, A, people aren't producing videos for various reasons, and then B, if they are, which is like what you see with most people, podcasts, is they don't know really what to do because there's so much glamour in producing the podcast. But then you got to promote it, you got get people to see it. You have to link episodes together in the right way. You have to cut out snippets and make it go across other channels. Podcasters, or most people that are making video, or most entrepreneurs, they are really good salespeople, but they don't have that.

Process that's been 100% guilty of that. Like, I have done such a poor job compared to what I should have been doing in doing all of this stuff. So that's. This is great. I'm going to be taking copious notes.

So you could either build process, which isn't as hard as it sounds. You just have someone follow you around. It doesn't mean you sit there and write, write all these manuals. You just turn the camera on while you're doing stuff that you're doing and have someone else follow up who is a process person and turn it in the checklist. I'm a weirdo because I can play both, right? I can do something and I can build checklists. You do not have to be a checklist builder to have checklists built. Number two, which is the easier way, is just leverage checklists that we've already built. And other people that have built checklists use their checklists. And if someone else has a Good checklist in local marketing or video marketing or entrepreneurship or digital marketing, then we have actively been seeking their checklist. Whenever I see someone that's accomplished a particular result, I say, hey, show me how'd you do that? And they'll say, oh, it was easy. I just, I just did this, this and this. Okay, no, no, hold on a minute. Explain why you did this, this and this and when you did this versus when you did that and we turn it into a checklist. So I'm constant, I'm a honeybee. I'm constantly gathering these things so I can show you the accumulation of that. And I can even show you on my phone how we collect video and how we process video, which is something that, I don't know, it's like a magician behind the scenes. Like people just don't know about it or they don't even realize what's possible. Right?

Yeah. So let's start with the strategy of, you know, for using videos to build the brand and to, you know, whether it's, you know, touching on the dollar a day strategy or the topic wheel. But then let's dive like once people understand that, let's dive into the way that this might flow out on a workflow.

People buy you because they feel like they know you. And what do you think is more compelling? A video or seeing a landing page that has a picture of you smiling that could have been years ago. What's more compelling? An email that. Let's say that you want to be a customer of ours and you want a training on digital marketing, which is what we provide. Right. Plus the support, which is actually more important. You could get an email from me that explains all the stuff that we do or you saw earlier. I replied with a video just to you. I said, hey, Brad, what's going on? I'm a big fan of being bacon wrapped too. Right. So you laugh because the personality comes out. And all of us know that when we are with customers or clients or team members and they can see our face, that that builds a stronger connection because 90% of that communication is non verbal, isn't it? Yeah. So we need to be able to put our face even if we don't.

It's not the way we're used to. We've got to put video out there everywhere. And that's what social media is putting. That's why it's called face book. See, a lot of people don't realize that. That's why there's YouTube and blogs and all that is you have to show Your face. And you know, it takes less time for me to reply to someone's email with the video than it does to speak the thing into the little microphone thing and have it transcribe and try to edit that stuff and all that. So I don't see why you wouldn't do it except for selfish reasons, because you don't like how you sound, or you don't like how you look, or you need to do your hair. People don't care. So the main point here is video is what builds relationships. And videos across all platforms, Zoom, email, whatever, YouTube, Facebook, any channel. Video is what connects. It's not just to sell, but it builds relationships to the point where people then remember you and then they might Google you and then buy your services or remember to call you. Because like we coach a team of chiropractors and these chiropractors are used to doing chiropractor things like sending out brochures and old school marketing yellow pages. And we've been teaching them to make 15 second videos about their life, about what they had for dinner, about their favorite Netflix show, if they're cooped up in coronavirus or about some piece of advice or here's a piece of equipment and here's how we use it. Because people don't know. Right. Educating, actually teaching. Right. And like what do you do if you have a migraine headache? Oh, that's interesting. I kind of want to know. Right. And teaching these chiropractors who are non technical to pull out this phone every time they have an idea just to make 15 second video. That's it. Post it on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. Then the process kicks in where there are folks who are experts at video editing and for $5 they'll edit that video and make it nice and put a headline on the top and do the transcription on the bottom and post it to YouTube or edit or process your podcast or all these things where you just don't want to get to the. Or make your website, convert the video to a blog post, like, come on. Right. That's stuff that you can push to someone else.

