PreneurCast is a marketing + business podcast. Each week, author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
Pete and Dom discuss the Marketer’s Filter, a way of evaluating your use of various marketing channels which will help you get the most from them. Pete uses Cialdini’s Influence factors and The Marketing Symphony as example frameworks to check against.
Pete and Dom discusses Cialdini’s Influence factors and The Marketing Symphony as your Marketer’s Filter
Action Step: Check if you are using tools like Twitter or Online Video effectively against the Marketing Symphony or Cialdini’s Influence Factors
Tech Tip: If you are using online video, be sure to include your web address!
Transcript:
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Episode 041:
The Marketer’s Filter
Pete Williams: Welcome to this week’s edition of PreneurCast. I’m Pete Williams, and as always I’ve got the Beavis to my Butthead, the Bonnie to my Clyde, Dom Goucher. How are you, buddy?
Dom Goucher: You know, when we talked about this before I’m sure somebody mentioned ‘The Starsky to your Hutch’.
Pete: That would be better, wouldn’t it?
Dom: It would, it would. But then again you know the Beavis and the Butthead; it’s at least on the level. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been like the lower guy, and I was looking for, you know, at least the mysterious guy. Like the guy in the Pet Shop Boys, you know the guy at the back; somebody’s at the front singing away, you got the guy at the back on the keyboard, never really talks…
Pete: True. Next week I’ll do the Penny-Inspector Gadget one, because she was the person who made all the things really happen, although Inspector Gadget was the face of the show.
Dom: OK. For anybody who’s seen the photos on the website, I’m not thinking that the pigtails are going to go well, so I think we’ll leave it there and get on with the show.
Pete: So yes, this week we are talking about Influence, Cialdini’s great book that obviously we mentioned in last week’s episode, but I want to talk about it in the terms of the marketer’s filter. So we’ll get into that in a moment.
Dom: OK, alright. So a little bit of a change, because we did say we were going to talk about the book. So we’re not going to talk and go in depth in the book this week, yeah?
Pete: No, I think, hopefully, a lot of people have already checked out the book. And if they haven’t, obviously there’s Audible and Read It For Me to get access to the core of the book. We’ll touch on the main factors and principles that Cialdini talks about, but I think we can talk about it in a unique way which would be engaging.
Dom: Cool. Just to pick up on something you said there, let’s not forget our sponsors on this show. As of last week, we’ve got two sponsors. And let’s start with the first one because it’s relevant. If for any reason you haven’t read Influence by Robert Cialdini or any of the other books that we talk about on the show, a great way to get an overview of many popular business and personal development books is Read It For Me.
And if you go to ReadItFor.Me/PreneurCast, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial and get a discount as a PreneurCast listener for this excellent book summary service. Now it’s not just a written summary of the book, Read It For Me – and we had Steve on here a few weeks ago to talk about how he does this but, they produce fully multimedia book reviews. They’re fantastic, they produce a little video, they produce a summary of the key points of the book, they even give it to you in a memorable format.
And that’s what Steve and the team over at Read It For Me are all about, you taking all this information in and actually being able to retain it. So it’s a great service. And if you go over to ReadItFor.Me/PreneurCast, you can watch a little video that Pete and I put together, which is looking inside the members’ area of Read It For Me, and showing you an example of the materials that they produce. So pop over and have a look, and just look for any old book that you might not have read yet, and see if it’s for you.
Pete: Sounds perfect. Absolutely, could not agree more. It’s a great service we’re happy to support here on the show. So, let’s get into today’s topic, the marketer’s filter. Now, basically, to give some context to this before we delve into the Influence side of things, the marketer’s filter is something that we’re going to talk about quite a bit, and It’s Not About the Product, the new book that we haven’t spoken about for quite a while.
And that was a topic of conversation early on, but it’s coming together and we’ve got a release date now and we’ll let some more information out over the coming weeks about the book. But we’re going to be talking about a little bit in that book, so I thought I would start to sort of share some of the conversation here on the show. The marketer’s filter is basically a concept where if you have a filter that you can run tools through, it makes it more effective when you’re actually wanting to work out how to use that tool in your marketing and in your business.
So, a good example we can talk about is Twitter. Now, obviously, Twitter by itself is a fantastic communication platform, and every social media expert and their dog is talking about how to use Twitter and things like that. But I think having a structured filter you can run through when you’re actually using your tool can make it much more effective.
