Brandon Lucero is one of the leading experts in Youtube and Video Marketing Strategies for small and medium businesses.
He has been a part of numerous web-based companies over the last 8 years.
He started early by building, growing and selling websites while attending UC Irvine. Some of those sites were even reaching 20,000 unique visitors in a day.
He is the founder of http://SoldWithVideo.com and he has been helping small businesses increase their local advertising through video marketing, while keeping it extremely affordable.
Some Topics We Discussed Include:
To learn more about Brandon and find out how video marketing can increase your local advertising, visit http://SoldWithVideo.com.
Brandon Lucero is one of the leading experts in YouTube and video marketing strategies for small and medium-sized businesses. He has been a part of numerous web-based companies over the last eight years. He started early by building, growing, and selling websites while attending UC Irvine, with some sites reaching 20,000 unique visitors in a day.
He is the Founder of http://SoldWithVideo.com and he has been helping small businesses increase their local advertising through video marketing while keeping it extremely affordable. This episode is deep and detailed, and you'll discover some amazing, tactical strategies for both YouTube and Facebook campaigns that you can implement TODAY.
I am excited to bring you a very cool topic. It’s one that I have been getting into more and more myself. I’m not a particular expert in this area. However, each and every one of you can probably use the information we are going to share.
Before I do that, I want to let you know about some cool stuff that I’ve been reading. I like to share some of my book recommendations and I love to get book recommendations.
I got Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans. It’s a huge book, I highly recommend it. It’s a lot of fun. If you’re a fan of Tim and his podcast like I am, you can go check that out.
I’m also listening to a great book by a friend of mine named Mark Manson. It is a New York Times bestselling book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I suggest you go check those out.
More importantly, I suggest that if you have any book recommendations, anything that’s inspired or entertained you, especially if it has to do with business or mindest or entrepreneurs, send that to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. I’m a voracious reader, you should be as well.
That being said, I have got an episode about video marketing and a specific type of video marketing. I’m going to give you the background on this.
A very good friend of mine that I’ve known for years named Jim Thornton, who is an expert on neuro persuasion and sales talked about a guy that he had met who is an amazing marketer with YouTube and getting organic views and optimizing them.
He’s the best in the business for generating millions of views on YouTube videos for individuals or business owners. His name is Brandon Lucero.
Jim and I were talking on Facebook. He’s like, “Brandon has gotten really creative. He’s found a way to turn Facebook into warm traffic by using video ads to groups and getting cheap cost-per-click. He’s launching products and building tribes quickly.”
All of this sounded like music to my ears. I said, “Let’s set it up.” Brandon and I connected years ago, briefly when Jim made the intro. We’re going to connect a little bit further here.
I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to pull out the sizzling hot advice, ideas, tactics and strategies that Brandon’s using so that you can walk away from this thinking, “I should have paid for this but Brad gave it to me for free. He is so cool.” Brandon Lucero, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here and give out all this knowledge
I would love to hear all about your back story, how you grew up, what color the house that you were in when you were a child, but I’m not going to ask all that. Instead, I do want to start with some of your background in video marketing.
You’re a master of YouTube and now you’re mastering Facebook video. Let’s back up a little bit and talk about some of the YouTube stuff that you’ve been doing over the years and some of the results.
I started with YouTube years ago. I worked for a video production company. That was right when YouTube videos started coming out in the Google search results.
I just started applying some of this SEO knowledge for websites that I had videos and they started ranking. I’m like, “This could be a business,” so I ran with it. Over the years, what we’ve done is been able to build out YouTube channels, grow YouTube channels to millions of views.
I’m not talking about PewDiePie or the million subscriber type channels. I’m talking about channels that are designed for business and brands and personal brands that deliver leads and traffic. It’s all organic.
We find these topics and keywords that people are looking for, which means that they have problems. We have solutions to problems.
What we do is we just create videos that give them what to do, here are some steps on it. We offer something at the end of the video, the lead man, the freebie, then get them on to a list.
The beautiful part of this is that when we create these videos on these topics and people watch them, we know what their problem is. It takes a lot of this guesswork out of what do we offer, what kind of language we use, what copy do we use. You already know.
They’re not searching keywords and trying to find solutions to their problems if it’s not a big issue in their life. That’s what we’ve been doing with YouTube.
Just to give you an idea of how effective this is, a lot of the videos we do will get between 20% to about 45%, the highest we’ve ever seen, click-through rates. It’s bigger than we’ve ever imagined.
If we get 100 views on a video and those 100 views stayed to the end and see the call to action, we can expect roughly 30% of them to click over to our opt-in page to go get whatever it is that we offered them.
This doesn’t stop. It’s always ongoing. Meaning that if we do a video on one topic, it’s always going to be found. It’s always going to be seen, getting traffic, getting views. It’s this thing that builds upon itself. That’s how I got my start with YouTube.
Let me dive down that rabbit hole a little bit. First of all, are there any YouTube channels or clients or people that you’re particularly proud of that you’ve worked on that people want to go see?