Absolutely.

And you should, because it's, you know, the minute you push it to somebody else that get frees you up to do another video and another video and you're gonna get a lot more videos.

Yeah, but if you just delegate something to someone else and they don't know what they're doing, they're not properly trained, it's not part of an overall process. The amount of time you waste explaining stuff, fixing mistakes, Chasing them because these freelancers, they disappeared on me. Right? That's a. That's because your process is broken.

So.

So then in the. So obviously, video is definitely king because it is the best way to build a bonded relationship with somebody outside of being directly with them in person. And, you know, and right now, as we record this on April 1.

Nobody is hopefully directly in person with many other people outside of their family. So it's becoming even more imperative that people understand this and use this to build bonds with their customers, et cetera. And in the strategy of creating these, you know, you've talked a lot about through the years, and I've seen a lot of people kind of parrot this. The dollar a day strategy. You want to go over the basics of the way that works. The dollar a day strategy.

Dollar a day is how you get seen. A lot of people, they produce content like they produce a website, they produce a podcast, they produce whatever, a landing page, they produce a YouTube video. They put stuff out there. But then you have to pay to get. We call it social postage, digital postage. You have to pay to get it seen. So if you post something on Facebook and you expect that 2 billion people are going to see it, good luck. You have to pay a dollar a day to get it seen. That means you have to technically advertise. But advertising has the connotation that you're trying to sell. But a lot of what you're doing when you're boosting for a dollar a day, like on Facebook, is you just want it. You want people to see who you are. You're sharing your expertise. So, yes, you are paying money to put out messages of who you are and your stories and your knowledge. And it might appear that you're wasting money because you're not directly selling. So then you're like, you know What? I spent $100 boosting posts over the last month, and I can't tell whether those videos directly drove sales. Well, you know, what does happen is people are more likely to Google you. People will see you in the supermarket and say, hey, I've been seeing your stuff all over Facebook. Right. We do this with hundreds of real estate agents that are part of the Tom Ferry International Group. And we teach them how to make one minute videos about interviewing their favorite restaurant owner or giving tips on what the best schools are or interest rates or whatever it is they want to talk about. And they see people coming up to them saying, yeah, you know.

When I saw that video that you put on Facebook, it reminded me that, you know, because I'm looking for to call you versus this other person that creates the word of mouth and the referral business. So if you're in a business that relies upon customer referrals, then how do those customers remember to contact you when they want to get their car fixed again? When they want to tell their friend that you're a dentist and tell their friend, hey, you should go see so and so. Who's my dentist? Right. Dentists are heavily on referrals. It's putting stuff out there so they remember you. So it is. It is kind of like advertising, but the dollar a day is hitting just your audience, hitting your existing customers, hitting people in your neighborhood. Brad, how many people can you reach for a dollar a day?

You can reach actually quite a bit, I mean, depending upon. Especially depending upon how wide your audience is. If it's a. If it's a pretty general. Like you said, if you're. If you're a real estate agent, et cetera, I mean, you'd be surprised. Like, you wouldn't be surprised, but other people would be surprised at how many people can see it. And it's not even. It's not even about the dollar a day is. I mean, you could bid 2, 5, $10 a day if you want, but it's about just the. Consistently keeping them out there in a way that doesn't break the budget. You don't feel like I'm just spending too much.

We taught some chiropractors yesterday in a live class. These people, they're not digital marketers. They're chiropractors. Okay. And this is, you know, you talk to someone who's like, there's a range, but, you know, someone who's like 53, their chiropractor. It's kind of like when we were younger, our parents didn't know how to use the vcr, so we had to do that for them. And we had them make a series of little videos and put them on Facebook on their public figure page or their company page and boost it for a dollar a day. And this morning, they were posting in the group on the results, and there was one girl, which was typical, too. She. She spent 37 cents, and it reached 900 people, and it got 500 video views for 37 cents. Yeah. Said, wow. And other people said, yeah, I did it too. I spent $3. And. And I reached 2,000 people. And, you know, I got 1,000 people to watch my video. And I'm targeting just people in my neighborhood. Just people like, however big your town is, if you're serving local. There's not that many people. You're not trying to hit the planet. You're not trying to hit everybody in New York. Right. And all the boroughs. It's so easy. And because of coronavirus and all this stuff, there's so many more people online. The cost of traffic is sometimes half or more. It's like everything's on sale.

