How to craft viral videos for marketing & sales [with Joseph Wilkins]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Joseph Wilkins, as they will be discussing tricks and hacks to increase the view rate of a marketing or sales video, what makes excellent marketing & sales videos and what septs to take in order to increase the chances of your video content to go viral.

Joseph Wilkins founded ProCreative Studios almost 20 years ago where his team produced infomercials, TV commercials and corporate videos. Joseph has directed thousands of campaigns for clients including Google, Linkedin, McDonalds, GoldmanSachs, Chevrolet, Home Depot and other mega brands. As habits shifted from television to online, Joseph launched FunnySalesVideos.com in 2017, where he creates attention-grabbing viral style sales videos that entertain viewers into making an immediate purchase. With two decades experience, hundreds of millions of TV & online views and hundreds of millions of dollars in tracked sales, Joseph has developed 8 simple steps any business can follow to boost online sales.

 

Connect with Joseph:

FunnySalesVideos: https://funnysalesvideos.com/

How To Make a Video Go Viral Podcast: https://www.audible.com/pd/Podcast/B08JJPY549

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilkinsjoseph/

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro  

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/ 

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu 

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency 

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/ 

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode transcript:

 

Andrei Tiu  0:08  

Hello there. This is Andrei, and you are on a new episode of The Market Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Joseph Wilkins who is the founder of ProCreative Studios, which he's been running for nearly 20 years and FunnySalesVideos.com. Joseph is also a host of the How to Make a Video go Viral Podcast, and today we discuss what makes great marketing and sell videos and hacks for making your content go viral. Joseph, thank you for being on the show. Good morning. How are you? How's the day going? 

 

Joseph Wilkins  0:33  

It was bright and early. Good, though. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited to chat with you today.

 

Andrei Tiu  0:40  

Excited as well! A very hot topic today, videos, marketing video, sales videos, and how to get as many people as possible to see them. So I think we have a busy agenda. Insightful things I know, you have prepared an overview from your period that infomercial produced overview from your own e-book, which is for free to download if our listeners here would like to get a more in-depth understanding of what we're going to be discussing today. Can you tell us where they can find it, and the link is going to also be in the description of this episode?

 

Joseph Wilkins 1:15

Sure. So it's a fairly small book packed ebook. It's called ''How to create a funny sales video without hiring us. Eight simple steps anyone can follow" and you can download it at the bottom of our homepage, which is FunnySalesVideos.com.

 

Andrei Tiu 1:32

Sweet, we'll include a link to that in the description of this episode as well. And very excited, to get into the nitty-gritty. So let's see - let's build a bit of context first for our audience. Tell us who are you, how you start on your journey and what you're up to?

 

Joseph Wilkins 1:51

Sure. So I started, as you mentioned, in my intro, 20 years ago, I started an agency that was primarily focused on producing television infomercials, short-form TV commercials and corporate sales videos. And our very first project when I started the company, in fact, the client that helped me to start the company, was Little Giant ladders. And within a short period of time that infomercial produced over $200 million in sales, just absolutely mind-blowing. I always like to qualify, we were one of three production companies on that project. But it gave me a taste of the power of video when you create a very well crafted sales message, and then target a larger audience. So we did that for about 15 years. We were an agency that would do creative for television, and also online. We've worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. I mean, LinkedIn, Google, Chevrolet, Goldman Sachs, McDonald's, but we also worked with a lot of smaller startups. So we were kind of, you know, always a fairly small shop, but we have clients that didn't make us look that small. Anyway, fast forward to about five years ago, we were struggling because we were kind of basing all of our marketing on old technology - television - people don't watch television the same way that they did 20 years ago, when I started the agency, you know, Divo, TV. And then obviously now online streaming has just not completely but almost completely replaced our viewing habits. I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I watched live, real broadcast television. And so about five years ago, our clients were saying, how do we get back to how the results that we used to get on television, because production costs weren't getting any lower. airtime costs weren't getting any lower, but the viewership was much, much lower. And so that's when we started to look at agencies like the Harmon brothers and other agencies like them that were doing these entertaining, viral-style sales videos, using humour primarily to entertain viewers into a purchase, or at least entertaining viewers into being aware of new companies and liking new companies and getting online social traction. And it's funny the past 15 years before that when a client will call us up and say 'Hey, we saw this really funny video, we want to do something like that. We would say 'Sorry, we don't do funny. Go contact one of these other companies because we just didn't have the tools the team and the worst thing you can do is try to be funny when you're not. And that's when the Harmon brothers were launching their Harmon Brothers University which is basically where they would take on Students and mentor them and teach them how they did what they did. And after going through their course, we started to see just hugely successful results online compared to what we had been doing previously with your traditional, you know, boring style, benefit-driven, call to action, shove-it-down-the-throat-and-try-to-get-them-to-buy-without-really-giving-them-anything-to-enjoy. And as soon as we went through their training - and I recommend Harmon Brothers University to anyone watching- our first campaign hit 7 million views. To give you some context, in the past 15 years, anytime we tried to launch a campaign online, our biggest grossing views for a video was 100,000 views maybe. And so this just catapulted the results that we're getting. Fast forward to today, our last campaign between two videos has 60 million views. I mean, just absolutely outstanding numbers, and more importantly, millions of dollars in sales. And so basically, what we do now, is we try to position ourselves - we're still a very small shop, and so we have fairly small overhead, but you know, trying to produce these bigger budget productions, or at least the look of the bigger budget production, on a much smaller budget than some of our competitors. But even so, some of our clients still can't afford that. And so that's why we came up with the free ebook. And I love to teach people my eight steps, how any business owner, small or large can try to create these kinds of more entertainment style marketing so that they can see much bigger returns on their ads. 

 

Andrei Tiu  6:52  

Super. So is there - before we go into it - is there a certain pattern or a certain type of brands that you thought was more appropriate to this kind of funny video type of advertising than others? The reason why I'm saying this is because for example, from our work with brands in B2B and B2C, and b2b stack and professional services and everything else, you always know it's not a person that purchases that product or that software if we talk B2B. But did you find any brand can apply these principles to a certain extent? Or is there any other context or advice you'd give to people before we go into the actual practice?

 

Joseph Wilkins  7:35  

My standard answer to that anytime the phone rings and a potential client says 'is this really right for our brand?' I always say 'well, is your end customer a human being? You know, do they have a sense of humour? Do they like to smile? Do they like to laugh?' And so the short answer is no, we, it doesn't matter whether you're producing a campaign for a very, very serious B2B audience, or a b2c or even we've done fundraising campaigns. So regardless of what your objective is, the key is you've got to make a relevant story. You can't think of this as let's just go out and be funny. That's one of the last steps, the first step - and we can talk about this later - you've got to identify who is your audience, and what kinds of problems do they have. Then the rest you can create a story around, but as long as you're relevant, you start out with pains that you know, your customers are experiencing them build a story around that it doesn't matter what the current company is, or, frankly, what they've done before. We're all looking to get to disruption, something that's different from what your competitors are doing. And so, you know, I tell everyone, B2B, B2C, serious audience, you know, it doesn't matter.

Andrei Tiu 8:58

Super, thank you. Well, then let's dive straight into it. What's the first step? Where do we start? 

 

Joseph Wilkins  9:04

Okay, so the first step, as I said, is research. Brainstorm, discovering who is your customer? What are the things that your customers are experiencing? Where are your customers? And so the more learning you can do - and this doesn't matter, if you're producing a funny sales video or writing copy for your next brochure, you got to understand who is your target audience. The more specific you can get in creating a customer avatar, the better and more successful your campaign is going to be. And I talk more in depth about that in the e-book. The second step is once you've identified your customer avatar - and I'll just mention really quickly: I'm not just talking about you know, are they male? are they female, how old are they? what's their income? those are demographics and that's fine, you need those, but you need to go deeper than that. Psychographics, what keeps them up at night? what are the pains? what's the cost of not doing something and so that you can really understand the mindset of the person that you're talking to. So the next stage is just brainstorming multiple ideas, a lot of people will say 'Well, I don't know where to come up with ideas’, and the first thing that you need to do is create what I call a brain share, which is basically a group of people that are all invested in the success of your project, some of those people should be your customer avatar. So whether that's employees in your company, family, friends, some of those, you probably want to reach out to professional creative writers. If you don't have those on staff, you can find those online from sites like Fiverr and other freelancers. But basically, once you have a group of people, what Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, in his book, 'Creativity, Inc', calls the brain share, then you just start throwing out multiple ideas, you know, dozens and dozens of crazy ideas in a safe environment, where there's no criticism, there are no wrong answers, because some of the worst ideas can spin off a great idea from somebody else. And so it's really a numbers game. And here, we're all we're talking about is, you know, what's the story about, who's the character in our story? What is the problem that we're trying to solve? and you want to throw it out in creative ways. The more different than what the next person is going to be doing on this timeline or on the YouTube feed or wherever your ad is going, the more different it can be, the better. But again, it has to be relevant. And if you want to see examples of these kinds of videos, again, look at FunnySalesVideos.com, but look at some, you know, go to the Harmon Brothers and go to a lot of these other agencies that produce these really same styles of videos. But it's a numbers game. So throw out as many different crazy ideas as you can. And then you put on your kind of judgement hat and say 'okay, which of these 50 ideas are our top five?' and then really spend some time refining those. And then finally, you got to distil it down to the one. Now you can pick up concepts or little things of the other ideas, but you want to really come up with your one key concept that has a character, that has a problem that's relevant, but an entertaining way to present that problem. Step three is scripting. So there are three different rounds of scripting. The first is the marketing copy. And most businesses have, you know, a marketing writer on staff. But again, if you're a smaller business, there are many, many freelancers that are willing to jump in and be part of your team, fairly affordably. But identify, what are the key selling points, the reasons why your customer buys your product. And one of the best ways to find this is to read a bunch of online reviews about your product or about your competitor’s products. And don't just assume that you know, why your customers are buying. Do the research. Find out. And again, one of the easiest ways to do that is to read lots and lots of customer reviews, dozens and dozens, make lists and figure out what are the most common things people are saying about why they love your products? Or why they love your competitors’ products. Also look for reasons why they don't buy, what are the objections? What are the things that they may be saying after they bought it that they're not crazy about and then first, try to fix those in your business - you can't sell a product with a benefit that doesn't exist. And so sometimes our marketing team will go back to the client and say  'we need to wait a few months, you need to fix this, you need to improve this before we can really launch it because this is what customers are asking for'. But if your competitor has a differentiating advantage that you don't have to figure out ways to overcome those in the sales script. And then you want to go through creating - taking those marketing copy points, and creating a story. So this is where a creative writer would come into the team. And then once you've got your story, and most of the time I tell people we use Donald Miller's story brand structure. So you know, the hero who has a problem, who meets the guy to show them the solution that makes his life better. And again, look at the different videos that are out there and just try to look at those story points of how these videos are taking that problem turning it into a solution and then giving the viewer a very easy way to take you up on an irresistible offer. So the next part is that in the comedy. This is the fun part. And this is the part that I absolutely recommend you don't try to do yourself. Reach out to comedians, to comedy writers, to people who can come onto your team and take that story and make it funny, adding jokes, adding witty lines, adding funny subplots to the story. As long as it doesn't distract you, but you want to find somebody who is experienced in comedy. So go to your local comedy clubs and watch stand up comedians and approach them after the show and ask them, if they'd like to freelance for you on the side, a lot of these comedians work during the evening, but they don't have jobs during the day because they're travelling to the next gig. A lot of online sites, again, like Fiverr have comedy writers. So it's all about numbers - to our scripts will typically go through we'll have five or so comedians that add to the script once the first draft is complete. And it's all about again, throwing out as many good ideas as possible, and then throwing away anything that doesn't add to the story. And that's not genuinely clever, funny. You don't want to be silly, funny, you don't want to be dad-jokes, you want to do something that will make the customer laugh. But also, you know, intelligently advanced the story. So that's, that's step four, step five is the production. And one of the most important parts is picking the right actor to portray your brand character. And so you know, we go through dozens and dozens of auditions, before we find the right character for each video. And to do that just reach out to your local acting agencies. One of the great things about auditioning actors is it doesn't cost a penny. Especially in these days of COVID, most actors are set up with a home studio, kind of like where I am, and they'll do audition tapes virtually. And they'll email them to you. And we'll go through 20-30 audition tapes before we find maybe two or three that we think are a really good fit. And then we'll set up a callback with Zoom just like we're doing right now. And I'll audition them and I'll say 'Okay, that was great, I loved your audition tape. Now, do it faster or do it with this emphasis or think about this' because sometimes doing an audition tape and sending it in is very different than on the day of the shoot, when there's the pressure and the camera and the lights and the strange crew, you want to make sure that your actors can respond to the direction that you're going to give them when they're on set. You also want to make sure that they're good at comedy, right? Timing is everything. So delivering jokes, with the right you know, kind of cadence. And also, you know, speaking fast is a huge thing that we'll talk about in step six. But, you know, make sure that your actor can deliver lines pretty fast because people's attention span just won't stick around if they're slow and have long pauses between sentences. So that's the critical part - getting the right actor. And then obviously, if you have a very small budget, you can shoot these videos yourself. But the benefit, if you hire a professional production team, is that it's going to look different, it's going to look higher production value. And it's going to disrupt better than if you just film it on an iPhone, because all of your competitors, or most of the other videos that people are putting out on Facebook or YouTube, are filmed with your phone. And so if you can look better look different, it's gonna add to the disruption. You also want to make sure that while you're on set filming, you create a fun environment that's not doesn't have stress on it so that your actors feel comfortable to improvise and to add things to the script and just to have fun. A lot of the time, in fact, all of the time, our videos ended up not matching what we wrote. It should always have, additions and fun little, you know, things that happen on set that you just happen to capture on camera. And that won't happen if you're so rigid and structured that you have to stick to that script. Any questions I've got a couple more and then I'll throw it back to you - any questions so far?

 

Andrei Tiu  19:32  

I think it's pretty clear. I was trying to build a sort of practical example in my head and trying to break it down. But basically, one thing that I think it's like an idea that is being carried through is: in order for you to actually be funny and not be cringe or silly, know when to actually look for a professional that can give you that edge rather than you trying to be funny when maybe you're not necessarily a funny person in that sense. I mean, probably you are good at telling jokes. But that's not the same as trying to make a funny video funny.

 

Joseph Wilkins 20:09

Yes, I would say if there are two places if you are shoestring budget, don't have, you really, really don't have any money. The two places that you should invest in are a good comedy writer and a good actor. Everything else you can kind of get away with, you're still not going to get the kinds of results that hiring the professionals that do it day in and day out, are going to get, but you really want to make sure you get a great writer and a great actor. You can get by without some of the other things, but ultimately, it's down to what do you want your investment to return. And so if you put nothing in, you really can't expect a huge amount out, you can definitely expect better returns than running,  whatever everyone else is running. But if you really want to elevate and, you know, get the kinds of results that I mentioned earlier, millions of views and millions of dollars in sales, it's probably worth investing in to do it, right. But anyone can do it, and anyone can improve what they're already doing with these steps. So really quickly, the next couple of steps. So step six is the editing. And again, I hate to keep saying this, but an editor who understands comedy and has experience in timing, with editing those lines is invaluable. So you can even take some video footage that has been delivered a certain way and in editing, you can improve it, you can speed it up, you can cut it quicker, you can overlap lines. I used to - when we were doing infomercials, we would hire out these focus groups where you know, there'd be this one-way mirror, and we'd be watching what people were reacting to, as they're watching our infomercials. And they had this little dial where they had to turn it to a frowny face happy face. And we would see on these charts after the session was done, we would graph it all out. And we would see the moments where the people were getting bored, or they were getting turned off. And I always imagined them, you know, with a remote control about to change the channel if we don't keep it fast pace edited. And the same is true online. In fact, it's even more true because people have less attention span. So keeping it fast, cutting out the breaths, speeding things up. It's critical that in editing, you really make that pace fast, upbeat, or else you're going to lose people who will get bored. We also edit multiple versions of each video. Our hero version, the main version is typically around three minutes long. Now some people say well, that's way too long. People don't click away from a video because it's long, they click away because they get bored. And so if you've got if you've done these steps, right, it will be way more effective than what you know, some of these other agencies or platforms will recommend these 10 seconds short direct get to the call to action videos. Well, that's good advice. If you're really if you really don't have the creativity to hook someone's attention, and then keep hooking them all the way throughout. Our videos will test shorter versions and longer versions. And almost every time the longer versions will out-perform the shorter versions. Because we've created a connection with the viewer, we've created a character that they relate to. And then when that character delivers the offer, they're way more likely to buy than if you just throw out an offer before they've established that credibility. And so we'll edit, you know, short versions, long versions, we'll edit square versions for Facebook, where we burn the subtitles in will let it longer versions in widescreen format for YouTube and desktop. So it's all about making sure you understand 'well, where is this customer watching this video? What's the best size and format to make sure that they're delivering with the most real estate of that video.' So step seven is and I guess this is kind of where I'll pull back the curtain and reveal the dirty secret that - our videos aren't viral. Organically. The days of creating an organically viral sales video are gone. So years and years ago, it used to be that if you would create a funny video like Dollar Shave Club - is a great example. They just went out and created a funny video put it online and it blew up without spending money to promote it as an ad. Facebook and YouTube have got smart, their algorithms won't promote your ad anymore. If it's selling a product because they know that if you're making money using that platform, they want to get a piece of that. And so nowadays, the goal isn't to make a viral sales video that organically goes viral is to create a video that when you spend $1 on it, you get three, four or five dollars in return. And so you're just going to keep doing that. And that's how these views rack up. Is because it's profitable for companies to continue running that as a paid ad. Any ad that you've seen in the past, you know, 5-10 years that has 10's of millions of views, you pretty much can be 100% positive that those views weren't created organically, they were created from paid ads. But time and time again, where we go into a company and do nothing other than just replace the creative with ads, we see a return on ad spend, double, triple, because the effectiveness of that ad is so much more profitable. That's the goal. It's kind of like creating a vending machine that's full of $100 bills, they cost $20 to use the machine. How many times you're going to use that machine? That's basically the principle here. And so every single time you create something, you want to test it and test it and test it. So in the scripting phase, in the comedy phase, in the auditioning phase, test this on your brain share, on the people that are your customer avatar, and find out does this work for you? Is this funny to you?Don't rely on your own opinion, because your opinion doesn't really matter. It's what the customer's opinion is that really matters. And so continuing to test and then you know, step eight is, again, forget going viral, you will get a big boost in organic shares. But that should kind of be the cherry on the top, not the meat. And so those you know, very, very quickly, those are the eight steps that we use on pretty much every project that we go through. And 20 years of experience going from the results that we use to get to what we're seeing today. I mean, we pretty much don't do any other kinds of video production anymore, because they're just not as effective as when we use these eight steps.

 

Andrei Tiu  27:14  

That was insightful. So let's see, let's try to take a practical example. Or maybe if you have a sort of like a case study in mind, and maybe we can discuss and debate a bit from a marketing and video perspective, as well. So kind of look into the applicability of that ad or that video. And let's try to deflect it into what was done right at which point in time. Because, even from our conversations, a lot of marketing managers or directors or entrepreneurs that want to use video to promote their services, a certain way, depending on the end objective of that, of that video, we'd have, the videos that are used for social media ads that are, let's say driving traffic to the online store, versus the case study type of videos and the company presentation type of videos, which they need to be different. And now with the rise of for example TikTok, I think TikTok could be a great platform that we could bring into the conversation to discuss or the purpose of discussing specifically funny videos. Because I think probably 100% of the brands that we work with, including ourselves, it's hard to know how to make a video on TikTok and be sure it's funny, if that makes sense, if you want it to be funny. So this is a bit going back to your point of hiring professional, funny people that can add that touch to it.

 

Joseph Wilkins  28:51  

Yeah, for sure. And I'll say just a word about TikTok. So typically, what we do is we will launch a campaign and just a quick disclaimer: we're a creative agency, so we don't get involved in the marketing. We take a client from concept through completion of the video, and then we hand it off to another agency. Typically, the client already has an agency, or maybe they have an in house team. So this isn't our wheelhouse, but I can speak to the creative side. Typically what we will do is we'll create the full version of the hero campaign, which is always our highest converting video. But then a lot of people won't buy. The first time they watch they're put into a retargeting funnel, and that's where TikTok and Instagram and shorter form content videos work well for us. So they've seen that first three-minute version, and then because TikTok limits the length of videos, will retarget them with TikTok or will retarget them with Instagram. And so you know, it's a multi-touch process, they may start seeing on YouTube or Facebook with the long-form version, and then they'll get retargeted on TikTok or Instagram or Snapchat or other platforms. So we'll edit those versions just like I was saying earlier, the shorter versions for the retargeting.

 

Andrei Tiu  30:19  

Do you have a recent example in mind of a brand that maybe you work with? And maybe we can talk a bit about that specific brand. I'm inclined to take the discussion into maybe E-commerce if you have a good example in that area.

Joseph Wilkins  30:34  

Yeah, perfect example, I mentioned them earlier. But True-Earth Eco Strips is one of our latest big case studies. They're a company that sells laundry detergent in strip form, which means that they don't sell e plastic jugs that pollute landfills. And it's a way for people to do their laundry, without having the consumer waste of plastic. And so it's a mission-based company, which, you know, really helps us online, because people love to talk about good mission-based stories. But we basically created a campaign - if you go to FunnySalesVideos.com, it's the two videos at the very top of our page, one of them, I think the numbers need to be updated, but one of them has 30 million views, the other one has 15 million views. And basically, what they did is they took a problem, which is we all have to do laundry but none of us liked the fact that we're wasting all of this plastic, and it's going into our landfills, and it's not being recycled. And so we created a story around a mom, who, who isn't this extremist, but you know, still wants to do her part. And the video just completely blew up. Within two weeks, we had over 11 million views, it had doubled the click-through rate on any video that they've done before. And this was a company that was already doing very, very well with had a very good in-house marketing team. But the results that they were getting back from these kinds of videos was just way more effective than what they'd done before. And like I mentioned now that between those two videos and the retargeting videos, over 60 million views. Now, that was an agent's or a company that had a very good advertising budget. And so obviously, they were spending a lot of money on Facebook, to promote that ad. And to get those kinds of views. I'll contrast that with another company that came to us, it was one man that was doing a very small business that had a tiny marketing budget. And they said 'we know that we can get much better results if we invest some money and hire you guys to produce a video'. And within several months, they doubled their sales based on what they were doing before compared to adding our video into the campaign. And, again, still not breaking the budget, they were doing manageable growth. If they were to dump in 10s of 1000s of views, like our truth company, or sorry, 10s of 1000s of dollars into ads, like our truth client, they just couldn't keep up with that growth. And so you know, regardless of whether you're a small business are a very large business, if you're currently doing advertising that's breaking even, or maybe giving you marginal results, those are the kinds of companies that are going to see the results with this, because it's just elevating you to the next level. 

 

Andrei Tiu  33:54  

Super. So you touched on something, and I want to go back to it for a bit. And that is the attention span of the people that are online nowadays because more and more brands are producing more video content because everybody knows it's working better than static. And every platform is promoting it now because of the number of videos being produced, not all of it is good, or a small proportion of it is good. And then I think this also affects the attention span of somebody that is used to seeing a lot of videos. So you need to have that hook already to get people to view more. And one thing that I wanted to discuss with you is insights or if you have hacks that you want to share for increasing the viewer rate of a video like say somebody wants to produce their videos for their ads.

 

Joseph Wilkins  34:51  

You mentioned a keyword and that is “hook”. You have to hook people's attention. So back in the days of doing infomercials, we would say we would do studies and found out that you had 30 seconds to grab someone's attention before they flip the channel. Now in the online world, you have five. You have five seconds before somebody will scroll to the next video. And, in the YouTube world, you have five seconds before you can hit that skip button. We know that 80% of the viewers of our videos aren't going to hear the sound, the sound is going to be off. So not only do I have five seconds, but I also have to make it visually hooking. And so if you look at our videos, and a lot of the other videos that the bigger companies and agencies do, they will put most of their creativity into that first five to 10 seconds, because once you've hooked them in five seconds you can lead them into the story in the first five to 10 seconds. So you've got to throw as much visual curiosity into that first five to 10 seconds as possible. And you've got to back it up with graphics, and you know, text or, you know, just crazy things that people like 'what is going on in this video?' My goal isn't to sell you, my goal is simply to make you turn the sound on and engage with the rest of the video. So that first hook doesn't have to be relevant to the problem or the solution, it just has to get your attention. Then I'm going to start going into the problem that I know you have. This will serve as a second hook to ask you a question: do you have a problem with this or show you the problem in action, so that you connect “Oh, this is something not only is it interesting, but it's relevant to me”. And then basically throughout the rest of the video, it's a process of hook-sales-copy, hook-sales-copy etc., because at any point, if I let my video go longer than 15-20 seconds, without giving you another hook, I know that you're not going to stick around to just listen to sales-copy. And so those hooks could be and most of the time they are jokes. Or they could be an extreme case product demonstration. One that comes to mind is the Harmon brothers did FiberFix a tape, an industrial-strength tape that's strongest than steel. And for their extreme demonstration, they use FiberFix to wrap a roll cage around the car and then throw it off a cliff. I mean, those kinds of crazy demonstrations that will get you to engage and be entertained while you watch. But it's still relevant. I think of “this isn't funny, but I think of the guys that do the, I can't remember what the product is, but they seal up, they cut a boat in half, and then they seal it up with this glue. And then they put it back on the water and it still floats”. So think about crazy ways that your customers would never actually use it this way. But it's so extreme that if it works for that it must work for what you need it for. Or it could just be some visual crazy character. I think of the squatty potty pooping unicorn, you know something that visually you like “I just have to find out what's going on her”'. I mean, so many ideas that are crazy will get shut down by executives. But boring is the worst thing that you can do. So it has to be a mix between still being relevant being on brand not being offensive, we don't want to offend people. But we do want to be disruptive, but be relevant. Continuing to hook people throughout that whole three-minute journey is essential, or you'll lose them.

 

Andrei Tiu  38:53  

Now that you mentioned, it just occurred to me that one of the very popular brands, there's a competitor of one of the brands that we work with - a much bigger company. And in Europe, they have just launched their latest ad like the spring ad, they are doing accessories for home and things like this. The ad has no link or whatsoever with their products is just starting weird, because I remember I watched it until the end because I had no clue what is going on. Was a band and he was in the 60s, like the setup. And then they were playing and people were dancing, and it just carried on in what - it was on TV- and it wasn't like a classical 15 seconds video. It lasted for about a minute I think and it was nothing to do with their products or anything. It was just this party in the 60s with people dancing and whatever. And then at the end, there was like this balloon flying with their brand, but nothing about the promotions that we're running or like the hero products and everything else.

 

Joseph Wilkins  40:00  

Yeah, that kind of stuff, to me, that's a waste of money. We always try to get - once we introduce the product - we repeat as often as we can, and we make it integral to the story. Once we have established the problem, the product becomes the knight in shining armour that writes in to save that character from the problem. And so that's the benefit of these kinds of stories is not only is it entertaining, it's memorable. And the brand is constantly hit on over and over again, so that you remember it, even if you don't buy us, our first goal is to make an immediate purchase. And we see much higher results in doing that. But our second goal is to at least make you like the brand so that the next time you connect with them, you're more likely to purchase.

 

Andrei Tiu  40:56  

Fair point. And what about your podcasts? Now, I know we are preparing for a wrap-up, but I was about to ask you. So I guess, the name says it all also, it's all about creating effective videos. But what are the types of subjects that you guys discuss on the podcast? And maybe some of our people tuning in here could find interest in?

 

Joseph Wilkins  41:21  

If you've liked anything that you've heard, we go way deeper in my podcast. So again, it's How to Make a Video go Viral, you can find it on all of the podcast platforms, it's also on YouTube. But basically, we do is have an eight-episode series, each episode devoted to just one of the steps that I talked about today. But then more importantly, what we love to do is interview business owners that have done this and have got significant results. So we look for businesses that have had company transformational sales results by using these steps. Whether some of these business owners were case studies that we worked with, but we're also going to be interviewing companies that we had nothing to do with them, we would love to learn from them. It's a fairly new podcast, I think there are 12 or so episodes out right now. But as we go, you know, I selfishly want to learn from these other companies that have had the same kinds of successes that we have

 

Andrei Tiu  42:28  

Super, so we'll have a link to your podcast as well in the description of this episode. And now, so the thing is when you've got so many things that it's pretty hard to just wrap them in like, one, but fortunately, so we have the ebook, which is free to download, and you guys can find it in the description of this episode if you want to. I think it's going to make it easy for you to regroup all the ideas and maybe structure a plan for your next marketing video. And in terms of some interesting points that we touched on, and I think would be good to just bring into attention as we wrap up: One thing about videos going viral is that actually, by itself, doesn't happen that much anymore. So they always need to be backed up by advertising budgets and have a strategy of how you want those videos to reach the people that you want to talk to. And then a good video will help you decrease the cost per view and increase the number of organic shares and that extra viral element. And then also in terms of the hooks, and how to think about the storytelling? Oh, no. The first first first thing is to get professional help, mainly on the point that actually makes a difference. So if you want to be funny, get somebody that is a professional, funny person. And then also if you want your video to shine, make sure that you have the equipment, you have a good editor that knows how to play around with that, have a good actor that can increase the perceived image of your brand, just by you know, actually being able to successfully deliver what you want to deliver. And the third point is that of using the intro of the episode, or sorry, the video, so that you get people to turn on the volume and to engage with the other senses and just the viewing of the video so that you can communicate better on the other channels such as audio in this case together with the video use and get them a story longer so that they can be the more solid relationship with your brand and eventually purchase or have a good perception of your brand by the end of this

 

Joseph Wilkins  45:10  

Gal is a pretty good summary.

 

Andrei Tiu  45:12  

Is there anything else that you'd like to add? Now on a closing note?

 

Joseph Wilkins  45:17  

I guess the only thing that I would add is companies need to understand that everything that I've discussed today is only 50% of the equation. The other 50% is making sure that you have a digital marketing strategy or people that understand how and what to do with the click. So once my team or you have created the video that gets the click, what do you then do with the click? to make sure that you don't lose it in the back end. A very well optimised sales funnel with a great offer and great opportunities for upselling cross-selling. And then knowing which platforms to run those ads on. That's also so critical. I can create the best video that we can do but if you don't have somebody who knows what to do with that video, then it's not going to be effective.

 

Andrei Tiu  46:11  

Super good insight, right and now turning cheeky, but I think I know with a marketing company.

 

Joseph Wilkins  46:19  

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Andrei Tiu  46:21  

Yeah, no, joking. But you are straight on point. It's very important. And being able to retarget those people, as you mentioned, it's critical because most people wouldn't buy the first time. And it's very important to deliver on multiple channels over a certain period at a certain frequency so that you can facilitate, actually, and help yourself to drive those sales.

 

Joseph Wilkins  46:45  

You gotta.

 

Andrei Tiu  46:46  

Super, Joseph, thanks so much for being on the show today. I know this was a very early morning for you. So the more appreciate it.

 

Joseph Wilkins  46:53  

No, it's good. It's good. And I just finally thought I'd add if anyone wants to talk to me personally about, other questions that they have, or maybe setting up a time to discuss a campaign for your company, there's a form that you can fill out FunnySalesVideos.com, just scroll right down to the bottom. And I'd be happy to chat with you.

 

Andrei Tiu  47:13  

Perfect. Thanks so much. So guys don't forget, all the links are gonna be in the description of this episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, then in the description of YouTube. And also, just if you're up for it, sometimes people share questions or thoughts with us directly. So you guys, if you want us to maybe reorganise something like this, but discuss a different topic or go in a bit more depth on specific areas, Joseph, depending on how you are with time as well, maybe we can try to organise the second episode where we could get back from the audience. And maybe we can go a bit deeper into actual practical things that might help people ramp up the effectiveness of their marketing videos and sales videos in this case. 

 

Joseph Wilkins  47:59  

Sure, I'd love to let's make it happen.

 

Andrei Tiu  48:01  

Super. Well, until next time, guys, thank you all for tuning in today. As always, feel free to reach out to Joseph or me, if you have any feedback or you'd like us to dive a bit deeper or if you have any questions. Hope you found this insightful. I know I did. And Joseph here was a very nice source of insight, being at the core of this for over 20 years now. Joseph, thank you again for being on the show. Looking forward to staying in touch and wishing you all the very best of success going forward.

 

Joseph Wilkins  48:36  

You too. Thanks so much.

 

Andrei Tiu  48:37  

Thanks a lot.