Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Every marketer knows they should be doing more video, so they start a YouTube channel, they post some content and they wait and nothing happens. So they post some more, still nothing, and eventually they just kind of give up. They're convinced that video just doesn't work for their kind of business.
But what if the problem isn't the video? What if it's that you're optimizing for the wrong audience entirely? You're chasing views from people who will never buy, while the clients who would pay you are quietly poking around YouTube on Sunday night looking for someone they can trust.
In this episode of Data Beats Opinion, we're talking with Ian Garlick, founder of Video Case Story, who has built video strategies for attorneys, coaches and some of the biggest names in online businesses. We're digging into why the invisible pipeline is more powerful than any funnel you've ever built and how the two minute data point that explains why your best customers find you before they even reach out. And why in a world flooded with AI generated slop, showing up as a real human on video might be the highest leverage marketing move left.
Let's start the show.
Ian, thank you so much for joining us. And we had some good conversation before we hit record, so hopefully we keep that good conversation rolling, man.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: We always do. We always have awesome conversations. It's like we might as well just record them all.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Well, last time we got on the phone for something, I don't remember what it was just like a quick 10 minute call.
We're on the phone for like an hour and a half just like talking about it just does not stop. So yeah, it's super exciting to have it. So for people who don't know, give me, give me the 10, the 10 second pitch.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah, we do, we help experts, you know, trusted authorities land big clients, you know, attorneys through dentists through, you know, Gina Wickman's one of our clients. And our land big clients using video YouTube, what I call the invisible pipeline, which you know, is scary to people and pre sold clients because we get those videos in front of them. And the thing I always say is like we're optimizing for the number one metric is time with your client. And so that for an expert, that's what they have to be doing is getting more and more and more now I think all the stuff you do is really important and that comes secondary if, because if you can't get in front of them with the right message and that's what we have and what's going on.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Right, exactly.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
And we Start by collecting customer stories and listening to your customer because they have all the answers. So that's why we're called videocasestory.com awesome. Very cool.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: And yeah, and we jumped right into this. So we were talking about how AI is changing video, how AI is changing search, how AI is changing discoverability.
Even with some of this stuff, do you find that AI has come in and kind of devalued or upvalued video and how, how do you think that's playing out right now in the, in the world? Right.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Well, it's definitely increased the value of video. You know, you YouTube is a big source of a lot of the data for ChatGPT, et cetera. So that's important. But, but also YouTube has metrics that those AI look at like you know, views, it can see the number of views and see if it gets into the API, it gets percent view likes, comments, all that stuff and then ranking in Google too. And so it's, it's definitely changed. It's videos become more important. And I also think another thing that people are seeing, and I've talked to website companies too, is that pure website visits are way down. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Because AI is kind of taking that away. But people still want to see you, hear you and they'd rather go to someplace familiar like YouTube or like one other platforms now. And then if you talk about time with site, you know, YouTube's time is actually going up while everything else is going down. People are spending more time on YouTube. So I think there's this massive, massive shift because of AI and video. Yeah. Is more important.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: I think it's fascinating because one of the things SparkToro is talking about right now is this zero click marketing and this idea that your homepage is not just your homepage anymore. It's really all of these places that you are and like you're saying people search for a solution or even they search for your brand name. The number one things that come up are going to be AI and video.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: A lot of the top before the fold search results now are YouTube and people are going to YouTube. YouTube and Reddit are now the two largest search engines for solution based, solution based searches. Right. For things that I'm looking for a problem to solve which is mind blowing. Right. But you're exactly right that that's where people are going for this information now.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Well, you know, and I'll, I'll put a, I've got a asset I'll give to your audience. Videocasetory.com we'll make it slash. Keith, I've got a calculator and it's got all the lists of places that we try. And because I always say it's YouTube and because YouTube ranks right, you should have YouTube. You should be driving YouTube. And there's like 40 different places. And also we have this whole list of searches that people do when they're investigating you.
And you know that so few people optimize for that, that fish that when they're ready. Right. To buy from you. And they, they like do all these crazy funnels and then they don't think, they, they, they don't think about the searches or all the other places like you were saying that people were going to.
And it's so important to think that way. Like, you have to think about how the, how the buying process has massively changed over the past 15 years. And then the past two years, it's just even more massively changed. And we've moved away from this whole Yellow Pages philosophy, like, I have a problem, let me go look up the solution, the person for the problem. And people are still optimizing for that.
And this is just side note, like, everyone's calling it answer engine optimization. I'm like, no, it's problem solving.
Like you were saying, solution. It solves problems. It knows problems before you know you have them.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting because it's not that people are saying, oh, search is going away and no search. I think search is getting more powerful. Search is happening more because we have more targeted. What's going away is the old school SEO where you can game the system in that way. You can still game the system through AEO and stuff like that. But the old idea of I'm going to have these blog articles that rank high and then people are going to come and do all this stuff that's going away. But the idea that we're searching for the solution.
