Eight Steps to Funny Sales Videos That Sell

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today is definitely no exception i'm so excited about this interview with
joseph wilkins about the eight steps we need to take to create funny sales videos that sell and
the key word here is funny yes it is so we are going to get
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now today's guest let me joseph is such a cool bloke
i really enjoyed this conversation with joseph where we talk about videos right
funny videos um that can help us sell our products online and actually this is super important for e-commerce
businesses because it's all about doing something really that no one else is doing and he's going to tell you some stories about companies that he's done
work with that have got hundreds of millions of views and have rapidly grown as a result now i was a bit fanboyish if
i'm honest with you because i have been uh i don't want to use the word victim
of one of his funny sales i've i've as you will hear in the interview he did
a video that i saw and that we ended up buying products uh as a company before i knew it was him
that created it if that makes sense and so i know what he's talking about here works
so let me give you a bit of an introduction to joseph and then we will jump straight into uh my interview with
him so joseph wilkins founded pro creative studios almost years ago can
you imagine what video was like years ago i mean he's going to tell you a little bit of the story but can you imagine the difference in technology
his team produced infomercials tv commercials corporate videos he's directed
thousands of campaigns for clients like google linkedin mcdonald's goldman sachs
chevy home depot or home depot if you're here in the uk all these mega brands i
mean he's done it right and has as habits have shifted from television to online
joseph launched funnysalesvideos.com in where he creates
attention-grabbing viral styles sales videos that entertain viewers into making immediate purchases
and so he's got two decades of experience hundreds of millions of tv
and online views right hundreds of millions of dollars of track sales the guy knows
what he's talking about is the bottom line and he's developed this sort of eight simple steps that any business can follow to boost online sales right so
this week's podcast eight steps we need to take to create funny sales videos
that sell you are gonna love this grab a notebook grab a pen because here's my
interview with joseph so joseph thanks for being on the show
Interview with Joseph
thanks for being on the podcast great to have you here now you're a fellow brit
who has defected to the dark side um you you know in the states right
yes yes years it's been so about half of my life in uh in london and half of
my life out here in the united states ah very good and what what took you to the
states was it the bright lights and and uh and well i mean originally i just came
out here to go to university um met my wife and ended up staying we've
been back to the to the motherland a couple times and uh we we just decided to settle out here
fantastic fantastic well great to have you on the show now yeah it has to be said uh joseph
when i look at the background uh because obviously i can see you and those that are listening to the podcast can't
appreciate what i'm saying if you're watching it on facebook or youtube you will be able to appreciate what i am
saying that is one uh funky background that you've got
going on there uh you definitely get the award for the best background uh of any guest we've
had on the show well thank you i'll take it maybe we should start giving out awards
at the end of the year um and you have been involved i mean it says there in big bold letters funny um
sales videos and so obviously you've been involved in video for a while uh you've been in in
How Joseph got into video production
that whole area which is what we're going to get into so how did you start this journey into
video production oh gosh well i mean i came out back to my university training i came out to go
to university i went through the communication arts program at byu
and i took some film classes but my my main focus was graphic design and when i got
out of college i went and started work for a company in their marketing department doing graphic design
and that's kind of again showing my age years ago that's kind of when the internet started to support video
streaming and my boss basically said hey we need somebody to go learn video and who
better to send than the graphic designer and so that's that's really how it got
started and you know i started doing corporate videos for for this company and then
i started freelancing on the side and all of a sudden i found myself in a
situation where i had more freelance clients than work than time that i had at home
and my wife basically said pick a job you know either go with your freelance business or or quit it and so that's when i
started procreative studios which is the company that i started years ago
and when when i very first started my focus was almost exclusively on television
right so we produced infomercials we produced television commercials um our
very first project actually that helped me basically quit my nine to five was
the little giant ladder infomercial that did over million dollars in sales
wow um we were a very small part of that um but you know that kind of gave me the
taste of you know if you make a really compelling sales video and get it in front of a huge audience you can create
huge sales and so we did that for about years producing infomercial after
infomercial but i don't know about you i can't remember the last time i watched live
real television and uh especially the channels where those infomercials are yeah yeah exactly yeah
yeah people just aren't flipping through the channels like they used to and that's how we used to catch you
um and so our results started going down and down and down and our clients started saying we need to figure out how
to get back to the days when we were getting these huge returns on investment and so that's when we really started to
look at social media and and where people were going to because they weren't watching
tv and that was you know streaming platforms but also facebook and you know
youtube hugely and instagram and so we started trying to figure out well we
can't take a minute infomercial and just put it on these platforms it's not going to work
and so we started really looking into what agencies like the harman brothers
and and other agencies that were creating these fun viral style videos
um and so that's basically what we decided to do is pivot our business away from
more traditional sales feeling videos and do these more fun videos that
basically trick our customers into watching our content and then halfway through discovering that oh this is
actually an ad but you know i've been entertained enough then i'll stick around and keep watching and so that's
basically you know five years ago is when we launched funnysalesvideos.com and i'll just
finish with an example and then you know feel free to ask me any questions but before we made that big switch our
biggest video that we'd ever done as far as an online view count we had one video we were proud of that had a hundred
thousand views when we switched to making these funny and i i spent a long time creating the
right team of writers and we can talk about how writing is the most important part of this but after we launched
our first funny sales video campaign we got seven million views on one campaign
for a very small customer and over half a million dollars in sales fast forward
to today our biggest campaign is about to hit a hundred million views wow across
uh probably about five videos but the same campaign and more importantly you know tens of
millions of dollars in sales i'm i'm guessing and so that just kind of underscores how
much more effective these kinds of videos are and more importantly how
your listeners should be really thinking about how can i make content and it doesn't
have to be you know these big elaborate productions that we do or other agencies
like us do but how do we make our content engaging enough that people
listening and people watching the content aren't just feeling like you're trying
to sell them something but you're actually entertaining them or telling them a story while you're doing it
because that leads to such higher engagement yeah that's um well i mean firstly
The old infomercials
congratulations that's some horrendous statistics uh horrendous in a good way jeremy i mean that's that's quite
extraordinary from the days of the infomercials and i remember those i like you i used to i
mean you still live in the states i did live in the states and you would see them on tv like a minute commercial
talking about face cream how someone could talk about face cream minutes totally blew my mind but they could
right and so you see these you see these i remember those days well
um and i i appreciate we live in an age where video content is getting shorter and shorter and shorter you know that
we're now on reels aren't we which are seconds and all that sort of stuff
Social media vs infomercials
would you say that the current mechanism that you have uh in terms of doing
videos on social media is now the equivalent of what you've lost in the
in the infomercial space do you mean are they comparable or was the infomercial space so much bigger or is the social media
space so much bigger than the infomercials that's a real that's a really good question so i'd say two
things number one is today's landscape has kind of leveled the
playing field and that's an overused term but if you think back to the days of the infomercials our infomercials
when somebody hired us you know they they could be millions of dollars because you're talking about a
-minute show it's basically a movie that's an enormous production to put
together and so the average small business owner could never afford the production cost
let alone the media time to to air that on you know national tv or cable tv it's very
very expensive today and we can get into this in a minute you know how the average person can produce
one of these kinds of videos everybody i mean you can't see it if you're listening but everybody has
a k camera in their pocket yeah that i'm not kidding when i first started
this company i'd pay grand for something that was nowhere near
as good a quality as what you have in your pocket right now so those those two factors have just
made it so that there is no excuse for anyone other than creativity and uh you know the the
determination to figure out how to do it anyone can produce really compelling content
upload it to a platform like facebook or youtube and immediately have
you know what we used to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to reach the these big audiences
but you have to know how to do it and so it just becomes
the the potential audience is even bigger than television because it's now the entire planet that's connected to
the world wide web but you have to know how to create the content in the way that
people will watch but then also figure out how do i connect them to it
the days of if you build it they will come don't you know that that actually never even did exist but even more today
you've got to know that this is the kind of thing that you you can't just upload it and it will go viral
companies have figured out that you know if you're facebook you're going to create an algorithm that's going to
favor the people that are spending dollars on your platform as opposed to people who are not so that's really how
we get those views is it's not a v an organically viral video
um i kind of explain it like if i was to say to you you know i'll create a
magical vending machine that's full of a hundred dollar bills but it costs twenty dollars every time
you use that machine how many times are you going to want to use it
and that's really what we do is we create these videos that as long as you realize that
you've got to pay to expose it to the right people but if we do everything right and if you
do everything right you know we get two three four five as high as seven
times return on ad spend yeah for every time we spend that dollar on advertising
we're getting more in return and that's really what you're looking for is a repeatable
scalable business rather than a flash in the pan organic viral view hit video anyway
Barriers to entry
yeah i think that that's fascinating isn't it i mean just going back to what you said in terms of the barriers to entry to me seem to be
