Today’s episode is about content marketing. My friend Jordan and I explored how to organically build an audience and what tools to use.
Video Transcript
Time to start the day with some workouts. We just finished our squats. Time for push-ups.
Two hundred and eleven.
Enough with the fun stuff. Time to shoot some videos.
So today I’m joined by this guy. Jordan. We met pretty much a year ago at an event here in Bali for the E under 30. That’s the entrepreneurs that are the members of EO that are under or up to the age of 30.
Jordan and I have a bunch of things in common. One of them is that we both used to or are currently running an agency. Jordan is building a very successful business in Australia with offices in Perth, Sydney, and Manila. He also knows a thing or two about remote working and collaborating with people that are not in the same office.
Today he’s gonna tell us some stuff about:
Content marketing and leveraging the buyer journey with your customers online
Cédric: Content marketing – I think we’ve all heard the term or what does it mean? What are the tools you use, could anyone watching this video profit from that?
Jordan: Yeah, so I think content marketing is having a good conversation with your customers or clients online. So “content is king” is a little bit of a myth because people don’t want to just be fed mindless content. So having a good conversation with actual thoughtful, informative material is really what you want from a content marketing.
Some of the different options to produce that anyone can produce:
- a video series just like this
- write your own blogs
- checklists
- infographics
- podcasts…
How to build a following
Cédric: Just got a comment yesterday on one of my episodes where someone said: “hey, I’m getting so much value from you, how come you don’t have more followers?” Because I think on YouTube I have somewhere between 120 and 150 followers right now.
Jordan: I think getting started, taking a look at it it’s all about consistency. If you look at an exponential growth curve, eighty percent of it is nothing and then you get that massive spike. So the Kardashians probably started with 10 followers as well 12 or 13 years ago. Now they’re the most followed people on the planet.
So my advice would be probably not to pump too much media and advertising dollars into content that hasn’t already found some traction with certain users.
Cédric: What do you think is an objective measure for when that traction starts to happen?
Jordan: In terms of a simple metric depending on across the board in different industries, there isn’t one definitive other than “more”. I think people want to see consistency and a broad amount of information. So considering you’ve only recently started with your video series, it’s the more and more you develop.
Cédric: I’m not gonna let him get away with just generic information but I think now it’s time to jump in the pool again and I’ll try to get some more information out of this guy.
What to do once you have an early following
We just talked about how first you want to organically build a certain followership or audience but then what? Let’s say I’ve reached that point, what’s something that I could learn from that?
Jordan: Are you just trying to generate awareness for your brand? Are you trying to get people to consider and use your products? So content marketing, if you’re trying to become the next Kardashian, it’s just having fun, entertaining, random content.
If you’re trying to build a professional service firm it’s actually having really valuable content first of all to offer. Then we can look at ways to promote that and actively get it in front of more users. Step one is making sure your content’s actually getting some sort of traction and following.
The best platforms to promote your videos
Cédric: For me, I’m doing this video mostly for fun. And I’ve spoken about this in another episode – to teach myself storytelling. But yeah, then there are companies that I’m involved in like DFINITY or Sendtask where we do produce videos and we do want to spread the idea of our product and we do want to get other users. Do you have any ideas – which platforms are the best?
Jordan: I would recommend Facebook and all YouTube depending on the type of business and industry and where you’re based. Facebook and YouTube are in a bit of an arms race for video. The head of technology at Facebook predicted a year ago that by 2020 Facebook will just be a video platform.
With Facebook and YouTube you can, within both the ad platforms, create your own advertising campaigns for video and there are lots and lots of different ad formats. A way I would recommend is starting with similar budgets for each. Let’s say $10 a day, $100 a day… Starting to run different split tests of each campaign.
Is LinkedIn a good place to advertise?
Cédric: Quick question – so for me over the years I’ve actually created quite a bit network on LinkedIn as well. And the videos don’t do too bad on LinkedIn, a lot of people watch these on LinkedIn but I’ve actually never looked into video advertisement on LinkedIn. Do you have any idea how big LinkedIn is in terms of videos?
Jordan: LinkedIn is a lot more expensive in general figures, however, the audience can be a lot more targeted if you’re trying to get in front of particular job titles. LinkedIn will need to be well researched, really informative, valuable content. And very similar to YouTube and Facebook to be honest as to how you can build a LinkedIn advertising campaign.
So you can target cities or job titles, large companies that have a certain amount of over 500 staff listed that link at that company. It can be smart to run newsfeed videos on LinkedIn as well to those, to the right users.
Cédric: One thing that I found kind of hard to do is actually measure how far people watch my videos. Do you know what the criteria are for a video view to count as one view?
Jordan: It depends across the platforms. I mean, if you’re paying for a YouTube ad, a pre-roll ad, you can build and pay more. So picked users have to finish five seconds of the ad or they have to finish 15 seconds of the ad. So forcing people to watch it for 15 seconds is you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a full view.
What is the buyer’s journey and how to use it
Cédric: All right, Jordan, you mentioned “buyer’s journey” before. What does it mean and how could I as someone who produces video for, let’s say, DFINITY or Sendtask profit from that knowledge?
Jordan: So I think it’s always good in any form of marketing, whether you’re doing content marketing or any other form of advertising, to take a step back and understand what’s the outcome and objective of what you’re trying to achieve with any campaign. So we like to take a step back and look at the buyer’s journey.