And it's interesting that you phrase it this way because I think when we get into our head about what our customers are doing and we try to think about it that way, we put ourselves into this phase, fake way of searching. It's like, oh, people are asking these questions on AI and then they're going straight to our site and then they're going to buy and that's not happening.
The first part's happening. I just did some research for some hosting. It's super geeky dumb, nothing to do with work. But I tried to find something and the first thing I did is go into AI and was like, okay, what are my options? This is what I want to do. What do I got there? I said, okay. So then I go to YouTube and I'm like, okay, let's look at some of these options that were put up there. Let's look at those. And then YouTube suggests the other things. I'm looking at those and then I narrow it down to like two or three. Right. And then I go to those websites and then I'm looking at those websites and I'm going through the feature list.
At no point did I go to any of their SEO marketed pages, but I was going through their feature list. It's like, here's what I need to do to be able to do this. It wasn't. I landed on a page and signed up. I'm doing my deep research. I'm a qualified lead at that point, doing my deep research to see if this is the product I want and it overcomes my problems and objections.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Exactly. It's how does this work? Right. And FAQs and also, do I like the company?
The about us page is still important. People are going to, it's like, well, where is this company? Who are these people? Is it going to be around in a few years? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: And what builds that trust more, I think than a website is video. Right? It's the actual customer talking.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: And yeah, it's, it's, it. Well, it, the reason, you know, the one I said number one metric is time is twofold.
First of all, it's the mere exposure effect and which, you know, we, I also call like the Oprah effect. It's like the more we see someone's face, hear their voice, the more we trust them.
You can't, it's, it's ingrained in humans and it's weird because it affects me and I know it. And like I watch my clients videos and I'm like, I feel like I see them all the time and, and then I see them, they're like. And I'm all friendly and I'm like, oh yeah. They don't, they don't see me.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: They don't know who I am.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
And you know, this is why clients I hear from, all of our clients are like, people just come in. If they watch our YouTube video, they just come in like I'm their best friend and authority. And so that's a big one. But also, this is interesting because I love Malcolm Gladwell. And so I link a long time ago he wrote about the biggest differentiator between people that get malpractice. Lawsuits and doctors that get them and doctors that don't. Do you know what it is?
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Time talking to the, the client, to the patient.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Time with patient. So it's time with patient now.
Like it's not quality of care. It is not, you know, their education is time with patient now. Here's the interesting thing.
So I looked up the study because I wanted to, I like to confirm my data. And guess what the time difference was?
[00:09:42] Speaker A: I'm going to say 5 to 10 x 2 minutes.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: What?
13.2 minutes to 15. The doctors that don't get sued spent 15 minutes on average with their patients. The doctors that do get sued, 13 minutes on average.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Wow, that's crazy.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: It's crazy. So it's like this powerful effect and that's why we want to optimize for it. And like you said, and I think, I think in the world of AI, we're not. I think social media is going to be kind of dying because it's bots talking to bots.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I really do think about, I felt this with Amazon and I think it's going to be exacerbated by AI video and AI comments and all these bots and stuff. But I really feel like Amazon's just filled with junk, right? At this point, it's just complete junk.
We bought a flashlight and my wife sends me this thing and it was this cheap Chinese thing that was being sold for a lot of money, right? And I was like, this is obviously a Chinese knockoff thing. Let's go look. And so what I did is I went to Wirecutter, I went to all these places, I went to places that I trust to give me that information. And so I believe that curation is the new trust factor. Right. And you need social media and stuff. But it's not going to be the fire hose that social media was. It's going to be people building trust communities within that.
And that is, it's always going to be, and I hate to use the word parasocial relationship because it makes it sound so horrible, but it's people trusting people and it's watching someone like you're saying over and over again building that trust. And that's where social media and business growth and stuff I think will stay. But the general fire hose of hey, here's a random bot on social media is just gonna destroy it all.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree completely. I mean, we still have to have the online communities.
I think those are gonna massively grow. But your usual, like, feed stuff. Yeah, it's. I Mean, I, I know I'm like on LinkedIn less and less and less because it's like, oh my God, this is just all AI stuff I'm seeing.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: It's so bad. It's so bad. I think LinkedIn and Twitter comments are the two places where thoughts go to die. Israel, although I've been on I just signed up for Blue Sky, I'm a little bit late to the party, but it's just as bad. And it's just like you really have to curate, I mean going back to the curation thing, you really have to curate who you're listening to and build off of trust signals there. Because I don't know if people have ever logged into YouTube without, or gone to YouTube in like incognito mode when you don't have anything. Like, have you seen the videos that are on there? It's horrible.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: It's horrible. It is horrible. But, and that's the problem with YouTube though is because YouTube is optimizing obviously for total views.