the lowest they've ever been because everyone like you say is carrying around a full production studio in their pockets you've got your k camera your
phones can even edit the the videos these days don't need a desktop or any of that kind of stuff
and i unlike you i remember the early days of videos where it was just crazy money furry and there were these super
high barriers to entry so now more than anything there are low barriers to entry but
um there is now more video content uploaded every second to the internet than there ever has been because
we can record video data transfer is so cheap and so on and so forth so it seems
to me that whilst the playing field is leveled and the barriers to entry have come down the
need to create high quality content has gone up because yes to stand out in this
sea of beige for once a better expression do you mean this sea of sort of everything
is the same there's only so many cat videos you can watch totally um it seems to me like
and if i if i'm hearing what you're saying right jose if this is it's a great time to do it but you have got to
stand out you can't just upload anything so ryan dice who's the founder of um
How marketers ruin everything
digitalmarketer.com he actually gave a keynote at uh traffic conversion in san diego a couple months
or so ago he talks about how marketers ruin everything
like like literally that's a great t-shirt right there it absolutely is because one person does
something successfully everybody sees it and wants to try to
copy it and if they start out and they set the bar up here the next person that tries
to copy it is going to bring it down here and the next person tries to copy is going to bring it down here and so
what what you're just what you just articulated is because everyone can do it
most people will probably do it sub standard and so people are going to start to get bored of seeing the same
kind of thing so the challenge is how do you exceed what's been done before
not how do you you know come under the bar of what's done before and so there's different levels of these
kinds of videos right and i always tell my clients the worst thing that you can do and hear this the worst thing that you
can do is try to be funny and end up looking silly
okay because that will sink your brand that will make people think
you know you you guys are just trying to do something and you end up looking silly and so i always tell people
the most important part of the process of producing a video that you're trying to make funny
is to test it and make sure it is funny before you go past the scripting phase
and you know i don't i don't know if you want to get into my my eight steps of how oh
we're getting into those yeah the the most important part is making
sure you know before you produce this video that people are actually going to
respond to it and that doesn't just mean laughs to it that means understand what
the problem and the solution is that you're presenting and what the offer is that they're supposed to take advantage
of when the video is over so there's a whole structure to this and and i have to give the harman brothers
props here they have an online university that that i went through that i would
highly recommend to anyone listening that's interested in this kind of approach to marketing is
to go through the harman brothers university but we've kind of developed an eight-step process that we take every
one of our videos through um and i i can run run through that if if you want to
do that now or i can answer other questions yeah no i think it would be um
Blankety Blank
before we get into it there's there's one thing that i i mean we we talked about um
we talked about this in our pre-call and uh just another example of a video that you
have done which actually i didn't realize you had created before we did our call um if that makes sense um yeah
and that is the video that is um i don't know what you call it i call it
the blankety blank video do you know what i mean the if you're in the uk you remember the blankety blank uh checkbook
and pen with terry rogan and his funny microphone and the guys um like i guess
however many guys there were anyway you've done this video uh which reminded
me of blankety blank and it was based on um a cleaning product wasn't it like a
detergent for washing clothes yes true earth eco strips
and we have that product in our house um i'd seen the video my wife had seen the video more importantly
and she bought that product and then when we were talking is like oh you you were the guy that created that video so
just to explain i guess for the audience this may be something that most people have seen
because this thing has had an awful lot of views but just a quick outline of that story and you're thinking behind it
Laundry Detergent
well so that was actually one of our very first clients and that's the one that i mentioned earlier that the
campaign is about to hit or close to hit a hundred million views across
probably five different videos of which the one that you just mentioned i think probably has close to million views
um so this is a product that a client came to me in fact we met in the harmon
brothers university um he was one of their students as well and we connected on on their chat forum but they have a
product that is a laundry detergent that saves plastic so it comes in a cardboard box
and it's dehydrated it kind of feels like chewing gummels almost that you're throwing into your washing machine and
so we wanted to create some videos that really got out there not just to the extreme environmentalists but to your
everyday housewife right and i know that's a stereotypical term but you know
you mentioned it worked on your wife well that's because our facebook campaign was targeting you know women in
a certain age group which i'm sure your wife fits into so i'm glad to hear that they hit the target but the story
is basically you know it's not a crazy you know sexy product laundry detergent
and so we we had to come up with some really fun ways to grab your attention
to tell a story but ultimately to create sales you know so this is kind
of like a subscription um laundry laundry of the month right so every month they they ship it to you in the
