Video Production
Okay, so Zig Ziglar did a thought experiment, had the large audience and said, "Okay, if you could pick anybody who would be your perfect boss or your perfect employee or your perfect spouse or your perfect partner, and you can type a list of things into a machine and it would spit out the perfect person for that, what would you type in? What would be the traits that you would look for?" The audience would start sending back feedback saying, "We want somebody who is loyal. We want somebody who is hardworking. We want somebody who is fun, honest, somebody creative, somebody insightful, somebody generous." They'd get through the entire list and they'd start running out of suggestions, and Zig would say, "Okay, how many of these, I want to divide these up. How many of these are skills? How many of these are gifts, and how many of these are attitudes?" Almost without fail, everything on the list is an attitude.
An attitude is something that you can adjust and it's within your control. Oh, by the way, it's why people want to be with you. Your skills are a given. You're professional, you wouldn't be a professional without it. If you're an electrician, you know electrical skills. Your gifts, you can't control because those were given to you and you decide whether to use them or not. But your attitude, your attitude is something that you can work on every day. Now, you should spend time working on your hard skills, absolutely. But, keep in mind the reason people want to be around you is because of your attitude. Decide what kind of attitude you want to have and be that. Thanks to Ginny Maxwell who helps me be grateful every day. If you've got questions for me, email me at [email protected].
Video Production
Okay. So today I'm going to talk a little bit more about video length. You need a signature video, something that says who you are, what you do and why someone should work with you.
The problem with that is that as you dig into that and you start working on the script, the script gets longer, and longer, and longer, and longer and longer because there's always one more thing to put in.
So there are two different solutions on how to deal with this. The first is you have individual products and services that you offer. Make a signature video that's about your company and what you do, but make an additional video for all of the different services that you offer. So when somebody is looking at you generally they've got something that they can go to, but when they're looking at you for one product or one service, you've got a video for them for that.
The second solution is a little bit more difficult to wrap your head around, but you have multiple verticals that you serve more than likely. And so you do a signature video that's you, but you can also use that material to create a video that's signature to that industry. So you make a video that's for manufacturing, that's for K-12, that's for tech, that's for finance, that's for medical, that's for one of those verticals so when they come looking, you're speaking specifically to them rather than trying to have a one size fits all solution. It takes a little bit more effort, but it is worth doing.
Thanks today to Michael Blue. Thanks very much for reaching out and getting in touch. And if you've got questions for me, email me at [email protected].
Okay, so I was going to talk about video link today, but something came up and I need to talk about trust.
Trust is a very fragile thing. You know this. And if you have trust with somebody, it is because you have earned it and it's because you continue to earn it. And when you enter into a business relation, and forget about friendship for a second. When you enter into a business relationship with somebody, you have expectations. I expect you to do this. You expect me to do this. Okay, let's go. And when you don't do the thing that you said that you were going to do, you lose trust.
Now I'm able to do my best work because my clients trust me. When I make a video, my client doesn't spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder because they know that they're going to get the highest and best thing that I can make. I don't spend a lot of time second guessing myself and they don't spend a lot of time second guessing me.
When I run an ad campaign, my client knows that I'm going to optimize it every month as I see fit. I'm allowed to do that because they trust me that I'm going to do the best possible thing for them.
That trust is important. That allows me to do the best work. And when you break trust, if something bad happens, we talked about this last weekend on Make the Mistake. You say this is what happened, it's my fault and this is what I'm going to do to make it right.
If you don't do that, if you don't unmake the mistake, you lose trust. And when you lose trust with somebody, do not be surprised, don't you dare be surprised when they show you the door. Do what you say you are going to do.
Thanks to Steve Jarosinski for being trustworthy and for being a great example to my nieces and my nephews and my son. If you have questions for me, email me at [email protected].
Video Production Length
Okay. So most marketing chiefs will agree with you when you say that video is important. Bare minimum, you need something on your website that says who you are, what you do and why people should work with you.
We produce a lot of video here. When I work with a client for the first time, one of the questions that I ask is, how long do you want your video to be? The answer, generally, is I don't know, we haven't really thought about it. And my recommendation almost always is two minutes (90 seconds if we can get there).