But we were talking about before you so many people are going down that path for their business when really they only want a thousand people and you're optimizing for all the people you don't want and you end up making Mr. Beast style content for your law firm.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean it's like traffic back in the day. Right. So you always wanted more traffic because that's going to turn into leads and that's just not how it works. And like you're saying, same with video.
We were talking, you know, I was doing, I watch a lot of like what I'd call just end user content. Right. So video, podcast Entertainment content on YouTube. Right. They have like a million views, 3 million views. And they were released a month ago. Right. And I, I was looking at marketing videos. So what were the top ranked marketing videos on YouTube? And other than this one, obviously bot farm thing there was. Russell Brunson has the number one marketing video on YouTube. It is eight years ago and it's half a million views. That's it. That's it. But those are the right half million people. Right. So if your video's getting 1,000 views and those are the right thousand people, that's much more valuable than spreading out to everyone on the Internet.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Well, and yeah, and like it's actually I've had a few people on that are, you know, I hate to use this word, but like targeting newbies, like how to make your first thousand dollars online.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: And that skews my channel because it gets the most Views and so like the lowest common denominator. And like you look at Alex or Mosey and that's what, you know, he's super smart stuff, but most of his stuff is targeting the person. Like, what if, if I want to make $10,000 this year, this is what I would do. And I'm like, man, if I only made $10,000, my wife would kill me.
Exactly.
So, yeah, no, it's, it's really interesting. And, and so many people are like, well, I want the likes and comments, but also the bigger the client you have, the more they're just going to show up and they're not going to like, they're not going to comment. I mean, I've had people like watching my YouTube videos for five years. All of a sudden buy something, they're like, I haven't watch you for five years. I'm like, I don't see a single
[00:14:40] Speaker A: comment or a follow.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, it's really interesting. But I mean, yeah, and it's, I think it's so important that people have to look at the whole, whole part of what they're doing and they can't just be funnel focused anymore.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Yeah, but how. So I want to dig in that a little bit when someone is starting out. So let's say I don't have any video presence. I don't have any of the user videos, the customer videos that anything.
How do you then start in that without.
Maybe I do have videos, but they're not doing well. Right. Like, how would I go about starting that? How do I start this new channel of video other than what I think a lot of people feel, which is like, I'm doing all this video and just posting it into the void.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Yes.
So I'm assuming that. Are you talking about someone has an existing business.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Exist. Existing business trying to go with a new channel.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Gotcha. Yeah. I mean the number one thing, and this is the number one problem I see with existing businesses and YouTube channels is like, show how you work and show your results.
If you do those two things. And that's what case stories work. And you don't have to just get your client, collect your clients, you should listen to your clients, you should interview them, but show how you work and what it means to work with you.
That's the number one thing. Because I go to so many channels and they're like, analyze my channel. I'm like, I don't, I can't tell exactly what you do on your YouTube channel. And like all these videos, like they're like, well, this video has 20, 000 views. I'm like, yeah, but it doesn't say what you like, how I can work with you.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: And I know that seems so obvious, but so few people do that. They're, like, afraid to be. And I'm not saying make a commercial. I'm saying this is what I do. You know, like, hey, when you sign up for segment tricks, your ultimate result is. Right. Is to double your results from your ads. And this is exactly how we do it. Right. And I'm going to show you when you sign up, this is what we do. And you know, when you talk to us, this is what you do. And when you join our email list, this is what's going to happen.
And then all the questions that they have around buying it, because they're buying questions. Yeah. Get all those filled out and finished.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Do you think that people get in their head too much when they're doing this video, or do you think it's like, fear? Like. I think.
I think so. But what do you, like, what's the biggest hurdle you think that people have?
[00:17:03] Speaker B: So either they go, they want to get too technical and talk about what, what, like their technical piece. And I'm like, bigger clients don't want to know exactly, like, how the software works. Right?
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: They don't want to know, like, how you. They want to know how it works for them. That's the one side of it. The other side of it is a lot of people go and start making commercials and like, no one wants to watch a commercial on YouTube. I know you see a lot of commercials on YouTube. They're doing it wrong.
Yeah, that's. I mean, those are the two big ones.
And over just overthinking it and not talking to the person's problems. Right. And really understanding the problems and how you solve their problems. Because no, like, no one wants another software. No one wants another video. They want to be authority. They want to land clients. They want to make sure their ad spend isn't like being blown through the roof in the wrong places.
And, you know, that's. We have to always talk about those problems.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: This is one thing that I realized. It's only been a year, about a year and a year, year and a half ago, that whenever we did a presentation or whenever we did this type of content, we always tried to be very new. Right. We tried to bring something that no one had heard before or like something very exciting, very expert level, and it never landed. And we gave this talk at Craft and Commerce which is Kit's conference. And it was just for us, baseline, right. It was how you look at a funnel, break it up, and then look at the segments of each of those things that you just broke up. Right. So touch points and segments.