My favorite one is Ron White. Not the comedian, it’s Ron White the memory expert. If you type in Google things like mind palace or how to read faster, he’s on the first page with his YouTube video.
He’s definitely on the top on YouTube search as well. When we started with him, I can’t remember the numbers exactly so I’ll give you some rough estimates. I think he was doing around 400 views a day on his channel when we started working with him.
Now, he’s doing roughly 4,000 to 6,000 views a day on his YouTube channel. His subscribers were about four to five a day. Now, he’s up to 300 or 400 subscribers a day. His channel has really blown up.
I won’t share his numbers because this stuff is all private. His revenue from the YouTube channel has gone up significantly. We’re talking big numbers. If you want to check out his channel and see what we’ve done with that, you can go over to his channel Ron White Memory Training.
Here are the things that I know about YouTube marketing. I’m going to tell you my rapid-fire best practices and you tell me if I’m off base, if that doesn’t work and if there’s something better.
Number one, you want to create videos that are good, entertaining and engaging. Quality is important.
Number two, in optimizing your videos, the keywords, title, description, the name of the video file, and the tags are all important.
You go through all of that, put your link upfront in the call to action to where people can see it. After that, I don’t know all the best practices.
Do you go build backlinks? Do you do anything else in particular to supercharge these videos? Is there anything in particular that works tremendously well?
I’ve seen some people do the strategy in the past where they’re using, I don’t know if it’s a hack, a YouTube Live. They’ll use YouTube Live videos which rank super well. They’ll rank immediately in Google for certain keywords.
They’ll play a prerecorded video up there as opposed to something else. I don’t know if that still works, if that’s best practices. What am I missing here that gives this thing extra octane?
Years ago, backlinks and massive backlinks would rank videos well. A lot of that could go down that spammy route, that black hat route. Same thing with the live thing. I don’t know how long live will be ranking for and I don’t know how much longer it will be ranking better than everything else.
I never went down that path because I want to build something for the long-term. As soon as live doesn’t rank, my videos could lose a ranking. I never went down that path.
Here’s the biggest trend that I’ve seen with YouTube. This is why Ron’s channel took off so well is that you’re right with quality. More so, it’s about engagement on the video.
I always put in attention re-setters every five to ten seconds. This could be a text on the screen or maybe I moved around on the screen or something like that.
If you watch Ron’s videos, he’s not just sitting there for more than ten to fifteen seconds talking straight to the camera. Something is happening every ten to fifteen seconds to reset people’s attention span.
We’re also very concise with the content. It’s like, “Here’s what you’re going to learn.” We do a little logo intro. It’s three to five minutes of just bam, then there’s a step. Then we get out with our call to action, which is recap-problem-solution.
We’re like, “Here’s what you learned in this video, step 1, 2, 3. The problem is, even with these steps you’re still going to face this problem. Here’s what we have for you. We have a free checklist or a free guide that’s going to walk you through this in more detail so you don’t have to face that problem.”
When we do that recap-problem-solution, the call to action gives more value that’s directly related to the same topic of the video. That’s when we’re getting those huge click-through rates.
What happens is when it comes to ranking, it’s less about the backlinking and stuff like that. It’s more about how people are engaging with the video.
If I have a hundred people land on that video and they watch 75% of the way through, Google is going to say, “This is a good search result or video for this topic. Let’s give it more exposure.”
They’ll rank it higher, put it in the related videos field, and shoot it everywhere because they want the best content coming up.
What happens is if you type in things like, “How to rank videos,” you’ll see my video at the top of Google. One of the reasons why is because over the years people were searching how to rank videos, they landed on my video.
They watched it longer than anyone else’s video. They spent more time with it, engaged with it better. Now, they’re rewarding me with rankings that don’t go away. I have years of this great user experience on the video with people interacting, watching it.
What will happen is you’ll start uploading content. Most people give up after a month because they’re like, “This doesn’t work. It’s not ranking.” Give it a few months.
If you're starting a brand new channel, do not go after the big keywords but the ones that are low competition. Click To TweetWhat you’ll notice is it will be slow for three to four months. Then you’re going to have this huge spike in views because now you have enough data on your videos for Google and YouTube to look at and go, “This is good content. Let’s give it higher rankings.”
The best thing you can do, if you have an email list or a social media following or you want to run Facebook Ads through YouTube video, is to get as much exposure from warm traffic sources as you can within the first 24 hours of the video being live.
Those are going to be your best viewers. Those are going to be the people that are going to interact, that are going to leave comments. They’re going to watch it all the way through.
If you put up a brand new video and you have an email list of 20,000 people, they’ll go watch your video. When they watch it all the way through, YouTube’s going to go, “This is a good video. Let’s start ranking it. Let’s start giving it exposure.”
The best thing you can do is start getting engagement from warm traffic on your video as soon as you upload it.
Quality is so important because quality videos create more watch time and create more engagement on the video. That’s telling Google and YouTube that this is a better video.
It’s not necessarily all these little behind the scenes, “I’m buying backlinks and I’m doing all that other stuff that used to work a long time ago.” It has more to do with some of the quality of the video and the optimization that way.