Well, and people have pulled back, and more people. People pull back advertising, but more people are online. It's funny, by the way, a few years ago, a friend of mine, I thought this was genius. I'm not single, but if I was, I would do what he did. But he. He lived in Dallas or he lives in Dallas and he did a. In his general area of, like, right around uptown where like, all the younger single people work out or, you know, live, et cetera. He. I think I forget what the targeting was, but it was like, women, ages, like, I don't know, 22 to 30 or whatever. Whatever his dating range was and like, into yoga, working out and all this other stuff. So the ideal, what he was. And he would. He'd do three or four videos on there. And it was. I don't know if he was following a dollar a day, but he was just putting it out there. And just sometimes it was just an image of him or sometimes it was just him just saying some, you know, kind of interesting stuff. And he's like, you'd be amazed. I would meet. He goes, I would meet women and they'd be like, man, I feel like I know you somewhere. And they wouldn't even connect the dots. They're just like, I feel like I've seen you. Yeah. So it can work in both, you know, one strategy. We actually have not started to publish these yet, but. So my wife is a loan officer, a mortgage loan officer. And, you know, things are. Have slowed down. You would think, oh, rates are down. But now things have really started to come slower. And one of the strategies we're starting to do now, and we'll end up using a lot of this.

Kind of piggybacks on what you were saying. So she's going around to some of the existing people she knows in the home service, like anybody who works with somebody who might ever buy a home. And it can be. Realtors are obvious ones, but it could be anybody from jewelers to insurance companies to handymen to, I mean, you name it, there's tons of homes, people who just. Yeah, etc. And I'm showing her how to do quick little interviews with Them. And I'm talking like five, ten minute interviews, like once, once a, you know, once a month, setting them up and just say, listen, I'd love to interview you. You know, I've got a list I want to share, you know, what other people are doing around the neighborhood. But more importantly, I had her ask, now, do you guys, do you have a newsletter as well? Do you, do you have a social media page? And they said, yeah, and no surprise there. It's really underutilized. So I had her offer, like, oh, by the way, once I have this, you can share it with as well. I'll even show you how to do it.

Yes.

Now, not only is she going to be able to share with her people, but the other folks on the other end will. It'll be, it'll start off, hey, this is Kenya Costa with prime lending and etc. And I'm here with Dennis Yu Y.

So it's one of those strategies that people should definitely be using and we'll do the dollar a day strategy and we'll start to build this up. So as I said, I selfish reasons. I love asking these questions because we're in the process of implementing this right.

Now and I want to hear what happens. You should be boosting her posts off of her public figure page because you can't boost a profile.

Yeah.

Like Brad with bacon wrapped. Take those episodes, take the best ones that you like and boost them and see what happens. Look at the engagement. Look at how many views you're able to get. Because maybe live you didn't get very many. I think I checked and you have like 20 on this one.

Well, and by the way, this one, we were live and Facebook killed me. Like it cut us out a while back.

So.

Okay, like live. But yeah, you're right. Yeah. Take it after it's done and then put it back on the Facebook page and then boost it. See what kind of action you can get.

Yeah.

And then, yeah, as we know, I mean, you start to build this invisible audience, this retargeting pixel that you can start to follow people around. Now, I also heard you talking about. And this was on just recently when I was watching it yesterday and today on Rich Sheffrin's still your winners campaign you were talking about how was it? Like 10%. You're looking for winners. You're looking for ones that kind of catch fire. And some people, if you don't really know what to watch for, like, am I just going to continue to run this?

Yeah.

How do you determine what is a You know what's getting good engagement? What do you continue to let run versus what do you cut?