And it was the highest ranked workshop at the event. We did it again at microconf. Again, highest ranked workshop at the event. And I'm like, this is stuff that I've been talking about for years. I consider this, like just based. But it's not because we're in this all day. The experts, your clients, we're in this all freaking day. We're thinking high level thoughts about this.
But everyone's not at that level. Everyone wants to know, okay, what are the things I need to do to get results? Not what's the most esoteric thing that I've seen today?
[00:19:12] Speaker B: No, I mean, it's like, I mean, Tony Robbins, a great example of it. Because if you listen to some of his stuff when, if it's the forward facing stuff, he just repeats the same stuff over and over and over and over again. But people need to hear it again. Like you said, they're not doing it all day. They need to be reminded of it and the simplest stuff and keeping it simple work. Because I have the tendency to do it too, because I'm deep in this. I want to talk about YouTube, SEO and A O and trust signals and blah, blah, blah. And if someone gets me going on that I, I can see, like that they go, oh my God, I didn't mean to ask that.
But they, you know, it's, it's so true.
If you do it properly, like where it's accessible to them and they feel transformed, you can win. And I think that it's, you know, like taking that presentation now and breaking up into two, three videos where it's really easy is a great thing for you to do. Yeah.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Repeat it. Yeah, yeah, I think I was talking. You mentioned Tony Robinson talking to me, Sadie, and same thing. He's like, at some point you just have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be repeating yourself over and over and over again for the rest of your life.
And you know what? That's what being a teacher is all about. I was a teacher for three years. I taught English in Japan. It's the same thing. I had the same lesson every single day for three years. And it's like, yeah, I have my lesson plan. I go to six different schools. I'm teaching that same lesson at six different schools. Rinse and repeat Go again, start the new year, do the same thing over again.
That's just your life.
Either you're going to do that or you're not. But that's what you need to do, I feel.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And that's why I think, you know, versions of that stuff on your YouTube channel, versions of that stuff on your YouTube videos, where you're repeating the idea over and over and over and over again till people, you know, and then when they get into indoctrinated and then they're in your community now, you can go deep and they love that. But going deep to. Yeah, I, I agree 100%.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Yeah. I was talking to Aaron Francis. He's big in the PHP community. I don't think anyone listening to this podcast knows who he is, but he was talking about essentially a four to one or five to one strategy where he does four or five general posts, like kind of top funnel. Hey, I'm saying the same thing. Or here's the news, general interest stuff. And then he, for every four or five of those, he does one super in depth, geeky, like, hey, here's a deep dive to get people who are ready to go to the next level more into his ecosystem. Right? So there's a bunch of stuff on top that's essentially like, I'm saying the same thing. I'm doing the blah, blah, blah. And then there's that piece of content that's like, okay, now you're ready to come in deep and essentially warming and qualified lead. Right? Like, same thing we've always been doing. Just the format's different.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Yep, yep, exactly. And that's another thing to think about too, is like, it's, it's a lot of the fundamentals I tell people, like, our whole Core4 YouTube video strategy is very, is a deconstructed webinar.
And it's, it's a lot of the same stuff over and over again. But you got, you get better at it, right? You get better at saying it, you get better at saying. And a lot of our clients, you know, we've made tons of videos and they just get better and better at saying it. And also what's really interesting right now is the repetition is actually affecting AI and the AI search because the more you say this stuff in different places, the more AI goes, you know, oh, you're the expert in this. Like, I was just talking about, I was looking up, like, what AI thought about me in a certain vertical, and it's like, well, you, you go, you talk about many other verticals These people talk about all this vertical only in multiple, in places. So, like, that is really.
That repetition is actually important now to AI search.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Oh, very much so. Like, it's, it's interesting because AI search is essentially SEO. Ten years ago, I feel where it loves listicles, it loves repeated content, it loves all this stuff that we used to do that Google now punishes us for because of the algorithm. But the AI doesn't really have an algorithm. Right. In the same way that we think about it, I was looking at a new partnership platform and I was like, hey, recommend some stuff. And it recommended this. It was like, you really need to use this. This is the best thing out there. And I go to look at their webpage and it's like they have their customer names spelled wrong. They have typos everywhere. I'm like, what?
What is this? And I pushed back to AI. Why did you recommend this site? It looks horrible. They're like, oh, they're just really good at aeo. They said they've been posting all this stuff that AI really likes, and so I put it at the top of my list.
But they were constantly putting out content that was saying the same thing, that was focusing on that and just. Yeah. And then AI was like, oh, they're an expert in their field because no one else is doing this.
