How to Drive Sales With Video with Ken Okazaki - Part 1

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is Lars Hedinburg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Today we've got a two part podcast with Ken Akasaki. He is the master of how do you drive sales with video? Drive sales with video, not put out a bunch of content that doesn't convert. How do you actually get a buyer or seller to take action on a video and take that next step with you? So it's not content for content sakes, it's content to drive the growth of your real estate business. So we all know that video is important, but are we doing it? And if we're doing it, are we doing it the right way where it actually drives growth in your business? So this is part one of a two part series. Hope you enjoy.

Hey Lars, thank you so much for the intro. Yes, I do enjoy video. I love doing it. Love, love doing it. But more importantly, and what I love even more than making video is seeing what my clients do with their video where they generate a whole bunch of engagement that becomes leads, that becomes business. Like new customers that pay monthly recurring revenue or sales or whatever. That is how it applies to their business. So Lars, please remind me, I think we have about an hour. Is that right? Is that the time we have? Yep. We've got 50, 57 minutes till the next 57 minutes.

It is all yours.

All right, I'm, I'm Japanese, so I'm going to be as prompt as possible. But what I want to do is break up my time with you into two sections. The first one, there's going to be a little bit of theory because if you don't understand some basic principles, then the second part is not going to make so much sense. So in the beginning, I'm going to share with you what this whole video marketing thing is. And when I say what it is, it's how can you use video on social media to generate leads that becomes customers? Right. And the second part is I want to ask for one brave volunteer to actually work with me one on one for about five or ten minutes or maybe even two people so that I can demonstrate how easy it is to plan and shoot content if you have the right strategy in place. So if you want to have a one on one conversation with me for the benefit of everybody else in the room, then you want to be thinking about this because I am going to prompt the the room at one point to say to type a certain thing. It's a secret word that's going to allow me to pick the right person to See if you're paying attention. So if you want some help around creating some content with me on the show right now, I mean, not right now, a little bit later, then you're going to want to be paying attention to make sure you get the right correct word. So if you're ready for some, some really, really fun stuff, just type. What's the word we can type here? Just, just put the number one into the chat and if I see enough people paying attention. Wow, you guys are fast. You train them so well. This is so fun. Okay, first of all, let's the title of this is scale your marketing with video spending only one hour a month. The reason I say only an hour a month is because the biggest excuse I hear from people is I just don't have the time. But what if it only takes you an hour a month? So that's what this is all about. And I'm going to answer this age old question is quality or quantity? And a lot of people ask this, they're wondering like, should I be spending a whole bunch of time on strategy and thinking about making the highest quality video or should I do a whole bunch? Right, because we see a balance and that's a difficult thing. Who's ever had that question? Just type a why into the comment. If you've ever had the question, should I make a whole bunch of videos? Should I make one masterpiece? Okay, awesome. So we're going to answer that definitively by the end of today. Now the first thing we got to understand is content is simple. Once you understand the structure and specifically the kind of content we're going to talk about today is what is the winningest type of content? Winningest is a real word, by the way. I looked it up in the dictionary. What it means is that the kind of video that will take the least amount of effort and that's going to give you the most bang for buck on social media when it comes to working for your business, right? And there's two really big camps when it comes to social media video content. One is people who make video, I mean, make their money from the actual video itself. So we're talking about people who are YouTubers. For example, Mr. Beast is a really great example. He makes a whole bunch of money from YouTube, literally just paying him because he brings in so many viewers. Right? And then there's in the same category, you also have influencers, people who are on Instagram and Facebook and they get paid to feature products, right? They get paid, you know, 500 bucks to, you know, take a Photo with this handbag or these sunglasses or whatever, right? So those guys actually make money from the actual content itself. Then there's the other side, and that's what we're going to be talking about is people who use social media to generate leads for business that's outside of social media. And I believe that that's going to be the majority of the people here. So, so we're going to be talking about part B, you know, the second one where you have a business outside of social media and you just want to use social media to help your business. So that's what we're talking about. And in that structure of, in that category, the content that's working the best right now, especially if you don't already have a million followers or subscribers, is super short form content. And what I mean by that is the kind of format you're seeing on TikTok, uh, we're going to call it TikTok Universal Format just for the purpose of today's session. Because TikTok, even though it is an app in itself, a lot of people are saying, well, what if it goes away? What if it gets banned? Da da da, da da. You know, scared of the Chinese or I don't want to, you know, do all these, you know, weird dances and lip syncing or whatever that is. Right? That's fine. Put that aside for a second. What TikTok universal format to me is, is vertical video, right? It's short form, less than one minute, it's fast moving and the words you're saying are coming on the screen as you say them. So this is a few elements that are in it. But there's also a blend of entertainment and information, slash education, slash story put into this short form. So if you think of it that way, then this is the exact same stuff that you're seeing on YouTube, shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok. And more recently LinkedIn is starting to start promote this kind of stuff too. And what's happening is every single one of the platforms is jealous of TikTok success. So what they're doing is they're encouraging people to put up the same kind of video. And the way they encourage is by if you put up that format then they're just going to give you a lot more traffic and while it's still growing, might as well jump on that bandwagon, right? So for this format it's really simple. There's just three things, three things you gotta think about when making these videos. Number one, you need a great hook. Hook Literally just means, what's a great way to get people to stop scrolling? Start watching your video. Second one is, you need to tell a story or teach something and then you gotta ask them to do something at the end. It's just three things. And if you could get this right, then you could spit out a whole bunch of videos really, really fast. And let's walk through some ideas. Sorry. Some examples of this. So we have three columns here. On the left is a hook. And you could, you could hook people by asking a question right at the beginning. You can tell them there's a list of things you're going to go through, or you can make a bold statement. For example, a question can be, did you know that? Wait, that's not a good one. Let's think of a really great question related to somebody in this room. Let's say in real estate, right? If you start a video with saying, how much? What's the lowest? Is it still possible to buy a house with no money down? That would be an interesting thing because a lot of people related to your industry, if you start with that question, they'll be very, very interested if they're in that cycle, if they're in the mindset of actually buying a house, that's going to get people to stop a. List the three, the three districts in X City that are the highest growing in land value or something like that, right? And then you're going to list three districts. Bold statement. You could, you know, you could say whatever you like there for a bold statement. And we'll get some examples in a second, right? And in the middle, once you hook people, you got to either tell them a story or teach something. Tell them a story either of yourself or of a client. Because remember, we're looking specifically for creating the kind of video that's going to attract people to your business, right? So tell them a story about yourself or client. This is how I did this. This is how my client did this. Demonstrate something, live in front of them, or give your opinion. It doesn't have to be an essay, it's just a short opinion is fine. And we'll get to some examples in a second. At the end, we want to ask them to either follow you, we want to ask them to comment something below or send you a dm. So if you look at these three columns and you realize every video is just some mixture of these, then all you got to do is pick one of the three in each of these columns, stitch them together, and then you have the structure for short form. Video now what we're going to do and usually this is printed out and I've done this a couple times and we brainstorm a bit and put these down the list. But instead of that, we're going to have a quick session at the end where I'm going to actually have you guys follow along with me. And as I help the lucky volunteer to work through creating their short form content, then you can be creating yours as well. But I'm just curious, curious because I have to know if you have made short form content for either TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts. What I mean is the vertical style video, it's edited with a bit of text in there and it's about a minute or less. Can you just type a. Just, just type the word TikTok in the chat? So I get an idea of how many people have done this. Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I see 10, 10, maybe 11. Okay. There's quite a few people, Quite a few people have done this. This is a lot more than what I'm used to seeing in this type of crowd. If you have not just type no. Because I want to see how many people have not done this. Okay. There's a lot of no's too. And I have a feeling there's a few more nos than yeses here. Great. So I want to make sure that there's something here for everybody and for the people that have done it. If you've done it using just your phone, just type phone. Okay, great, great. And because really the phone's the best way to start the. One of the things that I get asked all the time and you could ask my assistant about seven to 30 times every day. So it's going to say, what's the best camera to use to get started with social media video content? And my answer is always the same. I said, I always say the camera doesn't matter. First, you want to learn how to do great storytelling using what's in your pocket, which is your phone. And once you get that good enough so that you're actually earning money, that means you see some activity in your inbox and you see people becoming interested in what you're doing through your videos and then approaching you about business. That's when you get to reward yourself by getting yourself a nice fancy camera. It's not the other way around. The camera, the fancy camera is not the gateway to start. It's the reward for having started and proven that you know what the heck you're doing. Otherwise you're just wasting your money. And it's just one more obstacle from getting to the goal, which is the video is there to generate business for you, not, not the other way around. You're not there working to make great video. So thank you guys so much for the, for the feedback there. So we're going to come back to this in a second. But the goal here is to expand your reach in the beginning if you haven't done this yet. So when you say expand your reach, reach literally just means how many people are the gods of the algorithm or of the platform going to show your video to. So for example, if historically you have a whole bunch of great engagement and people enjoying your videos and sharing it and giving it a bunch of thumbs ups, they're going to want to show your video to more people. And that literally means that your reach is expanding. Right? And a lot of people make predictions. I've been guilty of this in the past too. If you say these kind of words, you're going to get more reach. If you post with this schedule, if you do this or that, or say, you know, use this music or that. And sometimes these predictions are right, but just as many times they're wrong. So instead of using predictions, we're gonna use data. And this is what we do inside of our agency. We do anywhere from two to 4,000 videos every single month. And we realize that predictions are just about as good as random guesses. So instead we use data. And this is how it works. First of all, we produce the video simple enough. That means we shoot it, we edit it, we upload it to our client's social media, right? And then there's this thing called patience. We wait at least a month, we let it age. It doesn't mean that we're not producing more video, but we just leave it alone. We don't touch it once it's up, we don't obsess over it. And then we go back and we make a new plan. So between here and here, we measure the heck out of what happened. We look at how, which videos did the best, and we hypothesize why did this video do so much better than the rest. And then we look at the ones that did the worst and we figure out why did it do so bad. And more specifically, once a month, we just look at everything that's at least a month old and the top 10% of the performers, the one that got the most, shares the most comments and got the most clicks to our clients business. We try to Figure out what slice of what happened in that video made it succeed. And in some cases it's something as simple as eye contact. Looking straight at the camera made all the difference between people engaging in the video and watching and people completely spacing up. Sometimes it's the length of the video, sometimes it's the quality of the performance of the person. And one of the things that's been consistent throughout almost all of my clients is this thing that we call time to impact. And what that is is how long does it take you from when the video started. Well, let me give some background on this. First, I had a conversation with Dennis Yu, who's a colleague of mine, and he was talking about something called ROMs. And ROMs R O M S is is a technical term that a lot of specialists use today. It's called rambling Old man syndrome. And a lot of us, when we get in front of the camera, we start rambling like an old man. And all these people who have an appetite for short form content, they are already flicking off to the next video. And sometimes our worst enemy is not things like technology. It's just taking too long to get to the point. So when we started measuring how long it takes from when the video starts to when you close the first loop, that seemed to be the biggest differentiator between when people stayed watching the video, meaning your reach increases, or if they leave. And we found the ideal time for you to close the first loop. And I'll explain what closing the loop means in a second is 7 seconds. 7 seconds. So closing the loop time to impact is when you, after you finish the hook. That means getting people to stop and actually watching the video to when you give them the thing that they actually stopped for, that's closing the loop. So if I were to start a video by saying, hey guys, here's three accessories that's going to help your video to sound much better. The first one is to use a lavalier mic. Now that took me about six seconds just now to get from the hook to giving you the thing you stopped for, right? If I say something like I just found out this hack, that is, I just found this hack in this app that should be illegal. And that hack is, and I'll give away the name of the app, you have to do it so quickly that if you take longer than seven seconds, you're at risk of having a low performing video. So that's one example of things that we found to be consistent by studying hundreds and thousands of videos. Not hundreds of thousands, hundreds and Thousands. I haven't done hundreds of thousands yet, but. And seeing patterns and then repeating the success of the great ones. And then we're finding consistently that the videos that perform the poorest are the ones that take way too long to get to the point. And sometimes we realize some of these videos don't even have a point. People are just like talking and hearing their own voice or seeing how beautiful they look on the camera or something like that. So what I'm trying to say here is that instead of trying to predict what's going to work and make a masterpiece, we first just want to produce a lot of video, put it online, have a bit of patience, and then create a new plan. And then using that plan, go and produce the second batch of videos. So we do this on a monthly basis. Every month we create a new plan, we produce, we wait a month, we measure, make a new plan. So this way we incrementally, every single month, improve the performance of how the videos work on social media. Now, I gave you this one example of Time to Impact. There's a lot of other things we found to be really effective, definitely eye contact. But we also found something inversely effective, which is that certain people, believe it or not, the more they gaze into the lens, the worse the performance of the video. It's really weird. Maybe people get freaked out or spooked by their eyes. I don't know what it is, but there's very few things that is consistent across the board. And that's why I'm so excited about finding this thing called Time to Impact, because that was super consistent. And the reason I'm sharing this is that any guru who's going to get up on a stage and say, if you want your videos performed, do this, and there's more than like 10 people in the room. Chances are it's only going to work for 50% of the people in the room. Because we measure every single client per platform and we're seeing varying degrees of success. And in fact it gets what works for one person will not work for another many, many times. So if somebody tells you there's one strategy that's going to work across the board, don't believe them until you test it and actually measure your results. This is super important. There's no cookie size success story. And I think you'll realize the moment you start actually looking objectively through Instagram, through YouTube, through TikTok, that every single person that's a superstar on there has found their way to success with the different route. There's no. 2 identical channels that are doing the exact same style of everything and succeeding really well. Everybody has found something unique, and that's the path that everybody has to find by studying and managing how well each video on their own channel is doing. So I've gotten a little bit into theory here. If this is valuable so far, just type the word value in there. Because I'm such a sucker for engagement. I'm just going to pull one more. Oh, thank you so much, guys. And if it's, if it's going a little over your head, don't worry. I'm just going to go to the next part real quick. Awesome. I'm so glad you're finding this valuable. So let's do a visual representation of how we can improve every month. So if in the first month, I have some data points here and we measured, let's just say we're measuring the length of the videos, right? Or topics. Let's say topics, right. Let's say light green right here. This is. We're talking about, let's say mortgages, right? And then blue represents loan officers. And then yellow could represent geographic zones for real estate or something like that. And we test different topics. In month one, we put them all out. And then month two, we measure, oh, what did the best. Hey, look at that. When we talked about the geographic locations for real estate, that performed really well. So month two, we're going to continue that and then do variations of that topic in order for us to further explore if and why this topic or this, this one category, what's one slice of the kind of content you're making is working. But this is not only about topics. This could be about titles. This could be about literally, if you're in your studio or on the road walking, we look at 16 different data points on every single video. But for now, I think the most important thing for all of you is to think about what topics are your audience going to engage with the most. So we're finding things similar and expanding on that topic because we found that that one topic works best. And then month three, we look again and say, hey, look, there's this variation of that topic that worked even better than the original. And then we're going to find things closer to that. And what's happening is that month by month by month, we're just honing in on the highest performing videos. And that means we just look at the top 10% performers, and then we figure out what is unique about those. And then we look at the bottom 10% performers. We look at what's unique about those, we stop doing what's not working in the bottom 10%, and then we identify what's working in the top percent and we do more of it. So you can literally, on social media, just line up. Your videos are at least a month old in order of performance, right? Like, I think the simplest metric you could look at is views. If you like, every social media platform is different. You can literally hire your teenage son, pay him 10 bucks to go, and just look at your oldest videos, copy and paste all the links, and then get a spreadsheet and put the numbers in there, how many views, likes and things like that. You line it up in order and you don't have to look at all the videos, just look at the top 10%, the bottom 10%. So if you made 20 videos, you look at the top two and the bottom two. That's all you gotta do. And then try to figure out why the winners are the winners and the losers are the losers. What to do more of. Make a plan for the next, next month, and then why the loop, what's going on at the bottom that you just don't want to repeat? It's really that simple. And if you just look at it like this, then you're just gonna keep expanding every single month and figuring out how to improve just a little bit. So when you think about video content creation, there's a lot involved, right? You gotta plan the content, you gotta perform in front of a camera, you gotta edit the videos, and then you gotta figure out how to try to make it fun, which is kind of a, kind of a vague term for some of you, right? Then you gotta figure out where to upload it and then get it all done. So who here just. Just type me if it's you, gets really excited thinking about that whole process, you know, planning, shooting, editing, uploading. Okay, a few of you. Who here would rather go to the dentist and get like four molars pulled? Okay, I see more. Go to the dentist. Poke my eyes out. Okay, so there is, there's. There's a mix here, right? I think some, some people would rather go to the dentist. Yeah, I'm one of those kind of people who'd rather go to the dentist, get all my teeth pulled out, and then get punched in the face on the way out than have to do everything myself. I used to enjoy doing all that until I actually started, you know, my business started growing and realizing that doing this takes so much time and I'd rather, really rather not. So when I say when I said at the beginning, I want to show you how to do all this in an hour, a month, then I really meant it. And this is how it's done. And this is how I do it for myself. This is how my clients do it. I see some comments here. I like editing. It's the time that it takes. Richie, I 100% get you. Uh, Patricia says no issue to do with the video, but I will prefer to pay someone to edit to get the final product. Super good idea there. Um, there's someone named Dean Jackson who Lars will be very familiar with. I'm not sure how many of you guys have heard of Dean Jackson, but one of the masterminds that we're at, he actually introduced something called the MOO method. And this really spoke to me. And the MOO method is literally, you got to think of yourself a little bit like a cow. And what's a cow's job? Cow's job, at least a dairy cow, is to sit there, eat, drink, produce milk. That's it, right? The farmer is the one running around doing everything for them, shoving food right in front of their face, cleaning up their poop, you know, washing their udders, doing everything while the cow just has to sit there, eat, and produce milk. Now, if you can think of yourself a little bit like that, then here's what MOOSE stands for. Massive oral output. Because you as the face, as the person who is the most important person in your business. If you're, if you're the. The CEO or the owner of the business, then you're the most important person. Then you will probably produce the best content, the milk, just by opening your mouth and talking Massive oral output and organizing your content creation so that you have, you know, like all your farmers running around doing the stuff for you while you sit there. And the best thing you can do is just sit there, consume food and produce product, which is milk. So let's look at practical terms. How can this actually work? And this is. This is an idea of how we actually do this with our clients all the time. And you can do this without hiring my team. You can do this yourself with each other. So I want you to look at this and also be looking at each other. For if, like, if we're in a live room, I look around and who do you lock eyes with? Go grab that person. Right? But I think that as a community, one of the fortunate things about being in a community, especially someone. Something that someone like Lars has put together, is that there's this level of trust and that if you ask someone, hey, could you help me out? You know that someone's going to return the favor at some point. And I think it's a great way to get started, but it's also a great way to learn so you understand what I mean in a second. So there's two parallel lines here. You as the cow, just need to move massive oral output. You're just going to talk and you're going to get someone who you know, trust, or maybe a friend, or maybe someone remote who can help you on this. And that person is going to be your team member for the day. They're going to do the research, which is very simple. They're going to direct you remotely on video while you move. Then they're going to edit the video and post it on social media for you. Now what's going to happen is this is the only part where you show up and we all, all we have to do is do one hour per month of this. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna open up your mind a little bit here because most people who do this the very first time will be able to shoot 10 videos per hour. And people who do this three or more times on average will be doing 30 videos per hour. So that means that in one hour a month you have enough short form video for every day of the month. And all you're going to do is show up, be asked questions and then prompted for answers. That stuff that you're already familiar with. You don't have to make this up because you're the expert. And you're going to walk away from that hour like an action movie with the cars crashing and exploding in the background. You don't even look back. You're going to jump in your car and go drive off to the gym or whatever you want to do next. And that's how I want you to think about these sessions. And you show up. Everything is prepared, the research, the questions. There's someone there to make sure you actually show up. That's accountability. It's done remotely from the comfort of your home. They're going to be just, they got a list of 30 questions, stuff that you're already an expert at. You're going to answer them short and concise with that format. I showed you a hook, a story or teach, and then an ask and then you go to the next one. So if each video is going to be on average 30 seconds, which I recommend, and you got 30 minutes, then you only. Sorry, you got an hour, then you only have to produce one video every two minutes. It's actually quite simple once you get used to it. So. And I'm going to prove to you how simple it is by demonstrating with one of you guys here in a sec.

Man, I love hearing Ken talk about this topic. He is unlike any other expert I know, specifically as it relates to growing your sales with video. If you're at a point in your business growth journey where you know you want to take the next step, or at least explore what it would look like to partner with real Estate B school, go to rebsgrowthassessment.com it's our free business growth assessment. We're just going to look at where you are now, where you want to be in the future, and what's holding you back. We'll see you over there.