So Facebook has something called a through play on a video. Have you seen this? A through play is defined as 15 seconds or longer. I want to get those through plays at less than 3 cents. If I'm doing B2B, maybe less than 10 cents. But if I'm not under 3 cents, that means that my introduction is usually not compelling enough or the background's not interesting, or I'm not making a compelling offer, or my video, I'm starting with a bumper, which is a huge mistake or doesn't work in a sound off environment because 85% of people are watching on Facebook or Instagram sound off. It's usually one of these other sorts of problems. But 1 in 10 of your posts typically will do well. So you'll put, now maybe put a dollar a day against each of the posts because you have to get it some traffic, otherwise you don't have enough data to even tell. But then 10% of those that you initially boost for a dollar a day for seven days, so you spent seven bucks. 10% of those usually will be good enough that you could put, you could extend that boost, you could edit it to put another $30 for another 30 days. And when you keep doing this and play win or stay on after about 90 days, you might have 20 or 30 posts that are doing pretty well. And then Maybe you've made 200 or so little videos or little snippets, little interviews, you know, just little things just to try to build audience and awareness. Then the sum of all the people that have watched any of your videos, you create a remarketing audience, a video view through play remarketing audience, 28 day audience, not the default 365. And then you can market them to, you can send them to your website, you can send them to a message, you can have them call you, you can, there's all sorts of things because that's an audience. If they're a through play audience, that means they have stayed to watch your content. So they've definitely resonated with you. So you're not just targeting people cold. And that's when social media starts to work for you. That's when you know your, your website, your organic rankings, your Twitter, Your Facebook, your YouTube, all these channels start working together because that initial attention spreads into the other channels.

Absolutely. Speaking of.

Making sure that you get those initial first few seconds of attention, what is your, what is your general advice for people on.

Format of, like, at least the introduction. So, you know, the obvious one is, hey, this is Brad from Blankety Blank. And today I want to.

Don't do that.

Yeah, that's.

That's the number one mistake. Do not do that because you've not earned their attention.

I agree.

Hold the phone vertically. That instantly puts you ahead of everybody else because people are holding the phone vertically. Film your video vertically. Two, remembering that there's sound off and holding the phone vertically. Have something gets their attention. Like, I'm gonna wave some toilet paper, right? And then people will find that that's interesting. They want to see what I have to say.

Especially right now. Toilet papers taking the place of, like, waving dollar bills around.

Yeah. That's new currency. Or maybe I'm a photographer, and I want to capture people's attention. I'm going to show off this camera real quick. Right. Just to get their attention. Right. Wow, look at the look of the lens on that thing. Right.

That's huge.

Yeah, this. This thing's not cheap. Right. And then I can say something about, you know what? You don't need that. What you need is this. This is your tool for making money.

We have this or this. Right. And you can turn into a video poll, a quiz. There's all sorts of things you can do to get people's attention visually. Right. Or one of these things. I like to talk about the immune system, so I talk about cocoon and how cocoon has these oxygen treatments. So I'm drinking cocoon water, and I'm interviewing maybe Dr. Lyons, who's the founder of the technology. Right. There's so many different things that you can do to get people's attention.

Now, this is some advice. I'd love to hear your piece on this, because this is a little, tiny piece of advice that I've given to other folks. Like, when they. When they announce their name, they go like, hey, this is Brad Costanzo. And, you know, blah. I always say, don't do that, because you're wasting really critical space with. And they know. They see who's posting this. Like, they see that. It's Brad Costanzo post. They see it's. If they're on my YouTube channel or whatever, they know who it is. It's not. It's not invisible. Like, you don't need to do that. You don't need to say, hey, this is, you know, Dennis, you. Your take on that. Do you. Do you usually announce your name or just.

No. Yeah, you earn that. And then 15 seconds in, you might say who you are.

Bingo.

They don't care about who you are. You need to show something of relevance to them. They don't care about your resume, don't care about your achievements, they don't care about how many years of experience you have. Give them something of value immediately.

You know, speaking of that, it reminds me and going back, you know, I just used this, that little anecdote about my friend who is dating back when I was single many moons ago. One of the most effective things I ever did when I would approach or even just get introduced to a woman, whether it was like out and about at a bar, a coffee shop or whatever, I had one little rule which was I would never introduce myself. Meaning I would never offer my name unless it was asked. Because realized that if I give you my net, if I gave the girl my name, it wasn't moving the conversation forward, it wasn't adding any value or whatever. But the minute that she would ask my name, I knew that, okay, she's at least curious enough, she's at least enjoying this conversation enough to go, hey, so by the way, what's your name? And oftentimes if they didn't ask my name, if I talked to, you know, woman for 30 minutes or an hour, and if she never asked my name, I knew she probably wasn't very interested. So along those lines, like it doesn't like let, let somebody else ask, let somebody else go Google you. You don't have to give them your entire pedigree online. Let them go discover who you are.

Yeah.

And that's much more powerful.

Yeah. Amen.

So on the. Alright, so one of the things we covered is video is king. And then creating quick short little videos that they can just be tips and tricks, they don't have to be super highly produced is important. Making sure you do something to get attention. And you also mentioned the, the subtitles or you know, for instance captions because most people watch automatic captions. Automatic captions. So when you're doing these, I know one little. Maybe you've heard of this app, maybe you haven't. I just discovered it and only one of my other friends is using this. I almost hate to give it out because once everybody starts using it, but have you ever heard of an app on iPhone called Clip O Matic?

I've heard of it. There's like 30 of them that you can use and they all do a lot of the same thing.

Well, it does like the real time. It like one minute videos but like real time, real time. What do you call them? Like captions and in all these different directions. So if you're doing these short little videos and you just kind of want to get it up and get it posted and not go through all the post production, it's super cool. Way to keep it spontaneous and not have to worry about editing. But anyway, if you. If you haven't played with Clip O Matic, it's pretty fun. The. So the next thing then we talked about is, yeah, run it dollar a day. Just boost it. Look for winners. It doesn't have to be rocket science, especially if you're just testing this out, look for winners, et cetera. But the more videos you do and the more often you try to just stick to this, the more overwhelming it can be from a workflow standpoint and process. And this is one of the areas that I'd love to hear about it once more, even just for me, because I know I can get overwhelmed.

Yeah. So let's talk about that as the last tip that we go through.

Let's do it.

Check this out.

This is my phone. And when I'm making videos, I'm pointing to my face and, you know, giving a shout out. Replying in messenger, replying in an email. You can reply with a video as an attachment. Now this is being stored right here in Photos. So the Photos app is capturing all these videos and pictures and all the stuff that I've been, you know, traveling gratitude, or, you know, here I'm with different people at Social Media Marketing World San Diego. That was, what, a couple weeks ago? But then I have all of it backed up to icloud, which you should be doing if you have an iPhone. Don't be stingy. Pay the whatever it is. 10 bucks a month, right?

Hold on. This is such perfect timing. This morning my wife goes, I just got an. I just got a notice on my iPhone that I'm running out of storage. I was like, well, do you have the icloud, the paid version? She goes, I don't know if I want to spend $2.99 a month. And I looked at her like, are you serious?

What are your memories worth? What if your phone gets destroyed? What if some nonsense happens?

Okay, exactly. Anyway, that literally happened at breakfast this morning. So that was really appropriate.

Also, my favorite tool, there's different ones that do different things is Amazon. Now everything is being automatically backed up here to my Amazon Photos. Right? These are all the same things I was in.

How do I not know that that's a thing?

Amazon Photos has got the best facial recognition, the best tagging, the Best, Whatever. So I can choose a friend of mine, and I can see all the pictures that have been tagged in New Zealand. I can choose all the pictures with Mark Wagner or with Ryan Deiss or with Rich Sheffrin. Right.

Hold on. So that's an app. Amazon Photos. I didn't even know this existed. Thank you. Just downloading it now.

See, look. Now here, I'll show you how easy. So I'm in Amazon Photos now. Of course, I'm paying for the storage. Another 10 bucks a month or whatever. Okay. Now I'm coming up here to the options in the top, right? Mm. Okay. Then it's giving me a sort so I can see all the people that I've been around. So I can see, you know, my friend Mark Wagner. I've got 687 pictures with Mark Wagner. And now it's showing me all these pictures right here.

Oops. Oh, there it is. And there it is now. Now it's showing me only pictures of Mark Wagner. Or I can do all the searches of roller coasters or all the searches where I'm at a campfire or all the searches where I'm with a dog or, you know, whatever. Like all the. It's automatically categorized for me. So if I want to write a blog post on the favorite places I've gone camping, it's already done for me. All the places that have had beaches, I could say Dennis's 48 beaches that he's visited in the last two years. Right.

So. So Amazon photos. Are you saying that like the. Because I know that, like, Google and. And Apple have good recognition. Like I can type in dog or whatever. It'll find it. Are you saying Amazon's is even better?

Amazon's is better. Google's a little slower on the upload. Icloud does it faster. But they're not so good because they're trying to do everything locally and they're about the device and not the software. So we can go into all the different differences. The fastest in uploading is actually Dropbox, but Dropbox here is more file storage, so all my photos are automatically here as well. So I'm using four different places to capture everything on my phone icloud natively, which ties to the photos app Amazon, which I love, for all the ways that it allows us to categorize Google, because you can't not have Google. And we tie that with. We tie our G Drive with our company Google Apps account, which is the Gmail plus unlimited storage, and then Dropbox, which is what we often Use for sharing. So I use all four of them because all of them do something a little bit different now. They do at the core store video. But because of the way we process, because we've got a large team that does processing for a lot of clients, we have to use all four. You may want to use just one. Yeah. So maybe you use just.

Yeah, I mean, you're working with clients and everybody else.

So it's. Yeah. Like icloud is not good for sharing. Icloud's good.

Correct.

Think about how Apple is with privacy. It's not like you're gonna give out your Apple login to someone else to go retrieve your photos. Right. You might have some photos there that you want. You don't want other people to see for some reason. Right. And Google is pretty good for sharing, but they're slow on the upload. And Amazon is pretty good for the sharing. And it's pretty good for how fast they process and how they recognize landmarks and people and locations and metadata that's tied to those particular images. And then Dropbox is the fastest for uploading, but it's really just a file sharing system. So that's why I think Amazon is probably the best of. If you could only do one, probably just do Amazon photos and then it ties into your Amazon prime account and all the other Amazon services that you have. So, you know, Amazon's trying to become everything to you, obviously.

Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so that's kind of where they're stored. But then as once you get them kind of up there and that. And does the Amazon. Does that pull up? Like if I do a video on.

My iPhone, I create a particular link with a folder to just things from when I've been in Miami or with Rich Sheffrin.

Nice.

I can. I can create a link that just has videos or pictures from a particular event. I can't do that very easily. I'd have to manually select those in icloud anyway. It's tougher to do things. It's one thing to store now. I need to get it in the hands of someone else who's going to work on that. Because I don't want to do video editing. I don't even want to touch it. I don't even want to put notes against what happened. I just want.

To notice, oh, I was just with Jay Abraham. Okay. And then I don't have to tell them anything. They already know what to do because there's a process. When they see something come in, they know what to do. So that's why we use all of these. And so we'll store everything in Google Drive because it's unlimited storage, but we will the initial upload off of my phone and the phones of other folks who are clients, who are public figures. So we're. We're behind where we do the editing and promotion and whatnot. Behind some, some big names. And off of their app, we're grabbing this stuff, creating different variations of it that we store in G Drive. Right. Because the initial stuff is coming through Amazon, but then different iterations. Version 1, version 1.1, version 1.5, version final is all going through Google Drive. And then we're going to post it to YouTube and then we're going to post it Facebook natively, and then we're going to post it to the blog and then we're going to put it in Wistia because it's inside a course that you can only get to if you pay for the course or inside Lightspeed, because that's where it's part of a sequence lesson. Right. So there's. It seems counterintuitive. It seems like extra bureaucracy. But if you understand that how content makes its way from raw all the way to being posted in different channels, you'll see it's actually necessary. And it streamlines a lot of stuff and we have a ton of training on it. We've been doing this for years and believe me, there's a faster way to do it. I'm all ears, but I've talked to thousands of people and that's one of.