So this is four phases. You can break it into more or less but typically four phases of how do we generate awareness for our brand product or service; how do we make sure that we’re in the consideration phase – that our company or product is one of the top three considered; how do we ensure purchase or engagement of our brand or product; and then how do we develop loyalty.
You can basically break all forms of content marketing into one of those four segments. So the four phases were:
1) Awareness
2) Consideration
3) Purchase
4) Loyalty
Phase 1: Awareness
At the awareness phase is where are people going and looking when they realize they first have the problem or pain point that your product or service might be trying to resolve. So how do we generate that awareness? Services similar to, people are gonna jump onto Google, so do you have a Google AdWords strategy or an SEO content marketing program? Are you utilizing video marketing – Facebook, YouTube – to ensure that you’re at least getting in that very top of the marketing funnel?
Phase 2: Consideration
Then, they’ll move into the consideration phase. That’s when they’re a bit more warm buyers. At this point, people are going to go generally two to three times to Google and to different websites looking for reviews, further information, testimonials… This can be solidified and supported by video proof and great real testimonials, not just a basic one saying “Jenny said a good thing”. So ensuring that people are leaving great Google reviews or product reviews on different product review platforms.
Phase 3: Purchase
Once they’re ready to consider you as one of the top one or two, how easy is it for them to purchase from you? So that’s where we really start to look at things like your website, conversion rate optimization and how likely and easy is it for people to purchase from you.
If you’re running a restaurant and when people call your restaurant, it’s impossible to book and you’re put on hold or you’re running a dental surgery and you’ve got someone at the front desk that has no sales training or communication training, then you can spend all this money at the top of the funnel and it can really all fall apart at that consideration phase or that purchase phase.
So here we really work with customers. Is your website mobile-friendly, is it easy to check out on your eCommerce store? Is it painful because for me if it takes longer than a few seconds to load or there are no autofill options to put in my payment details, I’m probably going to go somewhere easier.
Cédric: People do these tests maybe once or twice after they’ve launched a new website but then it’s not unlikely that they forget over time and sometimes they’ve been running their website for a month and the contact form was broken. Do you know an easy tool to continually test if simple processes on your website work?
Jordan: The most simple, basic way, and this is so often overlooked, is having a fail-safe backup every month that somebody in your organization is literally going and testing all the forms on your website. Because you can have different software and tools that can automatically check this but there can always be a glitch in technology.
Phase 4: Loyalty
Cédric: All right. And the last point was loyalty, right? What’s a way to measure that?
Jordan: What is a loyalty and how to measure it? Again, the reason it’s so important to look at these four different phases is that you can spend a fortune in any one of the areas but if you’re forgetting one of these, then you’re just losing, bleeding money effectively.
Loyalty, whether you’re an e-commerce store or a homebuilder, whatever it can be, it costs seven to eight times more on average to generate a new customer than to retain an existing. What programs, what email newsletters, what points of contact do you have to ensure that customers are either buying more from you or buying more frequently and larger shopping cart size? So ways to measure that is by just starting with measuring your retention.
If you’re a service business and simply measuring basic tools as the average times that buyers come back and purchase on your site. Do they come back once and then never again? Why is that? That’s awesome, let’s interview them, let’s send them surveys.
Cédric: I think one tool that’s often overlooked is something that’s called cohort analysis. A cohort is basically a number of users that are grouped by certain criteria and very often it’s the time that they first purchased from you. And what you want to measure is how many of those people come back in any certain time period.
So let’s say it’s a hundred people that purchased from you the first week of this year, how many came back the second week, third week, fourth week and so on. Which is tremendously helpful data because it tells you how loyal people are over time.
The rest of the schedule for today
All right, sir, thanks for those insights. What’s on our schedule for today?
We’ll go to an escape room which is pretty cool. Haven’t done one before. A dinner and some sunset drinks and lots planned so I’m looking forward to the escape room.
I think escape rooms are my favorite pastime, I do them whenever I can. I really like the problem-solving aspect and I think there’s one more thing that I really like about escape rooms which is: it kind of tests people’s limits a bit.
So you’re being put in a room, sometimes with new people. You have to make it out in 60 minutes and sometimes that can be a bit of a challenge. So you don’t know how far you’ve made it through all the riddles and so there’s this artificial stress that’s being produced. And it’s interesting to see how people react.
My favorite place for a second date
Escape rooms were my favorite second date. I think for first dates it was just too much. I would go have a coffee or maybe lunch or dinner. But as the second date, I thought it was always a great fun date. Because a) it’s fun. I like doing them and b) because it tells you a lot about the people you’re meeting with and how they handle stress. This is obviously not a date but I’m excited to see how Jordan does in the escape room.
An hour and 35 minutes have passed and we made it out. This was a two-hour room. Probably seven different rooms in there. So many cool riddles.
Elena: I think it’s the best escape room that I’ve done so far. Very, very good.
Jordan: Yeah, that was awesome. I didn’t know what to expect but the three levels or four levels I think. Yeah, it was really, really fun.
***
We just got back from a very, very nice dinner. Second last cheat day for me so a bunch of desserts. Today was a pretty fun day. Got up, got a bunch of work done and then we went to play an escape room in the afternoon. But before that, we did a bunch of videos. Talked to Jordan about the buyer’s journey and content marketing and I hope there were some takeaway values for you.
If you’ve never played an escape room, today’s escape room was extremely fun so I just challenge you to go, look up which escape rooms there are in your city, bring someone where you want to understand how to perform under stress and with that – see you tomorrow!
You can listen to the audio version here:
