Video Marketing Jam Session

Curt Anderson 0:00
All right. Andy’s in the house. Stacy. Gary, Lisa, Lisa. Ben Baker.

Jose’s here Marsha is here. We got time we got John. Man, look at this crew. We’ve got cooking here today. So Ben Baker’s in the house. Happy New Year, brother. How you guys doing?

Curt Anderson 0:28
We are doing awesome. Marcia. Happy New Year time up in Syracuse. Happy New Year. You got Lisa in Indiana here or no she’s in Michigan. Actually. She’s over the border. We got Andy Jose’s coming in from Chicago. Gary in Rochester Stacy and Alaska. Stacey. Good morning. Happy New Year. There’s Gary. Molly. Happy New Year. John Coleman. We’ve got a Prentice joining us Nicole.

And

guys will couple people are rolling in here. Nicole unit are you doing like opening up a Marsha Could you do? Did you do the national anthem to open us up? Meet me in Fox like next summer. Next summer. Okay, what you want not today. All right. I should have given you a heads up Marsha. So Marsha does an amazing national anthem. So hopefully one of these days that’s my Marsha that’s on my bucket list. By the way. Hey, Whitney is in the house here. Hey, Whitney. Morning happy today. All right. We’ve you know what, we’ve got a hot and heavy program. So I’m going to be like a call. I’m going to try to multitask here. I’m going to try to try to drive the program, moderate the program. Let people in. And I’m going to share my screen. And all right, can you guys Oh, whoops. I can throw away. All right. How about Greg tell a joke what you wrote real quick. Well, you please.

Greg Mischio 2:01
Okay, guys, I gotta get dad joke. Let’s hear it. I definitely got a good dad joke. How many dads does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Curt Anderson 2:11
How many dads does it take to screw in a light bulb? Well, if it’s mean, Ben Baker, I’m not sure right?

Greg Mischio 2:17
The answer is none. Well, we’ll get to it later.

Curt Anderson 2:25
Hey, that was a good one. All right, guys. Hey, let’s let’s I want to be mindful of everybody’s time, we will dig right in. So Happy Tuesday. Happy New Year. For anybody that hasn’t we haven’t connected yet. But do me a favor if you guys could drop your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile and the chat box. If we were all in person, we’d be high fiving we’d be maybe shaking hands hugging all that fun stuff. This is a great networking opportunity. A lot of amazing wonderful people here on the call today. People that you want to connect with engage with. So guys, I’m gonna dig right in. And we’ve got Robin join us here today. Okay, hey, we got Julie Warner from Purdue University. The Purdue MEP is here today. So I guess we have all sorts of great, amazing, wonderful people. We’re going to dig in. We’re here to talk about video marketing man and I brought in just a team of rock stars experts. So let’s you know, you know, I’m a baseball fan. So our leadoff hitter is this handsome dude from the great state of Wisconsin, Greg Mushu. Happy Tuesday. How

Greg Mischio 3:26
are you doing? Good. Thank you, Curt. Thanks for inviting me into join this esteemed panel.

Curt Anderson 3:32
Absolutely. So I know you’re doing a ton with video. You’re partnering with our buddy Jeff Long and so we’re gonna dig deep there. I have man there’s a lot of tests. Testosterone on the stage, I had to bring in our dear friend Nicole Donnelly. Nicole, how are you my friend?

Nicole Donnelly 3:46
Amazing day so happy to be here. Thanks for coming everyone.

Curt Anderson 3:50
Some Thanks Nicole for taking time out of your busy schedule. And again if you’re just joining us strap your LinkedIn in the chat box my buddy Jeff lon coming from the great state of Ohio. Jeffrey, how are you doing?

Jeff Long 4:02
I’m doing good Curt. Thanks for having me on. I’m super excited to talk about this topic and and learn from others as well. Absolutely, we

Curt Anderson 4:09
got a ton to cover we’re gonna dig in but we’d love to make this interactive. Any questions stop us pause us our goal is that you know we’re all going to get a little bit smarter and a little bit more strategic with our video strategy. So again, just feel free to stop anytime. My name is Curt Anderson and just honored privileged to be with you guys and so again drop your LinkedIn in the chat box connect with each other love to hear what you have coming on. Jeff Long my friend you are a video marketing guru you’ve been doing so for like a couple months now right? Maybe two or three months.

Jeff Long 4:42
I something like that. 2003 or something like that. I have 20 years my

Curt Anderson 4:47
20 years man it goes by like that you just blink so now dude on your website, you have a little 80% seriously talk to us. Why does everybody on the call need to be just going all in on video.

Jeff Long 4:59
You Yeah, so a couple a couple reasons why video is so important. I mean, as manufacturers, you know, you’re either making the product selling the product, distributing the product, like it’s, it’s product focused, right? It’s easy to showcase that. People want to see that. So whatever your buyer looks like, whether it’s end user or distributor, it doesn’t really matter. You know, people need to see how it works. Even answer questions like setup or safety or tear down, wash down whatever that looks like. So yeah, I mean, I believe this stat is from SEO insights. And, you know, it just shows the importance of showcasing your product. Talking about it’s great, but showing it is fantastic meeting is recorded. All right.

Curt Anderson 5:46
Speaking of recording, I think

we might have to ask if everybody could go on put on mute, that would be awesome. So Jeff, I’ve got one more slide here for you. 73% of people are more likely to make a purchase after watching videos. And you also say give me 30 minutes of content, I’ll give you 30 minutes of strategy content. I’m gonna give you a word of months worth of marketing sales. Please take a little deep dive in that.

Jeff Long 6:18
Yeah, so I know, we’ll talk about this, you know, so Nicole, and Greg in different capacities, but you know, so this is my 20th year of being in business, I’ve owned my company for 20 years, which is crazy. And I’ve learned a lot about video over the years, right? We’ve done high end, super professional, I mean, amazing stuff. One of our videos, almost made it into times square over New Years. Several years ago, it was number one, we are the number two, the number one God and we were number two, so almost. Um, so I’ve learned a lot that that the high quality, high end, big budget videos are great, right to tell your story, talk about your people kind of brag about yourself, those are great. But also these more simple content focus pieces, I think, are not getting the attention they should. So a lot of manufacturers think, hey, we need to talk about ourselves, right? We need to tell our story, we need to, you know, talk about how long we’ve been in business, which is fine. There’s a time and a place. But does your end user, your buyer, do your distributor? Do they care about those things? Or do they care about the problems they’re trying to solve? Right? And so let’s create content that’s customer centric, that that focuses on the frequently asked questions, the problems and some of those things. And so maybe we’ll talk about this later, but I have a service called Video value bombs, where I help manufacturers create that monthly content, so becomes a learning center and a snowball of content that gets bigger every single month. ABS man dude, it’s like we’ve

Curt Anderson 7:55
we timed that perfectly. So here’s a little video value bomb right here. And so what’s great is like you’re bringing the customer into the facility, we’re gonna we have a bunch of examples that we’re going to cover, but you have a great program, we’re going to do a deep dive, we’re going to talk about different examples here about your video value bombs. Dude, what a great name for your program. So let’s keep rockin and rollin here. So Nicole, Mrs. Donnelly, how are you? So you have a fun stat 83% 83? What? What is this 83% from Gartner? Can you talk about this for a little bit?

Nicole Donnelly 8:29
Yeah, the more time goes on your buyers, your prospects are spending more and more of their time online researching your product before talking to a sales rep. And that’s only going to increase over time, even among, you know, millennials. And so it’s just so critical for businesses to make sure that you’re showing up online and you’re you’re there for them, because they have a lot of questions, especially in manufacturing. It’s usually, you know, historically, a very long purchasing process, right, can take a long time, especially for some of these large industrial manufacturers, where there’s a lot of questions that they need to have answered and that they have during that process. And so you really, it’s so critical that you’re showing up for them during that process. And video is such a critical way to do that. Because for them to be able to put a face to the brand, it’s a way for you to start connecting with them right to start building that relationship of trust, you know, people connect with people. And in b2b That’s even so much more important, because it’s you know, there’s a lot of emotion tied up in these big purchases, right, there’s a lot on the line more so than I think even in b2c And so being able to build that trust is so important and starting with video by having that connection is just so critical. And I second everything just said about making sure that you’re showcasing your product and all of that so so key.

Curt Anderson 9:46
Absolutely So Mister miss you. You are the digital twin cape crusader do Could you please talk about and this ties in perfectly with that video strategy. Talk a little bit about this digital twin thing that you have going on? And I’ll tell you from the moment that you and I discussed this a couple years back, I just love the mission. Love what you’re preaching here, just share with everybody what’s going on here.

Greg Mischio 10:08
Well, most manufacturers and b2b companies who sell have complex sales are typically been sales driven. They rely on a technician or an engineer or somebody who’s really knowledgeable about the product. And it’s just been more cost efficient to train these people, send them to the trade show, send them out to the golf course, and just rely on your sales team. Well, just like Nicole gave the step from Gartner, that more and more of the journeys taking place online. So what we say is, you know, people are going to go down the sales funnel, or however they want, whatever method they want, and what you want to you want to be there online, when they are going through that. So what we tell these companies, we kind of meet them halfway, because a lot of these people have, you know, they’re resistant to marketing, and they’re not familiar with it. And so what we say is use your online content to create a digital twin of your sales team. So when people are searching, whatever stage they are in the funnel, you’ve got a sales presence there.

Curt Anderson 11:20
I absolutely love it. So all right. And just and I know you’re teaming up with our buddy Jeff Long on video value bombs. Can you just talk a little bit about your experience? And like, you know what that’s been like for you your business? What’s that look like?

Greg Mischio 11:33
Yeah, that’s kind of an intense shot there with those beady eyes. Yeah, very look like a head football coach, not to rip somebody’s throat out. But very intense. Very intense. So what we did with Jeff, I mean, we’re, we’re kind of new to the video marketing realm. And thanks, Jeff’s really helped us out, take the lead on it. But what we’ve done is we typically have, you know, b2b as a lot of print collateral marketing or text driven collateral. And we’re, we’re writers at the core when bound. And so what we’ve done is just like the old you know, inbound playbook, it goes, you want to read re repurpose your content. So we’ve, we’ve managed, we figured out ways to repurpose, we start with the in depth written content, and then rebrand or repurpose it into video.

Curt Anderson 12:27
Repurpose one of my favorite words, right? We just want to stretch that out. So Jeff Long, I’m coming back at you said one of the number one benefits is to teach customers how to use your products. I know you’re doing a great job with examples here. Talk a little bit about just some of the case study some of the projects I know you’re working with, like Cargill, some major companies, all the way down to small mom and pop job shops. Just what are you doing with companies here?

Jeff Long 12:51
Yeah, so I think it goes back to my parents, honestly, like my parents are both teachers, lifelong educators. So I look at marketing and sales and businesses as a whole is like how can I help teach somebody something, educate them, and build that trust? So a lot of the content that we do is that kind of teaching, you know, the ideal customer something. So the picture you’re looking at right here, the slide is Midwest Fasteners, they’re a construction, they service construction, side of things, they make fasteners for ceilings and other things. A few years ago, we did an eight part video series on their main product against safety setup, teardown usage, common problems. And we use that for a couple reasons, a couple of ways first for their salespeople, right, it was easy for them to put that in their sales pipeline, send it out ahead of sales calls, or after a sales call. And I’ll tell a story about that here in a second. It also helped greatly reduced their their inbound customer service phone calls and inquiries because these videos were obviously on their website on social on YouTube and every other place that their ideal customers would see it. So it really reduced the the hours that customer service would have to answer phone calls or emails or support tickets. So those two things alone were a huge benefit. But here’s the fun story I like to tell is they had a big trade show in Dallas, they went to I believe it was the first time they went to this trade show and set up their booth did all their stuff and talked with a pretty large potential customer of theirs and and over the course of you know, many conversations, obviously they landed this large client and they asked they said hey large client, you know, what were some of the reasons why you went with us, you know, there’s competitors around and and of course it was Midwest Fasteners, like capabilities and service and quality. Those can’t be matched. But there’s large clients that something that’s really interesting, it said Some of your marketing was unique. First of all, your website was up to date, it was modern. Now we make websites we did not make there. So I don’t want to make it sound like it was because of us. But the second thing was because of us. It was the videos, it showed that they thought through the process of setup, safety, install all that stuff for these videos, it showed that they again, were modern that they cared and, and so those two things were, I don’t want to say at the very top of the list, but enough that this big, huge new customer mentioned it to Midwest Fasteners. So it just shows, you know the value in you know, you look at some of their videos on their YouTube page. I mean, I think the one that’s the screenshot there does have 10s of 1000s of views, but some of their videos have maybe in the hundreds, you know, but still they got the value even though it wasn’t viewcount that that gave the value. It was like the quality of the type of person that was watching.

Curt Anderson 16:02
Well, that’s awesome. And so I know I had I’ve been letting a few people in I just want to give a shout out. Hey, we got John Buck lino here today. We’ve got I saw Julie here from Purdue. Lisa, we’ve got a vous here, guys. Thanks for joining us Robins here I’m letting somebody else in. So guys, again, drop your LinkedIn in the chat box. If you have any questions whatsoever, don’t hesitate to ask us. Our goal is to help you as much as possible here. Now, Jeff, I’m gonna I’m coming. I want you to continue on. You mentioned earlier about like, you know, being product most focused or company focused? Can you just just segment into that? And what do you think there?

Jeff Long 16:38
Yeah, I’m sorry. Can you repeat that I was reading the comments. And my brain couldn’t do listening to do Kurt, my band

Curt Anderson 16:43
aid me do just like my wife. No, I’m just kidding. So I it’s like, so here on this screenshot right here. So what you’re doing, if you go to your website, you have all sorts of videos, okay, you’re doing videos with Greg, you’re doing videos for yourself. Like here, you’re talking about being product focus compared to or versus being company focus? Can you just elaborate on that a little bit? If you could?

Jeff Long 17:04
Yeah. So I always tell people that, you know, a company, whether it’s my company or manufacturer of any size, you know, we have things we want to talk about. And again, a lot of times it’s it’s inward focused, right, I’m a good person been around for 20 years, I blah, blah, blah. And those are great. But a lot of times our customers have different concerns, problems, hesitations. And so there’s this misalignment. So what video value bombs does, and what I recommend, you know, to all the viewers is find out how to align what your customer, your buyer, distributor, whoever that is, what they’re needing to know, and create content about that. You know, sometimes people don’t necessarily care about some of the things we care about. And so be focused on your customer first, and that will get you a lot better traction.

Curt Anderson 17:52
I absolutely love that. I’m just going to give a quick example, there’s a small contract manufacturer I worked with. And so they make these little goofy thing, these little ground straps. And you know, it’s like a ubiquitous to $3 item, but they have videos on all their products. And again, the goal is like making their own life easier. How do we not have to answer the same questions over and over and over again? How do we help that ideal buyer make a buying decision? Now one thing I’m going to give a shout out and I don’t know if that our esteemed panel wants to give a shout out. If you’re posting videos on your website, what I encourage you to think about is Vimeo reason I like Vimeo is like you’re just not splashed with all those ads. Now, YouTube is absolutely critical posting your videos for search. I like using Vimeo when I’m posting videos on the website itself. Just because they you know, I don’t know about you guys, I have that you know, shiny object syndrome, you see an ad and then like five clicks later, you’re like, man, what website was I originally on? Other things. And Greg at the end, we’re gonna geek out a little bit about SEO. But I want to talk if you guys aren’t around for the end, I want you to take a look like a full description with your keywords and backlinks to those product pages back to your website. And again, we’re gonna get into search towards the end. But I just want to give an example right here, this little tiny custom manufacturer, they get number one ranking. They get a lot of great rankings on first page of Google and a big thanks to their their videos. So let’s talk about plant tours. Mr. Micheel, this is a client that you work with. I absolutely love what you guys are doing here. Can you just talk a little bit about what I’m going to talk about is like bringing the ideal customer into your shop. They might be hundreds of miles away, they might be cross country, they might be in another country. But I feel like what you guys are doing here you’re bringing the client into your facility, talk a little bit about some of the videos that you guys are doing.

Greg Mischio 19:37
So what we’re trying to do with we usually make a 32nd video and a two minute video for the clients based on the blogs and it’s kind of like Jeff’s what Jeff was saying with customer centric or even trying to take it another step further even and make it insight centric and try and bring something new to their not to them in terms of what they can do to improve their business, their customers can improve their visit their business. And really ours are, you know, for, for the most part, we start out with a script, some clients will read the script, some kind of take the ideas and, and come up with their own and we record a talking head. So we have a narrator to go through the concepts. But then we have a ton of B roll footage. And that’s, we animate it and we do a ton of B roll footage, some of its video some of its still photo. And that’s where Jeff and his team come in. And they take just a kind of a drab, talking head video and really make it come to life with some incredible animation.

Curt Anderson 20:44
Yeah. And Greg, if you want to it again with the chat box, if our esteemed panel, I’m not looking at the chat, you guys keep an eye on the chat. If there are any questions, please interrupt or pause. And if you guys have any videos that you want to drop into chat box that folks can check out, you know, please drop that in there, Greg, I thought this video was fantastic. But let’s keep this going. Jeff, I’m coming back at you. So here’s my question. So you do a lot of tours, you come into the facility. And again, like you’re bringing that ideal client into the facility. And you work with man, some with great companies talk a little bit about some of these examples that we have here.

Jeff Long 21:21
Yeah, so this one on the screen, did a several projects over the years with Cargill, obviously a large agricultural type accompany, but they have, of course big facilities to, to do some of their feed and other other types of things. So there was a new facility that they were retrofitting, building on to here in Ohio. And so we did have several things, I’ll kind of shotgun these. So one thing is we did a three d 360 degree virtual tour for a trade show. So we came in with our cameras that shot it in 8k, which is pretty crazy. And you put these Oculus goggles on your, on your face there. And I was blown away. Like even though I was a part of it, I was like, This is amazing. Like, you felt like you were there, you know. So it was a guided tour. And we were able to showcase inside the facility. Whereas obviously people couldn’t go because it was a construction site. The second thing we did once it was further along in the process is we did a so let me back up the 3d tour was guided by the person on camera, so you couldn’t really move around you were watching a video that was in 3d and 360, then separately, we did a separate project. And I’ll put a link here in the, in the, in the notes, is we did a virtual tour and, and what I’m going to put in the live chat the link is that’s not what we did. Like it’s a it’s a different link, but it gives you an idea of you know, we can do a a 360 scan of a facility and let the user kind of walk through it on their phone or on their computer or tablet, pull up little hotspots watch videos about different things. It’s really, really cool here, I’m gonna, I’m gonna just put it in the chat here. So there’s a lot of opportunities, you know, when people especially with COVID, but even after COVID People can’t fly in, or maybe you need to show a maintenance person, even where you know, this piece of equipment on your production line is and things like that. There’s so many different ways, whether it’s executives, line workers maintenance it, that these virtual tours can help.

Greg Mischio 23:35
Yeah, can I just add to that curve, that I’m trying to get all my clients to have Jeff come in and do this, because they all say the same thing. They’re all like, once we get them in the tour their customers, right? So I think it’s critical.

Curt Anderson 23:49
It’s critical. And the thing is just, you know, between COVID You know, airlines were a disaster over the holidays. It’s just, it’s not easy to travel. It’s just like, there’s so many things. And now like, with remote working, it’s just so convenient to let your ideal customer just look on their phone, and just, you know, bring your facility to you know, like, Val, I’m thinking like you at mine a fracks and like, you know, Lisa, it’s still cities, you know, like, you know, bring that client right into your facility. And just look, you know, like, a lot of a lot of times we’re like, man, it’s expensive to do it. It’s so affordable because like as Greg mentioned earlier repurposing it, once you get that video tour, like you are done, like your expense is done and just think how over and over, you can use that So, alright, let’s keep this going. So any, here’s a couple other examples from Jeff, this is great from Cargill. So I want to talk about there’s a great line I picked up recently How do you out teach the competition? You know, Jeff, you just mentioned that you know, you’re a you’re a product your parents or educators or college professors, as sales folks as marketers, if we could just dedicate ourselves to just you know, we’re trying to build trust. We’re trying to, you know, exude integrity boy when you can dedicate yourself to being a teacher and So that’s exactly what Jeff’s done with the video value bomb. So Greg, I’m coming back at you, you do a great job with your I’ve been loving your videos, you’re not only are you instituting what your what your client should be doing, you’re not the cobblers kid with no shoes, you’re practicing what you preach, you’re putting out tons of content, educating your ideal customers just talking about like your methodology, your strategy of like trying to teach your clients.

Greg Mischio 25:25
It again, it ties back in our approach, it ties back into generating insights, being customer centric, like Jeff said, and figuring out what we can do to improve their business. And then creating content along those lines to you know, we follow we use the Challenger sales method. That’s what we base it’s a proven sales, the most effective sales method for complex sales. So we apply that to all of our marketing. And all we’re trying to do is bring new insights. That’s kind of like my soprano. Look on there too. And that great still shot. So thanks for grabbing that, Kurt. Appreciate that.

Curt Anderson 26:11
Man, if I was as handsome as you, you know what I’d be all over the place. So I saw the sopranos I, Tony, or I’m not sure who you’re in there. But I don’t know. Hey, could you do me a favor? You just mentioned the Challenger sale sales method. For anybody out there. It’s not familiar with it. Could you please drop that in the chat box just for anybody’s like, Hey, Greg, you really piqued my curiosity there? Oh, sure. If you could share. So Nicole, my friend, you do an amazing job. This is a great example, this company, this is a huge manufacturer down in Texas, we’ve had the honor and privilege of working together on this project. They do these huge dust collectors, we’re doing a juicy e commerce project they sell like, multi $100,000 dust collectors and they are going on E commerce. Now you’ve done an amazing job library, the Learning Center just you know, dedicated yourself to educating consumers talk about the strategy here at this manufacturer, please.

Nicole Donnelly 27:04
Yeah, so what we did is we have three different types of videos that we’re creating for them. So as you as you saw on the previous slide, they sell these really large industrial systems. And so we really one of our strategies, we really wanted to to educate customers on this one particular product line, they’re cartridge dust collectors. And so we wanted to create several videos that would showcase a product demo that would showcase the the system, how it worked on the inside that, you know, people could see that, and then also how easy it was to assemble the unit. And then also how easy it would be for them to change out the filters. So we created these 3d animated videos from CAD drawings, and they just really helped really shorten the sales cycle, we saw a huge difference. You know, these systems were selling, taking, you know, 90 120 days for them to go through and close a deal. And once we started using these videos and promoting them, and our email marketing and the sales reps, were sharing these videos, we saw the average sales cycle decrease to 30 days, sometimes less. I mean, I remember one, there was one situation where I got a call from the sales rep one of the sales reps engineers. And he said, I literally just talked to this guy this morning was a Friday and Monday morning, he sent me the PIO. While it was all because we had built up this this content. So we did these 3d animated videos. They’re really high quality really well done. But then also, we wanted to do something a little scrappier and something a little bit easier for for the team to get involved. And it was just basically listed out what are the top questions that your customers are asking, you know, over and over again, we asked the sales team that we got them involved. It’s such a huge part of it. Make sure your sales team as part of this strategy process, right? What are they asking over and over again? And so we just basically had someone come in, like Jeff Long, and we shot on site for them and just answer these questions in these, these really short three to five minute videos. And I will tell you, this guy right here, he is the most introverted person on the planet. So introverted, so I’m telling you, if he can get in front of the camera, anyone can do it. So one of the things I will say that really helps is if you have a director on site that you really feel comfortable with, that can really help bring you out of your shell. So if you’re going to do these on site videos, that really makes a big difference, someone who can coach you through and the other thing that’s really helped is that I learned this the hard way. The teleprompter is not a good way to go. If you’re working with amateurs. I don’t know Jeff, you might disagree with me, but that was my experience. We learned that the hard way.

Jeff Long 29:41
It’s a challenge. It depends. Obviously, you know it. Yeah, sometimes it can take somebody that just can’t really spit out their words and at least it gives you a something. But yes, anyway, we have some tricks and stuff like interviewing, excuse me, interviewing people, you know, really helps kind of get them out of their shell and asking questions. So there’s different ways. Yeah. And

Nicole Donnelly 30:01
that was one of the things we found is that we would have kind of like a series of questions that they knew in advance, they were going to be asked on camera that was prepared in advance for them. So they knew what they were going to be asked, they could prepare their answers. And then on site, that’s what the director would do. Just sit there and say, Okay, we’ll stop. Let’s ask this question, roll, and then stop and take a break. And it seemed to work, it works really well for these onsite shoots to get someone like that, like this guy has come out of the shells like a miracle on 34th Street. So

Curt Anderson 30:27
yeah, in a funny thing is he’s he’s strikingly handsome. He’s just a great, great guy. He’s just very introverted. But, you know, when you look at these topics here, you know, would you like to avoid unexpected plant shutdowns? I kind of think most people would love to avoid unexpected plant shutdowns, you know, so you just look at these are the particular topics that are resonating with their ideal customers, you know, Hey, today, we’re going to talk about Erina cloth ratios. And Jeff, just the other day, you and I were talking about air to cloth ratios. And, you know, here was a video that would have answered that. And of course, this guy is a great, great dude. And I’ve had the honor of meeting all these guys. And you know, is your particulate small or large. To call it sounds like a personal problem. But it’s, you know, another great video there. But this guy, I just want to give it a shot at this guy is Tim, he is an army. He’s a hero. He’s an Army veteran, God bless him served our country proudly, very, like armed force super crazy stuff that he did. So that was a great team. And just a great example. So we’re talking about educating, let’s take it a step further. We’ve mentioned Learning Center. Now Jeff, you preach hot and heavy. I know, Nicole, this is totally your jam music to your ears. So Jeff, I’m gonna start with you talk about how critical is that learning center? You know, our folks out here on the call, they know their product or service inside and out. But when that customer comes in, man, they just don’t know it as well, as is our experts here on the panel on, you know, talk about the learning center.

Jeff Long 31:54
Yeah, I think, think about learning styles, right? Some people love listening, some radio, some watching. And so having different types of content on your website is critical, right? There’s a certain type of person that really wants to read it really in depth. Information, obviously, you know, our engineers and some of those types of people. And then we have some decision makers or other people that want more a brief overview. So it’s not an either or, you know, people like oh, is it video? Or is it text? No, it’s both. And so, you know, making your website. customer centric, again, is key, I talk a lot about that. And then having a learning center, so kind of the old model was like blog, right, and that’s fine. That’s, that’s text only primarily, but having a learning center is like on our website, you know, we have obviously blogs, we have videos, we have podcasts, we’ve been on both our own and when we’ve been on other people’s kind of like this. So we, anytime I’m on a webinar or a jam like this, I’m going to post the link on our website. So that potential customers, current customers can kind of get the latest and greatest information in a simple, easy, simple and easy to understand way through learning just like this.

Curt Anderson 33:10
You know, that’s a great point. Just yesterday, many of you know so I do a little LinkedIn live show with my buddy Daymond and our guests yesterday, is a gentleman he has 80,000 followers like 40,000 on YouTube and between LinkedIn and everything 80,000 followers, he’s, you know, he’s, he’s my age. So he’s not like a young like, you know, cutting edge, you know, influencer, but he’s an automation. And he said he and he does, literally 1000s of videos. He’s now posting daily. He’s doing a daily show. And he’s the automation guru. And he said that his readers, and his viewers are two totally different personas. And he goes, anytime that he’s tried to cross them, he goes, they’re not having it. So he has the folks that like to read, he has a lot of folks that like to view. And so that was a great point that you just made. So I’m coming at you, Greg, here’s another client of yours, I absolutely love this creating a great first impression. And you’re doing wonderful videos. And again, bringing the customer into their their wheelhouse, talk a little bit about what’s going on here with this particular client.

Greg Mischio 34:11
Again, this is so we we take the videos, we use them on the organic side with LinkedIn, and then we’ll post them to YouTube and then we actually embed them in the blog as well. So you have a multimedia on the blog, which can help you with the SEO for that. And just kind of reinforcing what Jeff said about you know, giving people different ways to view it. But you know, I think in that picture there, there’s kind of a talking head. There’s a CEO of the company, but the trying to get those product shots in there is really important, like Jeff mentioned, and those are always scroll stoppers for sure.

Curt Anderson 34:54
Love it ABS Okay, and then so I’m gonna call this out and it’s lunchtime. And I probably shouldn’t be showing this because I I’m a little I’m a little on the hungry side, but just you know you did an amazing job. So this is a manufacturer that you and I had the honor privilege working with our dear friend Juliette the Purdue MEP. As a matter of fact, I think she’s on the program julu Julie, happy Tuesday. So this is a great manufacturer in in wonderful state of Indiana, they manufacture Teresa, one of the oldest Mexican owned manufacturers companies in the country. And so he was getting, you know, he doesn’t sell to consumers. It’s purely b2b. And so Nicole talked a little bit about how important it was to speak to his buyer, that persona, and really creating that learning center.

Nicole Donnelly 35:35
Yeah, not really was the first step we really wanted to dial in and understand who his ideal customer was first. And once we dialed that, and we understood, okay, you know, distributors is who we really need to speak to, we need to understand their challenges and pain. So we created a unique page just for distributors that address some of the challenges, questions, problems they were asking. And then we created a learning center. And on that learning center, the way we did this is we basically pulled together some of the top questions that they were getting from these distributors, and we scheduled a subject matter expert interview, and SME interview with Edward, the lovely owner here that you see. And basically, we just recorded him, we gave him the questions in advance on the topic. So he knew exactly what we were going to be asking him about. And so he could be prepared. And then literally, we just scheduled a zoom call with him and recorded it and asked him the questions. It was a very, like, low maintenance, like, you know, low stress, there wasn’t like lights everywhere, all around him shining right on his face, you know, just a very casual conversation, he was talking about what he knew. And so I think like, when someone came up in the chat and said, What, how you can you come over? How can you overcome? You know, being camera shy? I think one of the first step is if you feel comfortable with the content that you’re sharing, that’s question, that’s number one. Like, if you feel like you can talk about that subject, all day, every day, and you’re confident in it, I think that’s, that’s great. And something like this is a really great way for people to just kind of dip their toe in, right, because having a, you know, one on one conversation with Zoom call is very low pressure, you know, and you record it, and then bam, now you have you really scrappy, you know, video content. So we just took the video footage. And then on our end, we edited it, we sliced it up, we added their branding, and, you know, captioning and everything like that. And then we just embedded it on the blog post page, to your point, Greg, just to make sure we get some of the SEO value for them, and then put it on their YouTube channel as well.

Curt Anderson 37:31
So let’s talk about the hack outer. If I know anybody that works with us, they know our best friend otter talking so basically all if you go to this webpage, it is super meaty, pun intended to call Sorry, I couldn’t help myself, but it’s a very meaty, juicy page, just rich of content. And the great thing is, as you know, like Greg, you said, like, you know, you guys are fierce content writers. The great thing here is like, we took a little bit of a shortcut, we get the information from the subject matter expert, you know, how do you be, you know, this guy has been in this business since he was nine years old. He’s, you know, 50 years he’s been it was his grandfather’s business, he, it’s in his DNA, nobody’s gonna, you know, know his product the way he does. What you did is you you interview Edward the owner, you get you get that video, take the transcription, and then start creating all this content. Just walk everybody through, like, you know, if they’re new to otter or the transcription, like walk them through that process.

Nicole Donnelly 38:25
So otter die ai, ai ai is taking over the world. It’s amazing. So otter is a really great transcription service, it’s completely free. So we use it for all of our SME interviews, just turn it on, when the interview starts, turn it off, and then you’ve done you’ve got a transcript. And then on our side, our content writers will take those transcripts and turn them into really nice blog posts, you know, adding intro, you know, nice conclusion and just clean it up to make it like, you know, a really solid, SEO optimized piece of content that we can put on their blog apps. Absolutely.

Curt Anderson 38:57
You know, what, in Marshalls in the house, Marsha, my dear friend, you did an amazing job she interviewed. She’s with louvers International, Marsha, and I don’t mean to throw a homework assignment. And if you want to grab you did an amazing blog post. If you want to grab that blog post, drop it in the chat box. And all she did was she in her it’s two brothers that own the company, Devon and Derek, she interviewed one of the owners, the trans, took that video grabbed the transcription and she created this amazing pillar post of great content. So great job to Marcia. Let’s talk about testimonials. So hey, enough about you guys. Jeff Long and Greg and Nicole talked about me for a minute right? So I don’t know about you guys, but man, I have been awful, terrible getting testimonials. I’ve decided, you know, working with MEPs my dear friend Julie and other MEPs around the country, like hey, you know, part of their reportable impact is one of their measurements of success is measurable impact. And we’re like, hey, let’s start getting testimonials. So as many of you know, either you’ve been guest or you know, thank you for checking it out. Well we’ve started doing this Again, printer. There you are man printers on the call today. Hey, printer Happy Tuesday. So we love bringing on our clients and like, hey, let’s because what we’re doing it’s multiple. It’s like we’re shining a bright light on our ideal clients here, Brenda, Ellie, they’re both in Chicago. This is iMac to Illinois MEP. Hey, there’s Edward from popular the tree. So manufacturer, and this is Gene from the Purdue MEP. And so, you know, and here’s another one and just here’s a great thing. And so what we do is we get the transcription just as new coal described using otter. And then here’s like, I grabbed on these quotes and working with IMEC. It was super, super easy. I’m so glad I contacted on my iMac, they were a godsend. So now it’s great because we’re shining a bright light on our customer, we our client, great manufacturer in the state of Illinois, we’re doing we’re giving a shout out to our friends at iMac and just everybody wins by just elevating and trying to stop being the best kept secret. So let’s talk about you know, I think there’s been a little bit of a shortage on labor from what I hear is I know is it too soon to say that Nicole, but I know recruiting has been a little bit challenging and bringing in the proper teammates, Jeff, we’re Oh as marketers, I’m always thinking sales, sales, sales, sales sales. When you’re the manufacturer you’re thinking dude, I need people on the floor. Talk a little bit about how recruiting and how video really go hand in hand.

Jeff Long 41:24
Excuse me, yeah, I was sober, which is on the screen here. We’ve done quite a few employee retention or new employee higher type of videos. So we’ve done there, they have a really good pre apprenticeship program. They work with local schools, they get these high school kids and do amazing work with them to obviously give them shop skills but also life skills. Stober DRS is in Maysville, Kentucky and amazing company, I always tell people, if if if I was looking for a job, I would probably consider there even though they’re like a two hour drive for me, amazing company. We’ve also done you know, apprenticeship program, highlight videos. And then this video you see here on the screen is obviously the benefits of working with Stober. And then we have a specific video player, where right on the screen, somebody can enter in their name and email address. So for a lot of these videos we did with Stober and other companies will say, Hey, if you like this content, check out our free guide below or, you know, we’ll have some incentive to get that casual viewer on to a an email list. We know you know, we know who’s a casual viewer, we know who’s a serious viewer by some of those clicks. And so, you know, they’ve used this in different capacities, both for new hires, both for sales and different things. And the interesting thing, like I mentioned this before, is they don’t need hundreds or 1000s of views. I mean, their buyer persona is fairly tight and small. So they need quality leads versus quantity, whether that’s from a new hire category, or a sales category. So we’ve been like I said, we’ve been working with them for probably eight to 10 years done, I don’t know 50 plus videos of various kinds, and those are just a couple of the ones we’ve done with him.

Curt Anderson 43:19
And just think, you know, I tell you, you know, again, like when, you know, ecommerce, you know, I’m always thinking sales, when you’re on the recruiting side, look at what a competitive advantage this gives you. It gives that company, right? Because the thing is, you don’t realize like you’re competing, you know, you’re you’re competing with fast food you’re competing with, you know, retail, you’re competing with a lot of different, you know, areas of employment. And when you can, you know, open up the doors to your facility, just like giving a tour to a client or a potential customer that, hey, this is a great place of work. We care. You know, it’s just Nicole, what do you any, any segue on that? Anything that you want to chime in about on the recruiting side?

Nicole Donnelly 43:58
No, I think that’s all awesome. I think yeah, the more that you can you can highlight your your company, the people that are working there, there and all of that which is going to attract the right minded people to you. So

Curt Anderson 44:09
perfect. All right. Let’s talk about live events. I know Greg, you do an awesome job. You do a monthly the AMA in Madison, Wisconsin, is that correct? You do a live event? Do you guys do you do anything with video by any chance or? So?

Greg Mischio 44:20
Yeah, we just started this year to do it. Make it make it a hybrid event. So you can come in person if you’re in in the man in town, or you can just sign up online in Washington online.

Curt Anderson 44:34
Awesome. So we’d like broadening your reach. So I’m gonna give a couple quick examples here. So and look at so if you meet Jeff Long in person, he is one tall dude. Is he not Nicole? He’s like, yes, so tall. He is. He’s not only a giant in the E commerce and marketing world for manufacturers. He is tall in stature. So we had the honor privilege. Three of us got together at a wonderful event in Cleveland back in September. So just just talk a little bit about like, you know, live event or just meeting people in person, you know, we, you ingested this wonderful interview here, what’s your take for the group here on live events?

Nicole Donnelly 45:10
What’s great doing video like this at live events, I love that because then your customers see that you’re out there, you’re staying up to date on what’s new, and the industry, you’re there to educate them on what’s happening. So I love that approach. Like, it shows them that you’re out and about and that you care and you’re trying to be innovative, and really help them solve their problems and capture some of the energy that you’re getting at that event. I think that yeah, it was just super great to connect. There was awesome

Curt Anderson 45:34
day and it was a crazy bald guy there. It looks like we’re having a good time. So this was awesome. We did a LinkedIn live right off stage. That’s Wendy Covey. I mean, like, these are great Joe Sullivan, here at East Saunders. These are just like great marketers, people that are just passionately dedicated to helping manufacturers figure out this whole marketing world. And it was just such man, I’d say it was like the highlight of my year last year just coming together with everybody. Jeff, any any any? Any segue? From your perspective?

Jeff Long 46:02
Yeah, first of all, it looks like somebody is stepping on my toe in this picture. Apparently, I’m not sure why I’m shrieking in pain. But nonetheless. Yeah, I think Nicole, you brought up a really good point about, you know, when you’re at a trade show, or anywhere out and about is capturing these moments highlighting other people I think, for better for worse, a lot of business these days is is getting people’s attention. Right? You know, Kurt wrote the book, stop being the best kept secret, right? How do you showcase your products, your people, other people. So whenever I go to trade shows, I try to highlight other people, you know, and showcase their expertise, which is what I’m doing here with with Nicole is a really fun interview. So anytime you can get out and about take pictures, post them on LinkedIn and other platforms, do simple video interviews. These aren’t complex. You know, there’s some simple tools you can do. We’re shooting here with my iPhone, and a little lavalier mics are under $50. And a tripod that was pretty cheap, you know. So it’s possible for for anybody to do this kind of thing.

Curt Anderson 47:07
That’s Ed’s perfect. And so I had, you know, I had the honor privilege, I went up to Alaska this year. So this is at the Alaska MEP in the same thing, we did a little LinkedIn live, I’ve my partner Damon, we did a LinkedIn live with a team from Alaska MVP. And then what we did is we had three manufacturers at that conference table, and then a one to picture to the right, actually went took a tour of a manufacturer. She is a hero, God bless her. She served our country, she did two tours in Iraq. And she’s now just as fierce, relentless entrepreneur up in Alaska, and just what an honor, what an inspiration to, you know, interview her and just showcase what she’s doing. And so again, like, in what did I, you know, I have my little laptop set up, you know, my 11 inch laptop, it didn’t you know, Jeff, Lon, coach, man, that little microphone there and some of the other equipment I have. And so Jeff, May, we’ll dig into some of the equipment. When we get to the end, if you have any suggestions for folks, Greg, I want to talk about SEO benefits. I like we’re really getting intentional with our LinkedIn lives. With our videos, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, go there for us, like just explain to everybody just the incredible value from SEO, on videos and go in this direction.

Greg Mischio 48:22
I’m not as adept at the optimization in the YouTube world, we’re just starting to get into that more and more. But, you know, it’s at least the thing that I think’s really valuable with what Jeff had brought up, because we were talking about some of the videos and the performance of the videos. And one thing that, you know, like a YouTube video is, is like you mentioned, Kurt, is once you start to rank for that, and once that shows up number one in the search because YouTube’s a search engine, that’s, that’s monthly traffic that’s coming in every month. Very, you know, those are buyers. And so if you can rank for some of your some of your videos, that’s ongoing traffic, and it’s also another inbound link. I’m not sure if a link from YouTube counts as an inbound link in you know, with Google search engines, but you know, anytime somebody might pick up your video link to it from a blog, that’s a potential inbound link that will help your SEO.

Curt Anderson 49:33
Yeah, it does. And I’ll tell you like this is an example of so this was an interview I did with our dear mutual friend house into Ford just two weeks ago. And so what we do is we’ll post it on LinkedIn on YouTube and so we’re very intentional of like playing around with like, keywords and those phrases and so for example, I think I might isn’t perfect I might have the example here, but I just want to show everybody you know, get those backlinks coming to either you know, if you’re like in the early part of the program Jeff was talking about, like, how important was product pages are or product videos, have the link rate to that product in the video, you know, help that buyer just land rate, you know, get your site. If you we talked about teaching, if you have any guides, any white papers, any resources that would be helpful. Get those links into those videos. So let me give you an example. So, Nicole, this is one of my favorites. This is a funny story. So there was a client that we were working with thanks to our dear friends at the Purdue MEP. Julie, thanks again for joining us today. And they do 4g, they’re up the road from Jeff Long. They’re in Ohio. And they do upset foraging. I had never even heard of upset foraging until I met these folks. And I said, Hey, what are one of your main key words? Well, at the time, you know, during COVID They’re like, You know what made in USA upset 14 is really important. Because like people aren’t getting product in time from overseas. So that night just for giggles, I did an experiment. I found a website that had a big long description on what upset foraging is. I turned on my zoom just as we are right now. And I hit record and I recorded myself reading this website talking about upset 4g. So then that night I so then I use otter, Nicole talk about otter, I took the transcription. And I put that into the description as I just showed here of the YouTube channel. within 24 hours I was the number one ranking on Made in USA upset 14 made an America upset foraging, upset foraging Made in America, like it was all these scenarios. I sent it to these guys and we closed in Purdue and I we closed the contract they signed with us. They were not a client prior to that. But the funny thing is then Nicole came in and she did her magic, as she described earlier. And so now we have a blog post with her number three, and then I’ll get my video out there to get them up. But the point is, video, if you use your keywords, you get your descriptions in there can be extremely powerful. To get those first page rankings. Nicole United did a program recently and I called it digital self service solutions for manufacturers. And on Bing. Within the first day, we were coming up number one. And this was this was with our I’m sorry, this was with Chris Harrington. You and I did another one. So again, I just wanted to talk about a couple of examples there. Jeff, are you working with your clients on like rankings? Do you get in like keyword strategy in that as far as videos go?

Jeff Long 52:21
Yeah, and I think, especially manufacturers have a tremendous opportunity. It’s almost like, you know, when the internet first started or social media or because a lot of our manufacturing competitors don’t have video content, just like you weren’t able to rank on such a simple thing. So to me, we’re still believe it or not in the age or in the time where you can rank for a lot of these key words. You know that that you want to? So yeah, I would just encourage the viewers here to take full advantage of that.

Curt Anderson 52:57
Absolutely. So I love what you’re saying. So anybody that’s gone through our training, Marcia, Lisa, Val, I call it two I call it Google 2005. I’m like if you do a Google search for one of your keywords, one of your main core keywords, and you see no pictures, no images, no videos. And then if you’re like, Well, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Then just Google like flowers or shoes. Because if you Google like running shoes, it’s just packed with pictures, videos, images, flowers, it’s packed. But if you do like one, like, you know, I do CNC machining for turbine engines on Tuesdays or something, you know, your core keyword, I call it Google 2005, you have a great chance of coming up. And you know, of course, it goes deeper, you know, somebody needs to be typing it. But with our manufacturers, a lot of times you just need like one or two buyers. It’s not like you’re trying to sell like $1.99 Pen over and over and over. You need like one contract and it can be game changing. So last thing I want to talk about here, I just started doing this Jeff Long is it we took we’ve taken we do our LinkedIn lives, Mark Meyer steam panel, they’ve been guests multiple times, we’ve now taken like little snippets, and we started throwing it on YouTube shorts. And you look down here we had a gentleman from Ink Magazine. And within a day we got like 195 views. We did this video here a couple interviews. So we’re starting to dip our toe into YouTube shorts. And so I’ll come back the verdicts not out yet. I’ll let you know how that goes. So it’s funny

Jeff Long 54:21
Kurt, after this afternoon, I’m going to be recording batch recording a series of shorts from my own company YouTube shorts. And so yeah, that’s definitely something to take advantage of for for really any company. So I’d encourage again, there’s lots of opportunities, whether it’s YouTube and it’s easy to get maybe overwhelmed by Hey, do we do tick tock or this or that like, to me like just just get started and you’re going to get better, more comfortable, you’re you’re going to be more efficient and effective, but you can’t get there if you’re not starting. So just get started. And you’ll learn as you go

Curt Anderson 54:58
Nicole

It’s so I know this is your one of your favorite phrases right here. Do any. So above before we hit this, and I want to be mindful because we’re coming into the homestretch. We’re almost at time. Greg, started. Nicole, do you have any any comment on distribution? We’re talking about like YouTube. I’ve talked about Vimeo. Greg showed examples on LinkedIn, any exam, any thing that you want to piggyback on as far as like distribution of the of the videos? Yeah, I

Nicole Donnelly 55:26
think that’s all great. And I think one of the things I love that you do so well, Kurt is CO marketing. So I think the more that you can involve other, you know, affiliates, like the MVP, you know, bringing your clients on and CO marketing and doing video that way. Like, for example, the video that Jeff and I did at the Cleveland event that we talked about earlier, that’s co marketing. And now we can expand our reach, because I can share it with my community on LinkedIn. And, and Jeff can share it on his and so it just gets more exposure for you and for your brand. So I would say like, wherever you can try to, you know, make it a community thing, you know, try to involve key partners in in that,

Curt Anderson 56:03
Greg, anything that you want to add as far as like distribution, getting the video out there anything there.

Greg Mischio 56:09
I mean, we just try and use it in everything we do. You know, newsletters, get it in your email to the customers. Again, we use it in the blogs, and just, you know, repurpose, and repeat. I think one thing that’s we don’t talk enough about in advertising and marketing is frequency, like just because somebody has seen it, you know, you’ve put it out there once doesn’t mean you can’t share it again and again and drive some of those messages home. Yeah, I’d like

Nicole Donnelly 56:41
to add something to that. I think that’s such a great point. And I think thinking about like this content waterfall approach, right, where you take one big piece of content, live event, you know, podcasts, you know, SME interview, and just taking that content and then chunking it out into smaller bits and pieces. So smaller video clips, and you can you know, create smaller ones for social, like, it’s a great way to repurpose your content that way, and then you can use it again and again in different ways. So people get the message.

Curt Anderson 57:11
Absolutely. It’s matter of fact, I friends Jose from La creola. From Chicago, they were they had like the like it was almost like the key of the city in Chicago in October of 22. So Jose, you and I were just talking yesterday, like, you know, that would have been we’re talking about like, boy, how can we exploit that? How can you know, the company’s been around since 1957. So that would be another great video opportunity. And just all these examples that we’ve given as far as getting that message out, that would be phenomenal. Nicole, I’m coming right back to you. I know this is one of your favorite phrases empathy and curiosity. Can you just you know, as we take it home, we’re gonna be closing I want to be mindful of everybody’s time as we come into the top of the hour. How can we take advantage of video with empathy and curiosity? Ooh,