Why? Because people are used to getting their information quickly. And the last thing you want to do is waste a prospect's time. Besides, think about what you can get away with in two minutes. The chestburster scene from Alien, from the moment they sit down to dinner is two minutes long. The cue card scene from Love Actually, two minutes. The colored bathroom scene from Hidden Figures is a minute 56. The Casablanca scene, the La Marseillaise scene from Casablanca, comes in at 1:55. One of the most famous phrases of all time, "As you wish", from the Princess Bride, comes in at a buck 46.
You can get away with a lot in two minutes if it's written well. So the next time you're thinking about doing a video and you find yourself doing something that takes more than two minutes, stop and think about whether or not you need two videos.
Thanks to Monroe Bush. I appreciate everything you say, Monroe. And if you've got questions for me, email me at [email protected].
Okay. I am here to make an appeal to CEOs who don't put a lot of value in design. I understand. It's okay. Your sales team is very important. Your designers are great. They give you fantastic stuff. Your website looks good. Your collateral looks good. Your ads are good. They're wonderful people, good on them, but at the end of the day, your focus is going to be on sales because you're the CEO and the sales are where the dollars come from.
Wait. Stop. Give me a moment to change your mind. Let's talk about vaping. Why? Vaping comes on the scene in America in about 2008. R.J. Reynolds gets into the game about 2013 with their Vuse product. All vapes basically look like this. You've got your power button, you've got your little socket in the back to plug in, you've got your reservoir here, and then you fill that up every once in awhile with whatever your favorite vaping fluid is. Then this is your heating coil here, and every once in a while, that'll burn out. You just take that and replace it with a new one. Easy, right?
So Adam and James come along, two designers from Stanford, one of them with an MFA. How useless is that? They say, "Here's ours. When you want to recharge it, stick it in the magnet we gave you. When you want a new one, you take this out and then put this back in and you're done." That designe earned them 72% of the market. It didn't make better flavors. They don't have a better sales team than you do. What they do have is a killer design.
The next time you're tempted to skip past the design phase, stop. Go to your designers and ask them what they can do to make the product better because a great design will make you more money than a great sales team.
Shout out to Jordan Nowaskie. Keep the faith, brother! Design rules! If you've got questions for me, email me at [email protected]
Try it. Try this one. Go to a car lot where you know exactly the car that you want to buy and say, "I want to buy that car," and don't negotiate on the price. Change your buying patterns so that you buy quickly and decisively, and then you can help the person across the table from you do the same. When you're shaking hands with them, you can say, "Look, if it's no, that's fine, but if it's yes, let's go." Because what is there to be afraid of?
Thanks to John Imard who was always much nicer to me than I deserve. Thank you John. If you have any questions for me, please email it me at [email protected].
Okay, so it is the second of the month, which means it is Analytics Day. We do reviews every Monday and Friday, we do an audit on the 15th, but analytics day is special. Why do we do it on the second? Because on the first, not everybody is done with their reporting. So I don't like going backwards to collect an additional 0.8% of data.
On analytics day we... Every campaign gets stopped down for about half an hour and we go line by line through every single thing that it's doing and see what we can do to optimize to make it better. How does this apply to you? We all have systems in place, whether it's to save us work or because we don't have enough time to deal with that or it's supposed to be somebody else's job. There are systems in place to help keep things going and every once in a while you just need to stop it down and assess what's going on.
What do I want this to be doing and how can I make it better? And that's whether it's your sales processes or your staff management and and ops, or your social media. Every once in awhile, pause, take a break, take a breath, stop and assess it. Is it doing what you want it to do, and how can you make it better? It's a pause worth taking. Thanks very much to Matt Lotz for reaching out and giving us an opportunity to get together, I appreciate it. If you have questions for me, please email me at [email protected]
Okay, so today I would like to talk about screwing up. There are basically two reactions that people usually have when they screw up. The first one is, "Oh my god, everything's wrong, what are we going to do?" They panic and that's honorable that you feel that way, but it doesn't make anything better. Worse is the people that go, "Was not my fault. I didn't do anything wrong. The computer program didn't go off or the campaign didn't launch when it was supposed to," or you were late on your deadline, so it's not really my fault. None of these things are helpful for the client. They are job one.
Paul Lushin, who's a mentor of mine, had a great piece of advice that I follow as much as I can. Which is, at the beginning of your relationship with the client, have a conversation with them and say, "Look, when I screw up, and if we work together long enough something's going to go wrong, don't judge me on the screw up. Judge me on how I react to the screw up." There's a lot of different things that you can do to make it right. You can refund their money. You can double down on the next campaign and deliver it 200% and not charge them for it. You can optimize a different campaign and bring some kind of better result to them than what they were expecting.
There's a lot of things that you can do to make things better. Because, the panicking and the excuses don't help them, and you've spent a lot of time developing a relationship with this client. The last thing that you want to do is make them feel like you don't have their back. So, lose money for a month. Your reputation is worth more than a check somebody is going to write you for June, so do whatever you can to fix that relationship and make it better than what it would have been had things gone the right way. Do whatever you have to make it right. Thanks to, I don't even know who to thank for last week, there was so ... Bob Jarosinski, thank you very much because he said something nice about my mom. If you have questions you want me to answer during one of these videos, please email me at [email protected].
Okay. What I want to talk about today is making things easier. I have never met a marketing chief who has too much time on their hands because everything from the executive suite that they don't want to do comes to you, everything from sales that they don't want to do comes to you, everything from operations they don't want to do comes to you. You wind up juggling 12 balls at the same time, and oh, by the way? All of them are on fire. It's not a great place to be. One of the best gifts that you can give somebody like that is to reach out and take one of the balls out of the air and say, "You've got the other 11 but I've got this one. It's not a problem anymore." And it's gone. Give them that gift and you will be of real service to them.
I'll give you an example. Client story videos, or customer testimonial videos, or case study videos, it's a useful tool, people being able to come on your website and see what you've done for somebody else and what they liked about you is an important thing to have. But nobody has them. Why? Because they're hard. They're expensive, they're awkward, they're time consuming, and sometimes the person that you get on camera just isn't all that great on camera. Not everybody's meant to be a movie star. We Henry Ford-ed did it. We turned it into a system that was easy, and turnkey, and something replicable that you could do every single month. The marketing chief spends maybe an hour each month looking into it and oh, by the way? They've got another one coming next month. It's one of our most popular products because we made it easy for them.
My challenge to you is find something in your life right now that is difficult, and take a hard look at it and see what you can do to make it easier. Knock some of the edges off. There's some obstacles in there that don't need to be there. Figure out what they are and get rid of them. Because if you can start making things easy for yourself, then you can do it for somebody else.
Thanks to Julia Fikse who said some very nice things yesterday, and if you have any questions or things that you want me to talk about in the video, let me know at [email protected]
Okay. So I would like to talk about logos today. I worked for a company once that brought me in and said, "We'd like to change our logo." So we went through that process and went through the design phases, came up with a couple of different options for them. They selected the one that they really liked, and we attached it to all of their collateral. And two years later a new boss came in, and he said, "But I'd like to change the logo." So we went through the whole process again and changed the logo and it was slightly different than the first one. And then the new boss came in two new years later and he said ... Well, you can guess what he said.
Your logo is not your brand. Your logo is not the important thing. When you think of logos, you think of Nike, right? Part of the Nike logo is the fact that it's been in place since 1971 but that's not the power of it. The power of Nike is in the brand. It doesn't matter if Nike makes shoes or hats or clothes or a car or a train. You would have a feeling for what it would look like. You would have a feeling for how it would feel. Because Nike's brand has been in place since 1983, 1988. It's been around for a long time, and they haven't changed it. They've augmented it, but they haven't changed from the fundamental principles of who they are.
So next time you're considering changing your logo, don't. Focus on your brand and make it better.
Thanks very much to Erin Igney for a fantastic conversation yesterday. And if you want me to address something in one of the videos, please let me know at [email protected].