The things you guys do. You have like a checklists and training. And if you're. What if you're wanting to do this for whether you're a solo preneur to get this out or whether you've got a team or whether you're working with agencies or whatever, this is one of the things that you guys offer, right?

Yeah. Great. And if you want it, send an email to operationslitzmetrics.com with the subject line Brad sent me. Do that and say, I want the video editing course, I want the one minute video course. And we'll give you both of those for free. No strings, no credit cards. We'll just give it to you. But you've got to use the keyword. What's the keyword Brad sent me? That's right. That's your subject line. And where are you going to send.

It to Operations at Blitzmetrics. And that'll all be in the. That'll all be in the show notes, by the way, guys, that's right.

And now we can see how many people are coming to this thing. How many, how many you guys actually watch to the end to get the goodies? I always put the goodies at the end. Right?

That's the thing. That's where they usually are.

Yeah. Now, now we've already, you know, inoculated you on how important is to have a process. You agree that process is important. So what reason would you have to not want to be creating video and then have it edited by other people?

It'd be crazy. I also like, by the way, how you have the personal touch of send me an email. It's not go to this page, opt in, do all of this other stuff. That's a. I know there's a.

That's not always the most efficient way to do it, but it is one of the more intimate and authentic and it does really well with building actual relationships. And in fact, I know that a.

Real human is going to reply to you.

Bingo.

Right? I could have just put up a landing page and you put in your email and it's all automated. But how impersonal is that versus, you know, you making a video for me and me making a video for you. 15 seconds.

You know, on a side note, my friend Peter Spaipen, I don't know if you've ever come across Peter, but he's a marketing and entrepreneur guy that always shares really great ideas. And not too long ago he shared a test that he had done and he was mentioning this in the context of like, look, if you're trying to break into a market that you or and become like a thought leader or whatever that you don't really have a great presence in, he goes, here's exactly how I would do it. And it's somewhat manual, but it's also very well, you'll get it. He goes, create a post on Facebook, for instance. And this can be a thousand word post. This can be just really good. But make it something really, really something that somebody would want to refer back to. Like, wow, this is almost like instructional, like a checklist or something. Like, I'm going to need this now. You know, Facebook gives you the ability to save, but how many things have you saved and then just never gone back to Right now then what he does, that's step one, create a really amazingly valuable post. And it can be text, it can be video and then let them know that. By the way, I know this is kind of long and hard to read on Facebook. I've got a PDF version of this for this is a for instance, I got a PDF version of this. You can download it if you want to. Just send me an email to. Yeah, Brad costanza.com or. And you can say. And I've even got a couple videos that go along with it to give a nuance. Yeah, send me an email and I'll send it to you. He goes, don't ask for him to click over to opt in, don't ask for him to do all this, etc. They did a test where one of them, they did a very, something very similar. They sent them to go opt in. Or actually what they did is, hey, here's what you can get. Click here to go opt in to get it. This one was, here's the full blown thing, you know, send me an email to get a more convenient way to digest this. And they had a lot more opt ins on the first version. They had a lot more emails, of course, something like three times more emails. Yeah, they had something more like three times more sales from the other version. Like they had a lot less opt ins but the sales. Because it started going back and forth.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was a really interesting thing about the value of that intimate touch and personal touch. And he goes, those, those ones who emailed you directly, they didn't give you a fake email. They didn't do all this other stuff. So anyway, that's just like a little segue that you made me think about this because this was just a tremendous strategy.

And how hard is that to just be human?

Yeah, I mean you're going to be doing busy work anyway. Just replying to. Replying to the people who took the time to reply to you.

I have an emergency.

No worries. Okay. Unfortunately, as you just heard, Dennis had to jump to an emergency call. So we have to cut this a little bit short. But hopefully you have enjoyed this. And you can check him out at.

Let's rerecord that part.

Okay. So unfortunately Dennis, as you just heard, had a call and it is an emergency that he has to take care of. But hopefully you've enjoyed this. To get the one minute video course that he's got, you can send an email to OperationsLitzMetrics and mention Brad sent me as the keyword and he will hook you up absolutely free with no strings attached. So I hope you've enjoyed this episodal and we will get back to another one next week.