Yeah. And they were, they had all this video, they had all this text, they had all this stuff, they had all these testimonials. Like. Yeah, it was crazy.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: That's interesting. Yeah. Like the, the case studies, the volume of case studies is like a big deal.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: And so, yeah, it's, it's super interesting how it's going.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And YouTube is one of the big sources for AI knowledge right now. And so we're look. You're looking at things like, okay, what are the. Because also Google is auto transcripting all of your videos and so that all gets fed into the AI. So you have a case study with someone big, or you have a. You have multiple case studies all saying similar things they're going to be pushing into the AI. And now that's huge because it's a much larger trust signal for AI than it is just to have something on the website because it's video, and video is always ranked higher.
Reddit is ranked higher. Like these things are ranked higher than just standard website stuff.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I'm interested to see what goes on with Reddit because it feels like it's so hackable.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: It is so hackable. Oh, my God. It's like, yes, I'm in a bunch of, of marketing subreddits and I think that every single post and 90% of the comments are AI at this point. Yeah, because marketers are going to try to game the marketing system. Right. So those are the subreddits that they're focusing on. It's like, it's, it's so.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: I don't ruin everything.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Yeah, we really do. We, I mean, it's, it's our lot in life.
There's money to be had. We'll make it.
I want to talk about something you had mentioned on kind of the intake and what we were talking about with this, this kind of YouTube and the fish in the barrel strategy and what, what is that? How, how does that work?
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Like, well, so, I mean, I've been doing it for almost since the dawn of time.
It a version of it and it was interesting. I, I talked to a client and like none of his clients. I'm like, I feel like I see him all the time because I see his videos pop up and I, I talk to him like every 18 months.
And you know, we made this original Fish in the Barrel. So we do the core four videos. You get them ranking and put them in different places.
It's been eight years. And he's like, they just, it all works. It's exactly what you said.
And so basically it's owning the time from something. When someone discovers who you are and they're thinking about you and working with you, all the places that they go, having videos there that are converting videos. Like I talked about how to work with you. The Trusted Path video, you know, your. Why us? I called the YS and not the about us. Because if I, if I tell people about us and they just blab their story, I'm like, no, it's like, why are you different?
You're converting questions. What are the questions that someone asks when they're buying from you? And your case stories, your customer stories and having those surrounding people, those videos surrounding ads are going down because we talked about time with website time, watching the videos. The, you know, like you're probably, you know, when you got close to that, the hosting thing, you started watching longer, more content, right? You'll nibble, nibble, nibble. And like, as you get closer to the buy, you're gonna watch 10, 15, 20 minutes. This is your opportunity to really optimize for this. And so many people are trying to get the lead and not optimize for what I call their fish in the barrel. There's the people there that are swimming around your business and the bigger clients like we've had other agencies, we have people landing a hundred thousand dollar clients because they optimize for that. So like you know, I mean can I can share my screen?
[00:27:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: So you see here segmentrics reviews. Second thing, right Is owning this, right? And, and owning. And this is a great place to have videos ranking. YouTube videos ranking because you get them over to your channel. This is someone else's video, you should have yours ranking, right?
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Like is it legit?
This is a big one. I didn't. Yeah, legit is a big term people put in and obviously the AI searches, this is where you want to be influencing that.
You know, I'd probably try and push this trust pilot thing down.
But another place to own videos. Right. And then you know, you know your name too because you're going around and you're speaking. So people are going to be like, you know, having case stories, having your About Us page. How to work with you here now and then go into segmetrics. Right.
This is another thing I'm doing is optimizing for actually so it doesn't share all the.
There we go. Let me see if that changes.
Optimizing for what you can't see but tabs. Another thing I'm doing is like because people have 20 tabs open so I want to optimize for all the searches and so what I'm doing is putting more YouTube videos, embedding them and having them open up instead of having this play on the website. But you know, definitely I would have here an about us page.
I like the use cases but we did a study with leadpages a long time ago and resources was actually not clicked. So. But having a process tab. Yeah, having a process tab, how does it work? How do I get set up on this about like your story? Because I mean you have a ton of personality and people want to buy from a person.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: It's interesting that you mentioned that because we used to have a Y Seg metrics front and center and we kind of buried it in the. In the use cases section right now.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: But I would look at your heat map and because I learned all this from the. You know we at one point we had like 300 websites that we hosted and we had heat maps on all of them. About US was the second most used page. Great place to put a YouTube video because now they're going to spend some time with you. Your process page, all those searches that I put on your LinkedIn, you should be have a YouTube video because you can open up. The LinkedIn YouTube video will open up again. You're owning more searches. Right. Because they're going to look this up. I would have your LinkedIn ranking for this too. And speak. But these are. That's the fish in the barrel. There's like 20 different places. When you go through that calculator, the go to videocase story.com Keith. It'll show you all the different places. And if you, if your average client value is $10,000 and you get one extra client a year from each of these places, like 20 places or course of four years, it's $800,000 return on investment.
And so that's that fish in the barrel strategy. It. And it seems really obvious, but people don't take it seriously.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: I think people don't take it seriously because they don't see immediate results. Right. And that's what I have seen across people that we've worked in the past as well, where they're like, oh, I did this thing for a month and I didn't get a million dollars. I'm just gonna cut it. Right. It's like, it's all, it's like you're saying it's wider and it's about stacking those bricks and like, okay, people are gonna find one of these things at some point and the more you have, the more chances it's increasing your luck surface. Right?
[00:31:30] Speaker B: Yes. I love that. Yeah.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
There was a phrase you used and I really want to pull back on what was the name of the freaking phrase. I'm gonna have to go back at the recording once this is live because it was such a good. Oh, that's what it was. Deconstructing a webinar.
I love that idea because I think all of us as marketers, as coaches, as all this stuff that we're doing, we understand the webinar, we understand the webinar format and the idea to deconstruct and like, okay, we're just going to chop this thing up and this is our social content strategy works so well. I think that really like, I think that rings true with a lot of people.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, because like when people are gonna like, the bigger the client, the less that sales can happen during the workday. Right. And if you're, if you're a coach or a consultant targeting C suite, they're not watching your YouTube videos on, you know, at noon on a workday because they're working.
But though at 8 o' clock on Sundays, they'll poke Around, Right. And at night, poke around and watch a little bit. A little bit, A little bit. And this is where you want to have repeated the various versions, various things that you're talking about. So when they poke around, eventually they get. And then that you just drive them down. So you're connecting the videos so they do see the whole webinar, but it's asynchronous.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you find that?
And this. I know this is getting into the nitty gritty because I love you a lot of video now.
I love video. I love talking into the camera.
One of the things I hate doing, though, is like getting the. Oh, I got to show the slides now and I got to do the demo video and all this stuff. Do you find that people respond better when there are visuals in addition to the talking head? Or do you see that even just a plain talking head is, is valuable in itself?
[00:33:25] Speaker B: We try and add B roll to everything and some, some. I mean, you still need to entertain them a little bit and, and you, you know, because people are looking off left and right and you want to, you want to grab their attention. So I do find visuals. I'm going deeper into it. It is interesting though, because I, I'll give you the link to this, but I did a link. I was doing slides for all these FAQs. I'm like, hey, here's 20 FAQs. Make me slides for it. And I built the slide generator and it start to answer the slides and it gave all incorrect answers, like, but they seem right.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Right?
[00:34:01] Speaker B: They seem right. I'm like, where did you get this from? And like, I'm like, did you use my content? Like, I used to do some of your content and then I just kind of made it up too. And.
But so it's. You got to be careful with the visuals if you, if you're not an expert. But I do think, yeah, I think it's so easy now. There's so much you can do with Claude and stuff to make really good visuals. I think you should take the time to do it.
I do though, like, if you, if it's too AI, it is affecting like LinkedIn and the search. I think it's. It's doing some scans. I know it does scans and like scans for the water, AI watermarks when you upload it.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Yeah. So I be careful with AI generated stuff.
I think YouTube's going to start segmenting it out too.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I think they've already, they've started already for fully AI videos. I think they watermark that. And they're like, no, push that stuff down.
That's interesting, though. I think that's part of the backlash we're going to see because it was interesting. So Claude released Claude design and people are building websites out of them. They all look exactly the same. It's the funniest effing thing. You can instantly tell a Claude. It's like when Bootstrap came out. And then Tailwind is like, all the sites look exactly the same for about, I don't know, maybe a year or two years or something until people figure out how to, like, make them not look the same.
But I'm looking at, like, anything that's like, especially oranges or like that weird that, that marker underlying thing. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's. You just AI coded this in 10
[00:35:33] Speaker B: seconds and the same fonts. And I'm like, yeah. And it's like, I've tried using it. I'm like, don't use those AI fonts. And, like, it, like, sneaks them in. I'm like, what are you doing?
[00:35:43] Speaker A: I actually, I thought it was better before they had Claude design, and that's getting into a huge rabbit hole. But, like, because I, I, I use cloud code every day. Like, we use it sigmetrics, we use it for marketing. We use it everything to help improve what we're doing and to get better ideas and to bring all this stuff out. But when you just toss something in and it's like, make it, it's turns out like, shit.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: No, no, yeah, that's. I mean, that's. I think everyone needs to.
I, I had a client, hopefully doesn't listen to this, but he's like, I had AI make me a marketing plan. I'm like.
And then I looked at him like, and like, it just basically was like a sycophantic. Like, I know you like these words, so I'm gonna put these words up here. Yeah, yeah, it's bad.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's. I, I've tried, I've been curious. I've. I tried the make a marketing plan thing. It's, it's middling advice, right? It's the standard, like, post on social, like, write blog posts. It's like, Yeah, I know, I know. The other thing I tried was with data and, like, I would. This is my favorite story right now. I don't, I've never trusted Claude with data, but I decided to try it. I uploaded 800 of our most recent trials and I was like, I want to do an onboarding analysis. How long are people taking to connect their stuff? How long are they doing to like, our major touch points in that thing?
I just want to see time differences and all this stuff and find some insights. And it made some really pretty graphs. Looks awesome. It's like clickable. It's so cool. It's the most awesome thing. I looked at one of the numbers, like, that's a weird number. 43. That does not sound like a number that should exist there. Hey, Claude, what's this number? And it's like, oh, you uploaded 800 records. I just used the first five.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Oh my God.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: I was like, you did what? You did what?
So, and it never told us, like, it never looked at that. And it gave us a nice total. It said, yeah, 800 records. That's how many you uploaded. But I only looked at 5 for the actual analysis.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: I know I always have to be like, did you use all the skills? No, I kind of, I guessed based on the skills. I'm like, oh my God. Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: It's like, did you, did you get lazy halfway through and start browsing Reddit? Like, what's going on here?
[00:37:56] Speaker B: It's, it's, it is, it's kind of like a, like semi lazy, super smart employee. Like, you're really smart when you do
[00:38:02] Speaker A: the stuff, but the laziest person
[00:38:08] Speaker B: I'm going to lie to you authoritatively.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. I mean, they're just so good at it. Just wants to please us, right?
[00:38:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
So, man, what's overarching? Like, what do you feel is next for kind of video and how we present ourselves and like, building that relationship? Do you think it's different than it was six months ago with how AI and search and everything has changed? Or do you feel like it's still the same thing and it's always going to be that same bread and butter kind of stuff?
[00:38:44] Speaker B: The, the big difference I see is while we said, you know, you shouldn't worry about the metrics is if videos rank more with more views. And I think running ads to the videos to get views is, is affecting AI.
I, I, I think more so than ever, you, you have to treat YouTube like your website. And like, and it's the argument I have with a lot of my clients, like, I don't want to send people to YouTube because there's other people. I'm like, there's, because there's other people on there and they'll go other places. I'm like, there's not one single person watching this right now that has Only one tab open and it's only, I mean, I don't know, like, my mom doesn't watch my podcast. I don't know if you're like. But there's not one single person watching that. So we want to. I think sending More people to YouTube as your website is probably one of the most important things you can do.
But besides that.
No, I think avoiding AI. Don't let AI write the scripts for you.
[00:39:44] Speaker A: Right, I see. I. It's interesting because I feel I've heard that a lot too. It's like, oh, but my competitors are on YouTube. It's like, are they bigger than you? Because if they're bigger than you, then you're still taking their audience. You're building on the work they did for your audience. Are you bigger than them? Then it doesn't matter. Right. Like for me, you know, we were talking about people, trust people and that community.
And one of, I think the benefits around that is when you see when you watch a bunch of, let's say, online course, online course videos, right? And people talking about that and it's all about. And you just watch this one person and then now this new. Your client, this new person starts popping up and you're like, oh, that's interesting too. And that would not have been there if they weren't already watching this. So you're kind of getting. And maybe I'm completely off track on this, but I feel like with the YouTube recommendation engine, you get kind of into other people's audiences to a degree, because when you finish one video, they're recommending other ones that are like, it 100.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: I mean, in YouTube, when you send traffic to YouTube, YouTube knows who's going to that video. And if you, if you're making, I think you know, the video, the quality of the videos, and by quality, I mean content. Because everyone's like, how do you rank a YouTube video? Because we, we have them ranking. But it's, you need to understand you so much more intention about who's watching it and when it's watching it and how you're driving traffic there than ever before. Because it's the, the opportunities there.
And I think that's, that's the thing that's. It's amplified, not changed. Yeah, because like, yeah, like you said, if you're sending people to there and they watch two minutes of your video, three minutes of your video, which is half of it, they're going to start recommending that video to other people that are in the same situation, that the same problems. Because they want more people to watch that video.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Right. I mean, at the end of the day, that's all YouTube wants, is for people to watch more video and to never leave the site. So the more that they can promote content. And it's interesting because even Google search, there was a study done by SparkToro that I believe it's 54% or maybe it's 70%. It's a huge number. It's a huge number of Google searches. Never leave a Google property, which means that they're going into Gemini, they're going into YouTube, they're going into all these places that Google still owns as part of that search. Interesting. Google's whole thing is they want to keep you and all these social platforms, they want to keep you right there watching as much content as humanly possible. And if that means recommending someone else who you want to get in there, then it's a great play.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: So I want to touch on something because you had talked about doing ads to the YouTube videos. Do you find that ads or boosted videos are better? Because I know a lot of people are just like, every video I put up, I put $100, $200 just to boost it. Do you find, do you find that different? Or how do you.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: I, I do high intent keyword ads.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: I mean, it's the second most used search engine. And as Google's data, why not send people looking for that problem to your video?