And this is whether you’re using an autoresponder series – and obviously, for those who listen to the Own the ‘G episode a couple of weeks back, you would’ve heard Dom quite a bit point out various influence factors that we used in that autoresponder sequence. So I think it’s really good to have this sort of checklist/filter in place, and I’d love to go through that and chat about it today.
Dom: Yeah, I like this. It’s a different angle. So you’re bringing together two things; one, a way of either evaluating a platform or guiding your use of that platform to maximum benefit, and you’re going to match this up with the lessons that we get from Cialdini’s Influence, yeah?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. And we can also touch on a little bit of the Marketing Symphony too that I wish we spoke about as a platform or a framework very early on in our PreneurCast broadcast. So we can touch on both of those and give some context to this marketing filter using those two examples.
Dom: Cool, cool. Go for it.
Pete: So we’ll start out with Influence and then we’ll sort of guide the information that way. So basically, for those who haven’t read Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, make sure you pick it up, check it out on Audible.com or something like that, because it’s a fantastic book for everyone, whether you’re a marketer, an entrepreneur, a salesperson, or just a father and husband. I think there’s some really cool factors in there you should be aware of anyway.
So let’s touch on quickly these six weapons of influence that Cialdini talks about in his book, just to give some context. The first one is social proof. And to sum up social proof, it’s basically if others have bought the product, it must be good. It’s that , you know, if someone else tries it and proves it’s good, it must be good for you, and that makes it easier for you to purchase it.
So things like testimonials and endorsements are great social proof. It’s others are doing it, the more people who are doing it, the better it must be and the more popular it must be. It’s that sort of evolution of social proof. The second weapon that Cialdini talks about is liking. There’s two definitions of liking here; there’s people are more likely to buy from a person or business that they actually like.
So obviously you want to be friendly and generous and that sort of stuff because it comes across as being a likeable kind of person. You’ve got to be easier to relate to and it makes it easier to sell. The other side of things is people do like to do business people that they actually are like, that they’re similar to. So again, in your market, you want to work out ways to actually show your personality so people feel that they are actually like you.
The third influence factor is authority, and people are more influenced by authoritative figures. That’s pretty straightforward. Obviously, throughout time, we’ve always… That’s why we have presidents, and prime ministers, and school teachers, and celebrity endorsements work really, really well to actually get that little authority across in your marketing. The fourth weapon: scarcity. This is again a pretty obvious one when you think about it. People are more likely to buy something that’s scarce.
I obviously did this quite well on the Own the G and reselling the MCG frame stories – selling limited editions and the first 20 customers get something for free, or expiry dates on sales and coupons. Those sorts of things help build scarcity, which obviously helps increase sales. The fifth weapon is reciprocity, and what that is all about is people will be influenced to get you something if you give them something first.
So by giving away free trials and samples and puppy dog closers and things like that, that actually helps people feel like they need to actually respond to you, and obviously generally respond to in the form of purchasing something. And the final weapon Cialdini covers in his book Influence is commitment and consistency. So if a person makes a commitment to you or your business, he or she can be more likely to buy from you and be consistent to that original commitment.
So things like loyalty programs are really, really good to instill this. Obviously, the more habitually you can get people to actually come to your coffee shop, the more likely they’re going to be committed and consistent with that action. Twenty-five words or less contests were originally designed to do that. The whole idea is to write 25 words or less why you like that particular product or brand, so even if you don’t win the contest you’ve already made that commitment verbally and physically by writing out why you enjoy that product.
Next time you’re in the supermarket, there’s more chance of you buying that brand of soap. So it’s that whole commitment and consistency thing that is used very, very well in marketing. They’re the six weapons that Cialdini talks about.
Dom: And you make it sound so, so simple.
Pete: But basically the book’s fantastic. I know you liked it from a scientific perspective because Cialdini is a university professor and is not a marketer per se, so he talks about these weapons in the form of science and a lot of case studies and examples and things like that.
Dom: Yeah, absolutely. I do like it for the fact that it’s factual. But I also like it for the fact that when you read it, it’s one of those books – another one is Why We Buy by Paco Underhill, it’s just you read it, you go through it, and you see these examples and you realize that you’ve either been on the receiving end of it and it has affected you that way, or you’ve at least seen somebody doing it.