When I say quality, I’m not talking about having a $5,000 camera. You can do a lot of it with your phone. I think one of the things that people get stuck with is, “I’ve got to get the right camera.” We filmed a lot of videos with phones and a mobile mic and done very well with it.
What about the length of videos on YouTube? Is it still roughly two minutes or so?
No, I’d say a little bit longer. If you’re doing a how-to video or a value-adding video, three to six minutes is generally the area you want to stick in between. I always say, “However long it takes is however long it takes.”
I have a video that teaches people how to set up a website. It took me fifteen minutes to walk through the process of setting up a WordPress website and it did well. In that case, a longer video is okay.
If you’re going over six minutes, you need to ask yourself, “Is everything in this video need to be in this video? Am I going into too much detail?” Try to stick more on to what you need to do.
If you’re going underneath three minutes, you need to ask yourself, “Am I adding in everything that I should be adding in?” because it might be a little too short.
Do you do various backlinking strategies, etc. after the video’s up? What happens off YouTube? Is there anything special that still works?
We used to spend a lot of time with backlinking for the bigger videos like the big search terms. I don’t do that anymore. If anything, we’ll just link from my own website. We’ll put it in a blog post and we’ll link over to the video that way.
The engagement thing, in my opinion and my experience, is the most powerful thing that you can do right now. For example, with Ron’s videos, he’s ranking on page one for things like mind palace, how to read faster and how to study better. There are zero backlinks to those videos.
Those are big terms and are hard to rank for. The reason why he’s there is because of the video engagement. He has a decent-sized following that he can just send to the video right after they’re uploaded.
They give good exposure and engagement. His videos, over time, start to rank because the engagement on the video is huge.
I had a private client come in. I offer power days for some clients where they spend a full day. We were together for twelve hours diving deep into her business. She’s a great health and fitness and nutrition coach.
She’s got YouTube videos and she’s got some traction. She’s not huge yet, but she’s working with me so she will be. However, this is a big strategy for her.
What she needs to be doing is putting these videos up, watching some of the tactics that you’re doing with Ron’s videos, etc. Should she start off with a keyword research to find out what people in her market are looking for? How do you plan out your content strategy for the YouTube side?
We do the keyword research first. We’ll go to Google Keyword Planner tool. I look at what topics and keywords are being searched the most. That’s where we will start to figure out what content to go after first.
If you’re starting a brand new channel, do not go after the big keywords. Go after the ones that are getting 200 to 300 searches a month because it’s low competition and it will still give you traction.
As you start to build channel authority, people are watching your videos, you’re starting to get subscribers. Maybe you’re starting to build an email list now and you have some traction behind you, then go after the bigger keywords.
Because you have the email list, you have the social following and the subscribers, YouTube is viewing your channel as an authority, which is going to give you more ranking power.
Advanced Video Marketing Strategies: Wait until your channel is an established authority before you start going after the bigger keywords.
For example, Wikipedia published an article about a new electric car. I start a website and publish the same article. They’re going to rank Wikipedia right off the bat because they’re an established authority.
Wait until your channel’s an established authority before you start going after the bigger keywords. Going after the smaller ones first will give you faster traction and build up more momentum behind your channel.
I’m not even signed into my account, but you never know if Google or YouTube shows you your personal results better. I’ve got a video where I’m consulting clients.
It looks like I’m ranked number one, at least in YouTube when I search for that. I don’t know if it looks like that on yours.
I put it up months ago. I’ve got 1,800 views. It’s not a ton, but it’s getting some great traction on its own. I did nothing to it but put it up there. I already got my five clients from this video.
What should I do to get even more firepower from this? I’m not running any YouTube ads to it or anything like that. Is there anything to do like send warm traffic to it to get more engagement and viewership?
If it’s already ranked at the top, there’s not too much more you can do other than send more. That’s the only problem with search. Once you get to the number one spot, you’re maxing it out.
The only way to make it scalable is just to do more videos. It’s not like you can throw more advertising or more money at it. If you did want to do that, you could do YouTube ads and things like that.
If I was just going to stick the organic route, I would probably look at other keywords that are similar to that one and fine tune the video to make it a little bit more effective. If you didn’t offer a lead magnet or something at the end of it, I would go ahead and do that.
I would focus more on putting more content out around that same topic. You can’t go anywhere. You’re at the top of the topic, you’re already ranked number one.
If I have other videos or if I’m linking inside YouTube to other videos inside the description, does that help interlink?
That will definitely help. You’ll want to link out to other videos. You can also put annotations in the videos at the end that link out to your other videos. Something else you could do too is to look through the video.
If you didn’t do all of the steps inside, you can always do another video on that same topic. You can take the one and two spots and push some of those other people down and get up there with a more effective video.
I do that a lot with terms like how to rank videos and video SEO. For example, if you type in how to rank videos, I have the number one and three spots. The number one result will give you most of the clicks but two and three also get a lot.
If I want to take all of it, I could do multiple videos on the same topic and take up more spots in Google and in YouTube.
Is there anything else you’re leaving out besides the quality of the videos, trying to get as much warm traffic to those videos, trying to get people watching them that will rank well?
Is there anything in particular that makes those YouTube videos rank well in Google results, not just YouTube, besides competitions of fact or the keywords and things like that?
Social really helps out too. Getting more traffic from social and getting it shared on social. I’ll give you two ways of doing this. Number one is a tip I got from a girl that I partnered up with. Her name’s Sunny Lenarduzzi. She knows how to grow YouTube video on all platforms well.
One of the tactics she was doing that we started implementing was taking a little teaser off the YouTube video, like a 60-second clip. She would put it on Instagram and on Facebook and at the end of it would say, “Watch the full version on YouTube.”
She has a big Facebook and Instagram following so she would put it there. She would get all of these social traffics going over to the video as well. It’s all warm traffic.
She would use video because it plays well in the Facebook algorithm where it gets seen all the time. People want to watch the full version and then they go over to YouTube. She’s getting Facebook and Instagram traffic that way.
I started taking it one step further and I would run that post as an ad. I would look at this and go, “Who else would benefit from my YouTube video?”
I will run that Facebook teaser as a Facebook video ad because it’s dirt cheap. You can get views for a penny or less sometimes on that video. You get all that traffic going over to your YouTube video as well.
My high-ticket how to get consulting clients video is a seventeen-minute video. Should I take clips out of there and run some Facebook ads to the YouTube video?
A five-minute video could give me four to five 60-second clips that I can use. We always pick a good point. If I make a good point or a good value-adding topic in 30 seconds inside that video, I’ll turn it into its own video and tell them to watch the full version up on YouTube.
YouTube is always about search. Facebook is more about pushing content. Click To TweetIf you have a seventeen-minute video, you could create a ton of these 30-60 things and run them as video view campaign on Facebook.
Have the link to the YouTube channel in your post, in your ad. You’ll be getting a lot of warm traffic over to your YouTube video which will start to give you better engagement and better rankings. That’s tip number one.
Tip number two is if you have a call to action at the end of the video and you give out a freebie, what we do is we tell them, “We have a training video opt-in.” Once they opt-in, they’re brought to a thank you page.
On that thank you page, I’ll tell them, “We just sent it over to your email. Go check your email. I have one more bonus for you. I have a cheat sheet to go along with that training video. You can get it absolutely free, just share the original YouTube video.”
What will happen is I give them a second freebie that goes along with the first one they just opted-in for. In order to unlock it, they have to share that original YouTube video that they watched on social media, Twitter.
Do you use a tool to do that?
It’s like viral lock or viral locker or social locker, something like that. What will happen is they share the YouTube video on social media which will give me more traffic.
Those are indicators to YouTube and Google that it’s a good video. No one’s going to share a crappy video on their social media. Some of our videos have thousands of social shares just from that one strategy.
I want to migrate over to Facebook videos. Tell me about this. This is one of the hottest things now. Facebook’s got YouTube in their sites in a big way and doing a lot of stuff like that.
Tell me about the stuff that’s working well with Facebook video. Get into the parts about launching, creating the tribe, using video ads and groups. I think that’s where people are going to be blown away.
YouTube is always about search, which means that the videos are always going to be up there and always being found every day. Facebook is more about pushing as much content as you can and using it as paid advertising to give it a little bit of a boost.
It turns cold traffic into warm traffic. With Facebook, it’s all about creating the same types of video, reusing my YouTube content.
Instead of posting it and walking away because it’s going to disappear into the newsfeed, we run everything as paid traffic. We use it as video views.
We do one of two things. If I put out a YouTube video, we do the teaser thing and we push all those views to YouTube.
Option number two is if I take a piece of my YouTube video that can stand on its own, a solid 60 seconds of a valuable tip. We will also end that video, leading people into my Facebook group. We’ll put people into Facebook groups with that content.
The other reason why we push it a lot to cold traffic is because we can remarket to people. Let’s say I wanted to do a launch around a video product that talks about YouTube marketing.
I can push content that gives out tips about YouTube marketing on YouTube or on Facebook. I can just pay for all those advertising, push it and build up this warm audience.
I can say, “If someone watched all three of these videos 95% of the way through, only then can they see my ad to this webinar about YouTube marketing.” It becomes a lot more effective. You have to put a little bit of money upfront, but not a lot. It’s very inexpensive.
It gives you this highly qualified audience that you can remarket to. What we focus on, especially going into a product launch, is taking people from this unaware state to a fully aware state that they need our product or they need to be on YouTube.
If I’m going to promote a YouTube product, I’m not going to give them tips for YouTube. I’m going to talk about why they need to be on it very quickly. I’ll say, “Here’s why you need to be on YouTube and I’m going to give you this one tip to show you how to do it.”
What we’re doing is we’re making them fully aware of why they need to be on YouTube, what they’re losing by not being on YouTube, blanketing in some case studies and stats.
We do a lot of pre-launched content before we ever launch a product, before anyone ever sees an ad from us. We’re making sure that they’re seeing our video content. It’s an opportunity you don’t see very often.
Facebook is trying to push video content as much as they can. How hard they’re pushing content versus how little people are using it is huge, which makes it very inexpensive. You don’t see opportunities like this very often in our space.
Here’s one of the things that Jim said, “Cheap ads, video ads, Facebook groups, give content to the group, build trust, promo a webinar to warm up the group.”
You get higher show-up rate conversions, etc. You’re able to launch a tribe quickly. I have created some small Facebook groups in the past. I see the value in this, but I don’t want to just start a little group and grow a few dozen people at a time.
Advanced Video Marketing Strategies: The longer your Facebook live is, the more traction you’ll get.
If you’re starting from scratch, what’s the best way to do this if you’re breaking it down into a bit more detail? Let’s say it’s in health and fitness, that’s a pretty broad topic.
What I would do is start putting out some content on whatever the fitness topic is, 60-second workouts and stuff like that. The call to action at the end of those videos would either be one of two things.
The standard is to get on to the email list. Once they get on to the email list, then I would push them into the Facebook group.
Once they opt-in, I would do a thank you page that says, “We also have another cheat sheet inside this Facebook group, community, and private workouts that you guys can go and get.” Then push them into the group.
I would go straight into the group and tell them, “We have a community here. we have some downloads inside the group that you can go get. Go into the group now.”
You can make that at the end of the video and in a link of the description. You can put, “Check out the group.”
You can put the link in the post as well. You have your video and above it, you have your text around the post and your copyright. Put the link in there. I would do that.
We also love the inspirational and thought reversal style videos which Gary Vaynerchuk has done well. We take a common thought that’s in the industry, give people a new way to look at it, and back it up.
I love that term thought reversal. I’m always looking for those counterpoints, how can you disrupt general knowledge. “The customer is not always right,” is a good example.
That’s what Gary Vaynerchuk says, “College is a scam.” You’re like, “What?” He will give his thought and back it up as to why he thinks that. People go, “I’m going to share this.” They start sharing it.
Thought reversal gets a lot of viral activity around it. I can run you through a process that we did where we started from scratch. We didn’t have a product. We didn’t even have a name for a product.
I partnered up with this girl, Sunny Lenarduzzi. I said, “You have the skill of growing inorganic following quickly. Let’s partner up and do something.” We created this product and started putting it together. It’s 80 videos long.
What’s it about in general?
Social video, how to use social media platforms and video to grow a big, organic following. We practiced that up until the product. I didn’t want to wait until the product is done to sell it or start marketing it.
I said, “Why don’t we, while we’re creating it, focus some time on creating some pre-launch content?” We created three videos. What I wanted to do with each video was to bring people to a new awareness.
Video number one was the introductory video to her. We ran it to her audience first so that we could get traffic, get some views on it, and try to get it to spread organically.
After her warm traffic saw it, we ran it to cold traffic. The idea here was asking myself, “What state of mind do people need to be in when they buy the product?” so we can get them in that state of mind before we make the offer to them.
We said, “They need to recognize social video.” They need to recognize that a video takes effort. You have to want to do a video. You have to understand the value in it.
I said, “Why don’t we make sure that people know that it’s going to take work and then that they have to take action? We’ll focus on that. That way when they get into our product, we don’t have to convince them that they need to do this. They’re already in that state of mind.”
Video number one was a thought reversal video that talks about how it takes work to build a business. You can build a business you’re passionate around.
There are people right now putting out videos on YouTube getting millions of views and making six and seven figures. It’s a real thing. That was the topic video. It’s about a minute and a half.
That was a Facebook video ad?
It was a Facebook video. It was a piece of content. Technically, we ran it as an ad. It wasn’t like the standard ad where it’s like, “Opt-in for this webinar. We’re going to teach you X, Y and Z.”
We had Jim help us with this amazing script. Sunny flew out. We filmed it, put the video together and ran it as an ad. It had about 50,000 views on it. We paid for on an average of $0.01 per view. It was not very expensive. I think it was $300 or something in that range.
Since it was a thought reversal video and it was scripted and done the right way, we had over a hundred shares, hundreds of comments and 500 or 600 reactions on the video. That gave us 20,000 extra organic views.
It is possible to build a business using video. Click To TweetEven though we paid for 30,000, we gained an extra 20,000 through all the activity on the video. If you average it out, it came out to about $0.05, $0.06, $0.005 per view when you factor in all the organic reach that we got.
We started this four to six weeks before we even ran any ads to people to get them onto the webinar. We let that run for about two to three weeks, then we’re like, “Let’s do video number two. “
Now that people realize that it is possible to build a business using video and make six and seven figures online and they understand that it takes work, let’s make them realize that they have to do it now. We want them to take action and buy the product now.
Video number two was all about time. We focused in on, “You have to take action now. We all have dreams. If you don’t take action now, then your dreams stay dreams and they don’t become a reality.” It’s another thought reversal, inspirational video.
We went from video number one where it’s getting people to realize that everything you want is possible to video number two, getting them to realize that you have to take action on it and you have to do it now.
Were you putting call to action at the end of that video?
Each video got people into the Facebook group.
You’re still not selling anything because you said this was four to six weeks prior. You’re just getting them enlisted in the mission of, “I need to do this.”
Sunny is inside that Facebook group. She is adding value, engaging, cultivating and building rapport. She’s nurturing the people in the group.
Video number two came out. I don’t remember the actual numbers, but I think it was 20,000 to 30,000 views on that video. One of the things we did is that if you watched video number one, we remarketed you and made sure that you watched video number two.
We were continuing to run video number one as an ad. We also ran video number two as an ad. We tried to structure it so that people would go video one, video two. We wanted to push both videos as hard as we could.
Then it was launch day, we were going to start the ads. Video number one was, “What is possible?” Video number two was, “It’s time to do it.” Video number three was, “Here’s how I did it.” We gave a little bit of Sunny’s story, what she stands for, where her integrity lies and how she was able to do it.
It was an inspirational, motivational video. At the end of that video, we said, “Go opt-in for the webinar where we’re going to show you the process that you need to do to make this all possible.”
How long were each of these videos approximately?
A minute to two minutes, somewhere in that range.
It’s not like they were mini webinars. I started to think of product launch formula like three 20-minute or 30-minute videos which is long. I know that stuff works, but it also quenches the thirst of a lot of people. I know it can build up a lot of excitement about something.
Here’s the way to look at it too. A three-part video series with a product launch formula works but what we’re doing is the lead up to it. They’re quick little videos.
The first two ran people into the group. The third one was the grand finale, get on to the webinar. Once we did that, then we did the traditional ads to webinars. We did the image ads and video ads. We split tested them.
We did the standard, “Hi, I’m Sunny and I was able to do X, Y and Z.” You could do the same thing. I’m going to teach you the process register for the webinar.”
The first thing we did is target all the warm traffic. If you watch any of those three videos, then we re-hit you with an ad. We did cold traffic too, but we spent a lot of time building up warm traffic, getting people into a group before we launch the product.
We ran the standard ads. When people register for the webinar, they’re brought to a thank you page. On that thank you page, we gave out a cheat sheet for the webinar that they had to get inside the Facebook group.
All said and done, our group by the end of the launch was roughly 3,000 people inside that Facebook group. We only had 2,500 people register for the webinar and go into the launch. Not a lot of opt-in. We were able to generate over $100,000 in revenue.
To me, it was a very successful launch because it was brand new. We did all these within three months. We launched it with it being partially finished. We did it as a beta launch and got people in there.
Now, we have all these students going through it. We could turn them into testimonials and use as case studies and social proof for our next launch that we’re getting ready.
This is a product the two of you created together?
Advanced Video Marketing Strategies: The longer your Facebook live is, the more traction you’ll get.
It’s Sunny’s product. 98% of the training inside the course is hers. I hop in for a few videos to talk about YouTube. I gave a bonus inside the course about outsourcing your video editing. I’m more behind the scenes doing marketing and sales funnels.
What’s the name of the group in case some of our audience want to get in?
It’s called Be Your Own Boss. The product is called Boss Video Branding.
This isn’t rocket science, but it’s well thought out. Three videos, bring awareness where awareness does not exist. You like to lead with thought reversal, something counterintuitive that the rest of the market believes is true but that you can say is different.
I’m working on one of those. This is a perfect way to use this. It can be a short video, about 60 seconds. You run a video view campaign to the warmest audience you have. You can also open it up to those who would be particularly interested in that.
The call to action can easily be, “I’ve got a great Facebook group over here if you want to learn more about it.”
I would put something inside the group like a download or a cheat sheet.
Video two can talk about urgency. This can be anything you want depending on what your business is. You’re typically running video two to the people who watched video one.
You can do the exact same thing, “If you’re not in the group, come over here.” You can probably even bonus it up. “We added another bonus inside the group. If you’re not a member, come on over here. Go to the file section, introduce yourself.”
By now, they’re starting to know who you are. Video three goes to everybody. Is it to who watched video two or is it to everybody who watched videos one and two?
We start with everyone that watched video two and one. If they watched video one, then we’ll go to video two and remarket them. After we remarket them, we also will run them the cold traffic to get more exposure on it. We try to make it a flow as much as we can.
On video three, you can still bring them in the group or you can just go straight for, “We’ve got a great webinar here. You can opt-in, go do this.” You can continue to market inside the group and let people know about your webinar.
You can also continue to market general sign up for this webinar ads to everybody who’s watched the various videos.
That’s the way we did it on this first one. We’re going into another launch for a different product to raise awareness. We’re talking about common mistakes that people make and how to fix them.
I’m targeting videographers and video production people. I’m talking about the biggest mistake you can make in your video production business and making people aware of something they’re unaware of before. We’ll just re-launch them.
Those won’t go in sequence. It’s just me pushing all these video content on common mistakes people make to get them ready for the ads they’re going to see next week. You could do live streams as well but that was the process we did with the product with Sunny.
Let’s talk about Facebook Live. Have you been using that quite a bit?
Yes.
Are you using those in conjunction with a strategy at all? For instance, do a Facebook Live where you’re talking about this stuff. You boost that post or do a video view campaign based upon that Facebook Live video that already had gotten a lot of traction.
That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re doing Facebook Live and we’re using OBS, Open Broadcaster Software, to do it. We have an open frame with a countdown timer. It will go live and then we’ll go do our content. It ends and then we’ll run those as ads as a video view campaign.
We’ll run those live streams as ads. We incorporate that with some pre-done video content like what we did with Sunny. We incorporated live streams, which is all designed to add value and make people aware of these problems that they could be facing if they don’t take action.
OBS is a free open source software that allows you to go live then broadcast what you’re seeing on your website. You can put video feeds and other stuff.
You mentioned something I’ve seen other people do which is having a timer upfront. Have you found that that’s effective?
I have a frame up that lists the topic of what I’m going to be talking about. Underneath, it says, “Starting in X, Y and Z.” Facebook will notify some people that you’re going live. It gets people to log in.
What it also does is gives you time to share it. I’ll go live and I’ll have a two-minute timer which gives me a two-minute period to be able to share it inside my groups and on my social media profiles. That’s one of the reasons why I do it, so that I can share it in my groups.
I go live for my page, then I push it into all the groups that I have. I found that to be effective. It prepares people for what the topic of the video is going to be.
I’ve heard that longer Facebook Live videos are getting more traction than shorter ones. Have you seen that or not?
I haven’t tested it to know, but each one of ours is usually fifteen minutes. Some of them are even up to an hour. I’ll talk about the strategy of the hour-long ones, but in general they’re probably 15 to 30 minutes long if we’re trying to just give people value.
One of the strategies we did inside the Facebook group was the last five days of the cart being open for Sunny’s product. I’ve done this on numerous products and it works well. In the last four to five days, we’ll do a live stream inside the group for additional content.
Every five to ten minutes inside that live stream, we will re-pitch the offer and we will give some kind of scarcity, “Closing down, bonus going away today.” We’re adding value, but what it’s allowing us to do is re-pitch the offer to them five to ten times.
You never do an infomercial and they only pitch at the end. They pitch in every quarter-hour.
With the product with Sunny, I didn’t get the data yet to have the final numbers, but I’m assuming somewhere between 60% to 70% of the people that bought were inside that Facebook group. On the last launch I did, 80% of the people that bought were inside the Facebook group.
When we did a launch into the product Local Video Academy, 80% of the people that bought the product were inside the Facebook group. We’re seeing huge numbers of people buying products and being inside that Facebook group.
Are you seeing that lower produced videos, the more raw and authentic, are working better than the highly produced ones? I know it depends upon how good you are at doing both of these.
I would say yes, but there’s a fine line. Sometimes these highly produced shows that are TV quality don’t do very well because they’re not that authentic and there’s no personality attached to it.
If you’re walking down the street, holding a camera and you’re just bouncing around all over the place, it’s not going to work either.
That’s one of the reasons why vlogging is taking off so well, especially for business. It gives that behind the scenes the authentic, realness to it. I think if you go that route, it can be very effective.
My answer is yes but be very careful not to go too overboard on the unprofessional side because it can do some damage.
I bought the Mevo camera and I’ve been playing around with it. I haven’t done any live streams with it recently. For all you folks out there in podcast land, check out GetMevo.com. It’s a cool camera for $300 or $400. It allows you to live stream. It does automatic switching and uses AI.
Are there any tactics or strategies that you have not yet revealed that would pain you, it would hurt in your gut, it would make you wince to reveal because it’s so good and you usually charge for it?
People may be doing this already, I don’t know. I came up with this concept where we’re going to play around with all of this content before we launch a product all on various topics.
What’s the market? Is this business-related?
The product is Local Video Academy, which teaches people how to start a local video marketing business, which is how I got started. We’re going after videographers, video producers, social media managers and local marketers.
First of all, what I did is polled my Facebook group that I had on what their biggest worries and concerns are. I created three separate USPs off of those three main points. Then I put content out on all three of those USPs. Afterward, what I’m going to do is run ads.
If people viewed all the free content about video or USP number one, they’re going to get remarketed with an ad talking only about USP number one. I’d go through all three of them.
If people land on the opt-in page and don’t opt-in, they’re going to start getting re-hit with the next USP. If they land on the opt-in page of that one and don’t opt-in, they’re going to get hit with the next USP.
I’m hoping that by coming up with three different USPs, I will definitely hit a pain point of someone that will get them to re-opt-in to the list. Once they’re in, they’re going to get tagged with what they opted-in for. All my sequences can be focused around that USP.
That’s the benefit of listening to a podcast. You can rewind them as opposed to a radio where it’s live. As a business owner, do you do some of this for people? Do you have services you offer? If somebody out there is like, “Brandon’s smart. I have money that belongs to him.” What is the trade there?
We pretty much do everything that we just talked about. I did do some partnership where we developed products for people, but that’s a very rare case. Most people what we’ll do is develop the video strategy. YouTube strategy, Facebook strategy, and we’ll implement it.
We’re finding the topics, creating the videos, moving them into 60 second chunks, coming up with a scripting and the formatting your pre-launch videos, and running your Facebook video ads campaigns. We do all of that.
Advanced Video Marketing Strategies: One of the beautiful parts about a podcast is you get to learn what you need to do.
If people want to get a hold of you, hire you and talk more about to see if they are a fit for you, what’s the best way to contact you?
The best way would be to go to our website. It’s SoldWithVideo.com. You can get some more information there. There are forms you can fill out to see if you’d be someone that we would take on.
I’m thinking about how to use this as a strategy. I’ve got a couple of clients who are big. They’re in the equity crowdfunding space. We’re running campaigns. Are you familiar with equity crowdfunding at all?
Not really, no.
Do you know what KickStarter and Indiegogo are?
Yes.
In general, it’s a type of crowdfunding where people get rewards. In essence, a kickstarter is you’re buying it pre-sell. You’re preselling your product. Give money, you get stuff. You don’t get equity in the company.
Up until a few years ago, it was illegal. Now, you can raise equity, raise up to $40 million from the crowd, doing a Facebook ad to a landing page which explains what the offer is.
“We are a company doing X. We want to raise $5 million. Here’s our share price and here’s our story. You can invest.” To non-accredited investors, which I’m not going to go into an explanation. People who know what that means knows what that means.
This is a relatively brand new industry. I’ve got a couple of clients who I’m running the marketing campaigns for them to do this.
The big problem that a lot of folks have faced when they’re doing an equity crowdfunding campaign is that first, you have to explain why your company is so great and why people should invest in it.
The other thing they have to do is educate people on the fact that this is something they can do. Because to investors, they’re not out there looking for this. There’s no awareness. There’s a big educational aspect to this that people are missing out on.
I’ve seen what some of the competition is doing. There’s one that has to do with cars, an electric car. “Don’t go buy an electric car, invest in a company that makes them.” They just go over and they try to go straight for, “Get the investment.”
Because it requires so much more education, trust and awareness, using some of these videos to build out little micro-snippets and building it in a group and warming them up, becomes powerful.
Much more as opposed to going straight for the kill on something where you’re asking for an investment with no immediate future guaranteed returns.
Even if you did go right for the kill in the beginning and they don’t take action on it, you can re-hit them with another objection killer video. There are just so many possibilities and ways to use it, which is why I love it so much.
Is there any nut you’re trying to crack in your business? By nut you’re trying to crack, is there a resource you’re trying to get, a person you’re trying to meet, a skill you’re trying to learn, money you’re trying to get a hold of? Anything that myself or my audience can potentially help you with?
As we grow, my business right tends to focus on either launching products or bringing on service clients. We want to scale out both sides of those. We’re looking to bring on more clients on the production side of it.
If you are looking for someone to help with the production and strategy and run all that stuff for you, then I’d love to talk.
You and I will talk offline about that and we’ll get into some more details. First of all, Brandon, I want to thank you for being here. There is a ton of actionable information.
Go to SoldWithVideo.com. Find Brandon on social media. If you have questions about your business strategy, I guarantee there’s a nut you’re trying to crack. We’re all trying to crack that nut.
Sometimes it can be the right relationship at the right time. Sometimes it’s a strategy, your campaign’s not working, you want to get into consulting. You don’t know what you don’t know. The answers are out there.
You can email me. I put my email out there for everybody to contact me if you wish at AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. Tell me what’s on your mind. Tell me what’s not working with your business.
If I can’t help you, I’ve got a ton of contacts who might be able to. You don’t know if you don’t ask. If you are sitting there struggling, I don’t feel sorry for you because you deserve to go broke.
I’m a big believer that you do not have to be an expert in everything as long as you know the people who are. One of the reasons I do this podcast is so that I can meet the people who are.
Oftentimes, I hire the people who I need this stuff done. I could spend a lot of time learning it. One of the beautiful parts of a podcast like this is you get to learn what you need to do. You don’t have to learn how to do it. Pull out your checkbook, hire the people who do.
If I could go back ten years in time and tell my younger entrepreneurial self what to do would be to stop trying to figure so much out on your own and hire a partner best people out there.
You want to meet them? I’ve got a Rolodex and I’ve got a lot of good ideas between these ears of mine. I’m happy to help you but you’ve got to reach out to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com.
If it makes sense, we’ll get on the phone and we’ll talk. If we decide to work together or not, I guarantee that it won’t waste your time.
I encourage you to help me out and pay me back by sharing this on social media. Tag me and the show and let me know that you did. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I’ve enjoyed doing it. I will see you on the next epi-sizzle.
Brandon Lucero is one of the leading experts in YouTube and video marketing strategies for small and medium-sized businesses. He has been a part of numerous web-based companies over the last eight years. He started early by building, growing, and selling websites while attending UC Irvine, with some sites reaching 20,000 unique visitors in a day.
He is the Founder of http://SoldWithVideo.com and he has been helping small businesses increase their local advertising through video marketing while keeping it extremely affordable. This episode is deep and detailed, and you'll discover some amazing, tactical strategies for both YouTube and Facebook campaigns that you can implement TODAY.