[00:42:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: And it's funny because, like, we have clients in like, sensitive areas and like, they're like, like one of my clients, his neighbor is like, oh, I saw your YouTube video on my TV. And he's like, oh, he's like, you did something bad.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: You should not have been searching for that, my man.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Like you search for something and you're in trouble. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, no, I, that's what I, I think because you don't want just viewers, you want some intent.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:34] Speaker B: And we have one right now running for an agency that were like high, high, high intent keywords. And they're at 0.003 cents of you with an 80% view time because then tents there. And now this is what's really good about it is because the intense there and you get the view time, you actually, Google and YouTube will start ranking the videos for you.
So.
[00:43:59] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's, it works.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: That's brave new world. And it's interesting because traditional ads, let's say, are really having a hard time. Cost is going up, Retargeting. Is more expensive than cold ads at this point, which is insanity.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: Yeah, some of the price, I know some people are doing really well on it, but a lot of people are just like, especially in the B2B space, anything that's going after any sort of prosumer or business level, the ad price is just insane. Like it's just so much money at this point. It's like, okay, we're looking to get ROI in six months, not a week like it used to be, right. Or God forbid you try to have a self liquidating offer at this point.
[00:44:44] Speaker B: Right?
[00:44:44] Speaker A: So it's fascinating.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: I think a lot of those people rely too much on it automatically doing it for them. And so they didn't spend enough time on the, on really understanding the, the content that they made.
You know, and it's. I'm in a, you know, a couple mastermind groups with like amazing copyrights from back in the day that did tons of, you know, millions of dollars of direct mail and they had to spend the time nailing it down because you didn't have a second chance with it. And now it's like with Facebook ads is like, oh, put up more garbage.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: This is the thing that gets to me, I think. And I've gone to a couple of marketing conferences recently where I feel like they've lost the lead a little bit because they keep saying, oh, we're just going to have all this AI stuff out there. AI is doing all my ads and so everything's generic, right? And they're like, well, we're just pushing it to more people. I'm like, there's a lot of people in the world, right? But especially when you're a high level coach or you're a high level creator or you're trying to sell something that's not ten bucks. Like there is a limit to the number of people. And like our, some of our ads get half, like 100,000 impressions. Half a million impressions. A million impressions. Like that's a lot of people.
How long can we keep.
What is the damage to our brand to push out schlock? If we're just thinking that these people are. There's always new people that are going to convert, right?
[00:46:13] Speaker B: And if you think about it, I mean AI like we're talking about the websites, right?
Only can.
It doesn't make new stuff up. It makes up stuff but it's not original. And, and so it is just bringing in from what it sees out there and what it, you know, what might be working. So we we have it in this death spiral of everything looking the same. And I think that's the, that's the opportunity is to not be doing it and do something completely different.
And you know, and what works like, like you said, and, and make it not look AI because here's the thing. Just because the ad didn't work like you said, doesn't mean didn't do damage to your brand. And if it's, you know, when I see AI over and over and over again, I'm like, you're getting lazy and you're insulting me.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I feel, I feel the same way when I see, especially on LinkedIn posts, right. I'm scrolling LinkedIn and I see the same, I see the same cookie cutter posts and the same AI generated images because it's fascinating. I feel it's kind of like the IKEA effect, right. The first time you see this come out, you're like, holy crap. I just put in a prompt and this thing came back and this is awesome looking. And then you don't realize as you're scrolling LinkedIn that it looks like every other post out there and you're like, wait a minute. What I thought looked so freaking cool is just this cookie cutter off the shelf thing.
And as soon as you realize that that's AI, then your value of those posts and that content just drops like a rock.
[00:47:41] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
Yeah. And you feel insulted.
[00:47:46] Speaker A: Yeah, you really, you really do. You really do. You're like, you didn't spend the time to come up with an original idea here. You're just pushing stuff into the void.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: Exactly, Ian.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: Awesome, man. I always love talking to you. It's so great. Like, you have so much good stuff. Talk about where can people find you, what should they come to you for?
[00:48:07] Speaker B: Video kstory.com Like I said, video case story.com. keith. I'll, I'll have the Fish in the barrel analyzer. I mean, it's really, it's probably the most. If you're, if you are a high, like have a high ticket, high value service, it is probably the most important thing you can do and no one does it.
You can go there and then also follow me on YouTube, you know, look up iron garlic. I'm the only one out there and. Yeah. And if you want to connect to me on LinkedIn, connect me on LinkedIn. Tell me you saw me here and whatever I can do to help, let me know.
[00:48:37] Speaker A: Awesome, man. Thank you so much for joining us.
Love it as always and see you then.