As you say, the 25 words or more competition to 25 words or less competition and things like that, some of these things are more obvious. And another is scarcity. Lots of people do it. They fake it or they force it or whatever, and some of it just really happens. And so I just really enjoyed reading it from that point of view, as well as the practical applications which is what we’re talking about right now.
Pete: Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk about this in terms of being a marketing filter or at least a marketing reference point. So in the case of Twitter, everyone’s familiar with Twitter so it’s probably an easy example to use. I want to talk about each of these factors when it comes to Twitter to actually get an understanding of how these apply in the platform and ecosystem that is Twitter, and then we can talk about it in another way using the symphony as well.
So if we look at social proof, how does social proof apply when it comes to the platform that is Twitter? Well, obviously social proof is all about testimonials and endorsements, and if others are doing this it must be good. So obviously, the more followers you have, the more social proof you have as an influence on Twitter.
By having people retweet you, that is fundamentally a testimonial or also an endorsement of the tweet, or the twat that you’ve just made. That’s sort of how that factor applies on Twitter. Obviously, having more followers and obviously encouraging people to retweet you is a great way to show social proof on that platform.
Dom: Yeah, I’m slightly linking forward a little bit, from my point of view, because the number of follow-ups is a good number, and a lot of kind of non-expert users would just look at a big number and say, “That guy must be good.” There are some people that we know on Twitter, some people that we talked about before on various podcasts, and they have like in the tens, and multiple tens of thousands of followers on Twitter.
And so just by looking at that number, you go, “Hey, wow, this guy has a lot of followers; he must know what he is talking about!” But the other factor is that retweet. And I think in a way retweeting can be more social proof in that way, as we’ll go on to say about all the other factors. But when someone retweets something, they are indicating that they’re read it and think it’s of value. They’re not just kind of passively following you, they’re actively almost endorsing you, yeah?
Pete: Exactly right. And a big thing I really want to make clear is this sort of filter and reference point we’re talking about doesn’t just apply to social media. I don’t want people to get that idea. This is just a marketing framework you can use for anything, whether you’re using direct mail or TV. How you can actually apply these factors to the platform you’re using is really important, so that’s the core message I want people to take way from today’s episode.
But moving on to the second factor, which is liking. Now obviously, as we spoke about, there are two definitions for liking. People are more likely to buy from a person they actually like. So having a personality on Twitter and not just simply marketing and making sales pitches all the time is really important if you’re using Twitter as a business platform. So you want to make sure that you’re actually out doing stuff that is engaging that allows people to like you.
So showing photos of what you’re doing on the weekend and making comments about the Super Bowl or things like that is really important to show that you’re a likeable kind of person and not just a full-on marketing machine. On the other side of the coin is obviously people like to buy and do business with people that they actually feel they’re similar to, or that they’re like.
So again, having photos and talking about your hobbies. Gary Vaynerchuk does this very well. He talks very, very passionately about his jets and about his family and that sort of stuff. So it really helps build that like in that he’s just another good old bloke that likes sport and is passionate as well. That’s the way that this factor is used when it comes to the Twitter platform.
Dom: That’s a really good point, actually, because a lot of people will say, just in general, don’t always be selling. Other than this vague sense that it might offend people if you just keep hammering them with a sales message, that there’s nothing really scientific behind a lot of it. People just say don’t always sell, and they give you, as you say, this is a framework. So going back to autoresponder sequences, don’t always be sending people ‘buy my stuff’ links and things like that.
But bringing back to one of the influence factors, I think, is a really good example, because you’re right; putting some more personality into what you do gives people the ability to first of all decide whether they like you as a person and second of all, see if there’s some resonance, see if you share an interest. And with those two things, just by sharing a little bit of yourself, those two things are both aiming directly at that liking influence factor. So that’s a really good example.
Pete: Absolutely, sir. The next factor that we’ll talk about is authority. Now obviously, authority is all about being a market leader. And the number of followers you have on Twitter is a direct correlation to your authority in that particular niche that you’re talking about. So obviously, trying to get as many followers as possible is a great way to get that authority.
Dom: I tripped forward from social proof just to bring this one up again. Again, I’m big on the retweet. And in any market, if you can get someone who is seen as an authority person for any reason in your market to retweet something of yours, you inherit some of that authority.
You know, we talked about this in various things including the publicity episode; about getting associated with either a publication or a person that’s got a larger profile than you. You come into their little halo of influence, and you pick up some of that authority. So that again is a good thing to be aiming for, as well as just the raw number of followers, yeah?
Pete: Yeah, exactly right. That’s absolutely right. It’s all about that, ways that you can actually get authority communicated through the Twitter platform. Now the next one is actually an interesting one. The next one is scarcity. And the really good thing about scarcity in this context is that it’s not actually relevant in that you can’t actually communicate scarcity to your marketplace on Twitter, because you’re not really selling stuff and things like that.
Yes, you can obviously tweet stuff about, “My latest book’s selling really, really well; and there’s only so many copies s available,” or “Tickets to this event is selling fast!” So you can communicate scarcity that way. But using Twitter as an ecosystem, it’s not really designed as a scarcity play, which is really good.
I know you’ve got some ideas of how you can apply scarcity in this area, but I just wanted to talk about it with that context, to say that not every influence factor is going to be relevant to every platform you use. It’ll be relevant to certain platforms and other certain tools, and not others; something to keep in the back of your mind as well. I know you’ve got an interesting take on this scarcity sort of stuff with Twitter.
Dom: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first take if you said scarcity and Twitter in the same sentence, it sounds like a crazy concept because Twitter is basically about volume. There’s just a massive… If anybody’s going to say anything about Twitter, it’s that there’s too much of everything. But I saw this really interesting use of scarcity on Twitter a while ago. There was a software company, and they were releasing the beta of a brand new piece of software in a new market.
They went in a completely new direction; and they mailed the list and they said, “If you want to find about this, if you want to be on the inside of it, then go to this Twitter account.” And it was a Twitter account that you needed to apply for access. It was this secure secret Twitter account, which, they exist, and up until this point I always thought, “Why would you bother?”
But again, it’s creating a sense of scarcity. It’s creating, not directly scarcity of a product, but of information. It’s an exclusivity more than just blatant scarcity. But I just thought it was quite a clever play to create this exclusivity, create this club within the Twitter ecosystem, because it’s the first time I’d ever seen anybody do it; and it worked quite well actually as far as I understand it. But I agree with you completely.
Well, I think that’s a really good example of how you can apply these influence factors or this framework. We’re not talking about crowbar-ing things into a framework. We’re not talking about square pegs and round holes here. There’s no point of stamping on it if it’s not going to go in. But it’s good to have these discussions and look how you can bring these influence factors to bare against a particular tool or platform, and the benefit of it.
Pete: Absolutely, absolutely. So we move on to the fifth factor, which is reciprocity. It’s all about giving things to get back. And obviously, with tweeting, you can share good advice; you can share free reports; you can share links to good articles, that sort of stuff. The more you give your followers and your community that you built there, the more likely they’re going to come back and do stuff with you later.
What you want to do is give as much as you can on Twitter with good information and retweeting important and relevant documents, and articles, and videos to your followers that are relevant to them and the niche you operate in. So that’s, I guess, the whole reciprocity thing in play when it comes to Twitter.
Dom: There is another angle to that as well. That this is something certainly that I do and I’m influenced by, which is as well as if you’re talking to your marketplace, you’re seen as somebody who gives good information, who provides good content without seeming to expect anything but you’re not doing a direct sale but something else that I think is quite important within the ecosystem of Twitter, is the retweet. Because I know that I’ve got into the kind of being noticed by people in my marketplace because I follow them on Twitter.
And if they say something interesting, I retweet it. And I’ve found that over time, they’ve retweeted things of mine now, and yet I see them maybe as a figure of higher influence than me, a higher authority in that marketplace than me. But I got onto their radar by retweeting them; and reciprocity works because they started to notice that I did things and they saw something of value in what I’d done, so they retweet me.
Pete: Yeah, perfect example of that. And the final example is the commitment and consistency side of things. If you can get people to retweet you, or get them to interact with you on Twitter by asking questions of your followers and getting them to respond, it builds that commitment element. The more they do – interaction breeds commitment, they say.
The more interaction you can get, then obviously the more commitment you’re going to get from those followers as well. So asking questions and actually having an engaging conversation and not just making it a one way communication platform is really important too if you want to apply Cialdini’s influence factors to your Twitter presence.
Dom: Yeah, that is a really good thing. The whole asking questions angle of this is really powerful, especially if you ask questions about something that you have done, or something that you’re thinking of doing. You know, I found I got some great feedback saying, for example, I’m thinking of designing a course about this, and what kind of things do you have problems with in this area? And people are responding; they’re giving me ideas, they’re giving me input, great feedback; but they’re also interacting with me. Some great conversation starters as you say.
Pete: They’re also – just a sidestep there, is they’re finding exactly what the marketplace wants to buy, what questions they actually have. And if you incorporate those elements into the course, then obviously it’s going to hit the marketplace perfectly because it’s going to be exactly what they want.
Dom: Well, there’s an entire other podcast in that.
Pete: So that’s looking at the platforms or tool as a filter through the influence-type framework; but we can also look at it from a Marketing Symphony framework which we spoke about on one of the very first PreneurCast episodes. We can touch on that as well to give some perspective to using, again, we might as well use Twitter as an example and continue that on, through the Marketing Symphony and how you can apply that to Twitter too.
Dom: Yeah, I love talking about the Marketing Symphony; because by comparison to the influence factors, it’s one of the most simple models and frameworks that I have ever come across in business. But it’s one of the most powerful things – I go back to it almost every day, and certainly when I’m talking to clients.
When we’ve talked together in the Mastermind to the clients, the Marketing Symphony is vital. It’s a great framework and it’s a good thing to see it in action against a platform like Twitter, so I’m interested in your take on this.
Pete: Basically, for those who are new to the show – welcome, welcome to the show. But if you haven’t, go back and check out the Marketing Symphony episode, because we delve deep into the Symphony and how it really applies. But basically, it’s all about doing your marketing and building your business in a sequential, logical framework or order, and that is: market research, traffic, conversion, and then product.
So you want to start with doing market research first, ensure you can get traffic to your business, making sure you can convert that traffic into buyers, and then worry about actually developing the product for that marketplace. And if that sounds a little confusing, then go and listen to the Symphony episode, because that covers that in depth. But if you look at Twitter from these four perspectives, how does it actually apply? Well, if we’re trying to do market research on Twitter, is it possible? If so, how?
Twitter’s a fantastic tool for doing research. As you just said, a perfect example, if you actually have a marketplace and a community that follow you on Twitter, and you’re looking at actually doing another product or writing a free report, you can easily make contact with your target market on Twitter to get answers. You can just tweet a question out in exactly the same way that you just suggested, and then the responses you get is perfect market research.
Dom: Yeah, and it is great because Twitter people are highly responsive. That’s the whole point about that platform, is if you get a good following on Twitter, some good responsive people, you can pop a question out there, you can be doing your market research and be done in an hour, literally.
Pete: Exactly. Absolutely. So if we go to the next level of the Symphony here and look at traffic, is Twitter a tool that can get you traffic? These are the sorts of questions that you want to ask yourself when you’re looking at a platform and applying these marketing filters to it. Can Twitter get you traffic? Absolutely. If you’ve got a sales page or a blog post or some kind of high-quality content you can get traffic for, sending a tweet out to your followers is a fantastic way to get that traffic because people are following the Twitter feed.
They see your link, they’ll click on it and get to your particular page no matter what it is. And obviously, as we spoke about, you can actually get that retweet factor come into play as well, and actually get more traffic and extended traffic beyond just your own followers throughout your entire Twitter network.
Dom: Absolutely. If you are seen as a figure of authority and seen as somebody who tweets interesting or useful things, or people just know you and you have a good reputation, then simple, simple, simple things. We, for example, tweet when we release a new podcast episode. We make it easy for people to follow that link to get to the podcast, whether it’s on PreneurMedia.tv, or whether it’s on the iTunes feed or whatever. We tweet them out, and that’s traffic.
Pete: Exactly right. Absolutely. So what about conversion, though? Is Twitter a good tool for conversion? My argument is not really. You can’t actually make the sale on Twitter. It’s hard to make a sale in 140 characters. That’s what the whole idea of getting traffic to your particular business website, sales page, squeeze page, whatever you might be using the internet for to generate leads and business for yourself.
So I don’t think Twitter’s a great conversion tool. You just cross that off the list, it’s OK to not actually apply every tool to every filter box. So conversion, I don’t think Twitters great for that. It’s engagement, and it’s a traffic tool.
Dom: OK, can I get out my evil marketer’s cape and laugh?
Pete: OK.
Dom: Ready for this? Mwahahahaha. What about affiliate links?
Pete: Well, that’s traffic.
Dom: But if you’re sending somebody to a sales page, you can then work out that they came from Twitter, and that they converted. It’s a bit of a reach.
Pete: Sorry, dude. I’m not going to give you that. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re in the business of generating traffic to a sales page. So it’s a traffic-generation platform. It’s giving you traffic through your affiliate link, it’s not making the sale. You still need the sales page to make that sale.
Dom: OK, we give that one an official “un-uh”.
Pete: Well, hang on, here’s one you can try and redeem yourself on: product. Can Twitter be used to create product? Again, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a product-producing platform. You can’t do a product with that, although you could potentially charge people to be accepted into your closed Twitter feed.
It’s a very, very manual process. But obviously, you’d have to apply and be approved to follow the private locked Twitter feeds. So you could potentially create a product with Twitter and charge people to actually be able to access your private platform.
Dom: OK, I’m just going to reach in and take that shovel off you. In and of itself, as a product, no. But as a way of not just basic market research, because the whole point of Marketing Symphony is find a market; investigate the market through how much traffic you can get – is there traffic; and then through conversion – are they going to buy, have they got money, are they going to buy things; and then you create a product.
Now when we get to the ‘create a product’ stage, is Twitter a viable product-creation tool from the point of view of, will it help you create product? Absolutely. As I said earlier, I popped out a quick tweet saying, “Hey guys, what’s your biggest problem in this marketplace?” and they tell me, there’s my product outline. Bang.
Pete: Market research?
Dom: It’s not market research. That’s not researching our market, that is product design. That’s flat-out product design. You know me, I build product for people all the time, I build my own, I build products for other people. I work heavily on product design and it is one of the biggest problems people have, is structuring their product – putting the right information in it, because the biggest, best marketing lesson there is is find out what people want, make it, and put it in front of them.
Pete: Very good point. In the context of what the Symphonies meant to be, you are absolutely right.
Dom: Whee.
Pete: Let’s continue this conversation, let’s look at video. Let’s try to sort of give a bit more perspective to this and give another example beyond Twitter. If we talk about video online; well, OK, let’s try and apply that. YouTube or something is the platform, or Vimeo, or Viddler, and put all these in the same sort of bucket as online video. Market research – is online video a great way to do online research? Again, I’d probably say not really because it’s not a two-way communication platform that Twitter is.
Yes, you can have the comment fields below the video, so you can kind of make that leap to say that if you create a video with a call to action at the end to leave comments, that it could be a great way to do market research. But generally, video is a one-way communication medium. It’s designed to entertain or educate. So it’s not really a market research tool unless you go to that grey zone and actually consider the comment field the response mechanism.
Dom: Yeah, this is it, isn’t it? If you stand one level up and look at any kind of online video-sharing platform, they all come under the umbrella of social media. And the whole point about social media is that whatever the platform is, whether it’s video-sharing sites, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever, they all have the similar mechanisms which are things that allow you to indicate that you like something and share that like flag with your social circle, and also the ability to actually directly share that content and comment on that content.
Those are the basic tenets of social media. So whether it is Flickr or YouTube or whatever, you’re absolutely right; there’s nothing special about it that makes it particularly good at market research. Whereas, as you say, Twitter by comparison is an inbuilt two-way communication system. So, yeah, I’m with you. I don’t think that video particularly as in and of itself gives you good market research or does anything to stand out as a tool for market research.
Pete: What about traffic? What’s your take on traffic and video?
Dom: I actually have done a number of projects to use video to get traffic. And it’s, yeah, absolutely 100%, it’s a traffic-generation tool.
Pete: Can you give me an example?
Dom: Yeah, absolutely. Do a search for any reasonably well-known phrase or a popular topic in Google, and you will see about halfway or a third of the way down the page, certainly most of the time above the fold on the first page, you’ll see a couple of really obvious thumbnails of videos. Nice, shiny, colorful pictures that attract people to click on them.
And depending on how you’ve got that set up, that video could actually be on your website and drag that traffic from page one of Google straight to your website, or it can go to your branded YouTube channel or Vimeo channel or wherever it goes. So that’s straight down – either straight to your website, straight to your sales page or whatever, or to a branded environment where you can show people more of your wares however you’d like.
The other way is if they’re already inside the platform, it’s possible to include either advertising or just straight-out links along with videos – below the video, over the video, whatever. So somebody’s generally searching in YouTube, which is browsing around, or sees an associated video, then they see your video. There’s a link there, so you’re giving the message; it’s dragging the traffic.
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a great tech tip for this week, is if you are doing YouTube stuff, I encourage you to put the URL of your website at the first part of the description of the video and include the http:// bit because that will make YouTube automatically turn that link into a clickable link, so you can actually get traffic off.
So rather than writing a boring old description or an engaging description with just text, include a URL at the very, very start of that YouTube description, because it will be seen under the video and it will be clickable.
Dom: Absolutely. In the circles that I operate in, that’s so well known now that’s no longer a secret; but it used to be sort of a ninja tip. But to just enhance that a little bit, the way the YouTube interface operates, there’s basically one line of the description visible below the video on a standard page now.
So if your web page address is written correctly with the full http:// before it and YouTube identifies it as a link, not only does it create a clickable link, but it’s visible directly below the page. It’s pretty much the only thing visible below that video unless you click the ‘more’ button these days, which makes it even more obvious and even more enticing to click. Because a lot of people don’t see the ‘more’, they just see the link. So that’s one.
But the other one, forget the technology, forget the complexity; this is another one of those retro tips. Please, people, if – heaven offend you, don’t use me to produce your videos. But if you’re producing the videos yourself, please include your address, your web address, some kind of information about your website or how to get a hold of you in your videos. I know it sounds obvious; but trust me, really, folks? They’re never going to get to your website if you don’t tell them where it is.
Pete: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, what about conversion? I think this is a pretty obvious one. Video can be fantastic to convert online. I know we’ve mentioned this a number of times in various episodes of PreneurCast. But actually using video online to have it on a sales page, to have it on your actual product page through your ecommerce store, to have it on your business website to build that trust and relationship before someone picks up the phone and calls your tiling or accounting practice. So video is a fantastic way online to actually generate conversions. There’s no question about that, I think.
Dom: Absolutely. I mean, you could cram all of the influence factors, roll them all up into one, and stick them into that, that whole category really; because you can do on video so much more in such a small a space. For example, one of the reasons I really, really love video at the moment is because on the mobile devices, it’s infinitely more powerful.
Even if your website is visible on a mobile device, people have always got to zoom in and zoom out, scroll around, or you’ve got to minimize the amount of information they can see. Whereas, if you’ve got a video and it’s formatted correctly to play on the iPad, iPhone, iPod, or Android device or whatever – a quick tap on that video, it goes full screen.
You’ve got a full screen in front of your audience to do anything. You can demonstrate your product, you can show them who you are. As you say, going back to that authority and the likeability and everything, it’s just right there, full screen. And you’re basically never going to get that with a page full of text.
Pete: Absolutely, absolutely. So I guess the last Marketing Symphony item is product. And again, I think this is pretty obvious where video comes in exceptionally well is creating product. Video courses are a huge, huge thing online. So if you actually record all your content, whether you’re an informational marketer and selling information online, or whether you’re an accountant and what to create a small video series that you can sell to your clients about how to double-check and keep good records and things like that, video is a fantastic way to create product. Obviously, there’s written books; but there’s also video and DVD. But I think that’s a pretty obvious one about creating product using video.
Dom: It is, but I’m going to point somebody back to something that we talked about a while ago. A lot of people – we started to say video and a lot of people switched off. Now, video is pretty much all I do. I do digital media production, that’s my business. But the majority of what I do for my clients is video, and it’s creating information products and sales videos, and the things that most people listening to this product will have experience themselves.
Whether they’ve seen one of your courses, or any course, basically, pretty much everything is video-based. But once you say to somebody, “Hey, go make a video information product or a sales video,” they run screaming to the hills. And I just want to point everybody back and I’ll put a link in the show notes, point everybody back to the video that you and I produced about our Content Leverage System.
Pete: Yeah.
Dom: I’m just going to summarize it. Basically, and you’ll back me up on this, you sit down with your iPad, you whiz up a little mind map of whatever it is that you want to talk about – they’re your notes that guide you through what you want to say. You get out your microphone and you record you talking through the mind map. You drop that recording and the mind map in Dropbox, and that’s the last thing that you have to do to produce your information products.
Pete: Exactly right. You have a team to do this for you.
Dom: That’s right. The secret to this is that there are skilled people out there –- we talk about outsourcing all the time. And the way to do this is you are the content, you do the bit that you need to do, and then get the people to back you up.
Pete: Absolutely. I should probably do a whole episode on outsourcing at one point. Have we done an episode on outsourcing?
Dom: We kind of have, we kind of have. But I think it would probably bear another more in-depth example.
Pete: Sounds good. Forty-one episodes in and it’s all getting blurry about all the stuff we’ve shared, so it’s very exciting. Speaking of future episodes, what are we going to talk about next week? What’s next week’s topic?
Dom: Well, this is something personal. This is something I’m interested in your take on. I’m having a bit of a branding crisis at the moment, and I think that a lot of people do this. We’ve talked about being on Twitter, being on social media, being out there, putting yourself out there, and being yourself or giving of yourself. And there’s an aspect of branding that if somebody looks at Pete Williams, there’s a definite brand there. So I don’t want to go into that too much but…
Pete: Am I part of the problem? By obviously every week referring to you something different, like Abbott and Costello or Lois and Clark? Is that my fault for actually changing that each week? Do you notice people want to just call you that every week? You are the Robin to my Batman?
Dom: No, not really, because so far you haven’t picked a good one.
Pete: You are the Brad to my Angelina.
Dom: Dude, really? Put the shovel down and step away from the hole. No, seriously though. Next week, folks, we’re going to talk about branding because it’s a big issue. The more that the world moves online, the more that you are seen and the more that you having a definable brand will help you get your message out there. So I definitely want to talk to Pete about that.
Pete: This is definitely going to be a rant and soapbox episode, no doubt about that.
Dom: Excellent. I missed those, I missed those. So, action point for this week?
Pete: I think that the action point for this week is just to sit down and assess what you’re doing with the various tools that you’re doing and you’re using with your business; really get an understanding of each of the tools that you’re currently using, and are you using them to their full and maximum benefit, based on either the Marketing Symphony or the influence factors; and how to figure out how you can entwine some of these influence factors into the various platforms and the way you’re communicating on them.
Dom: Yeah, these are some more examples of frameworks. And of course, there’s always the 7 Levers framework that you can look at how you’re using things against that as well. But definitely, sit down and just review how you do things. Don’t be so haphazard with these tools. Go get a framework and just measure what you’re doing against that, I definitely agree.
And then of course there’s our tech tip for the week, which is if you are using online video, certainly if you’re using it on a sharing site like YouTube, definitely include a link to your site or some kind of contact information and call to action in your video. But use Pete’s super tech tip which is to have that link actually clickable by including it in the description.
Now, before we finish, we have got one other sponsor. Now Pete’s mentioned our other sponsor already quite a few times; but just to be specific, Audible, the audiobook company that both Pete and I use extensively, have a great offer for you through our link at AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, 14-day free trial. You can go in, look around, try out the service, and you’ll get a coupon if you go to that link for a free audiobook you can download out of their library.
And their library is absolutely huge. They have got just the most amazing range of books, fantastic quality. And of course, if you use Audible and download it, you get to use our favorite trick which is listen to it at 2-speed.
Pete: Absolutely. And something that really excited me is one of the bestselling books they’ve got on Audible this week is Inside Apple, which is how America’s most admired and secretive company really works, and it’s the unabridged version so you get the entire book, and it’s really cool.
It goes a lot into how Apple innovates the deals it has with its suppliers, and how it’s going to actually handle the transition to post-date jobs. So I really encourage listeners to check out the 14-day membership that’s available, and you can download Inside Apple for free as part of that trial. So check it out at AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast.
Dom: Excellent. And amazingly, we are pretty much on time again. That’s 2 weeks in a row, I’m impressed.
Pete: Sounds good. Well, sit tight, we’ll see you all next week for our rant and soapbox episode on branding.
Dom: See you folks!
Pete: Bye!
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Links:
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http://audibletrial.com/preneurcast – Audible has a huge library of audio books of all types. Visit our link for a 14-day trial and PreneurCast listener coupon for a free audio book.
– PreneurCast Episodes:
These previous episodes are talked about in today’s show. Go back and listen, if you missed them, over at http://preneurmedia.tv
PreneurCast Episode 2 – Pete and Dom discuss the Marketing Symphony
– Online Resources:
The Content Leverage System – The post on the Noble Samurai blog that Pete did about our publishing workflow
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