mail and so we basically created this game show that was you know what what's
the worst way and the best way to do your laundry and people answered and you go go to
funnysalesvideos.com and take a look at it i think it's like the third or fourth video down the page um but it it got such a huge response
that you know we just we just kept doing different kinds of spins in fact we just
launched the latest version of the video two days ago it's a rap video with the
same character and you'll have to check it out it's really fun it's um
i think it's still in testing on facebook but i think we got like a half a million views just
over the weekend well i have to say congratulations um on
Environmental Message
that video joseph because you took a topic which is innate it's
just innately boring isn't it i mean it's it's a commodity it's a commodity it's
boring and yes it's got a good environmental message but you know and i know the good
environment environmental messages they don't sell to the mass audience everybody feels like we need to be more
environmentally friendly but very few people actually take action you only really sell to a very small portion of
the world with that message yes and so you took that but the way you did it the way you told that story
i just thought was utter genius and you didn't just come on they didn't just do it on the website saying buy this
product save the planet you actually used humor in a way that i went this is
very very clever how you guys did this and i don't know how long you spent i mean i know how long you spent so we
talked about it last time but in terms of the the writing and figuring out that script and the the time it took
to do that you guys must have had an absolute blast putting that together because i i thought oh yeah well done
Writers
and i have to give credit to our writers we have a team of you know about writers and that's another huge point
for your audience to think about um i think in the uk you still have the tv
show who wants to be a millionaire right i i guess so i've not seen it for a long i think jeremy clarkson does it now
oh does he so so the if you watch that show and it's been years since i've watched it but you have three lifelines
i think phone the fret phone a friend um and ask the audience and always
the best one the most accurate one is going to be ask the audience
because the wisdom of the crowd will always be better than the wisdom of the individual and when it comes to writing
you know we have a virtual writer's room of multiple people that will bounce ideas off each other
and one person will read somebody else's joke and say yeah that's funny but if we just tweak it like this and somebody
else will come up with a great idea you can never get that when you have just one person locked in a room so i always
tell people test your jokes on multiple people you'll be amazed at how many you know
just crazy ideas will spot spawn off of you know just sending it to somebody and saying what do you think of this and
it's even more you know apparent when you get really good comedy writers that
have experience most of the people that work for me are freelancers who are stand up comics that's their full-time
job so they're traveling from city to city during the day to the next gig and they
were you know basically punching up my writers scripts and then at night they're you know in the clubs and they
love to kind of get the extra income of working for me in between so that's the kind of quality
that produce that video that you're talking about it doesn't happen you know by chance it's a lot
Humor
yeah there's an awful lot of hard work and it's your deliberate decision to use humor that i think
separated the video out and you know if i find it fascinating that you go and get stand-up comics to help write your
scripts i mean that do you mean there's obviously humor is a big deal for you um so if i you know the guys listening
to the show um they're thinking oh this all sounds great i've not obviously got the budget or writers
but you've mentioned it before test it's funny why why do we want humor why do we want to bring in that that sense of
laughter into what we're doing so there's something and i'm no psychologist but i've read books about
Connect emotionally
how when you connect on a purse with a person on an emotional level so
it doesn't have to be humor but when you when you connect emotionally there's
certain things that happen inside the brain that don't happen in any other way so that could be
make them cry that could be make them laugh for me
it's much much harder to make somebody cry especially in this very short period of time making them laugh is a lot you
know it's a lot more dependable that i know i can do it but when you make somebody even smile right when you make
somebody smile they remember but they also let down their guards and
they will actually start to listen and that's the huge problem that you articulated earlier is that we
live in a society that is over communicated when you jump on your facebook feed or
what or your you know instagram or or youtube you are bombarded with people
who want your attention and you have to figure out how do i stand out and i'll
go back to the reason why i think our videos and and videos from companies that are you know much bigger and better
than ours the reason why they are so successful is because people aren't coming to these
social media platforms to be sold they're coming to waste a bit of time
they're coming to have a coffee break and to enjoy you know catching up with their friends or watching cat videos or
if if you can become as close to what they've come to these platforms to consume
the more likely you are to connect with them and final thought is the more likely people are to engage and the
magic word is share so how much more likely are you to share a joke with a friend in the pub
than to share some technical specs from something that you read in a white paper
i mean that's really why our videos are so successful as people watch them
they emotionally connect with them and then they're likely to share them because of the
you know everyone wants to be seen as the guy with the jokes or the guy that's sharing the fun videos nobody's gonna
share a sales video but if they feel more like hey this is a fun video
then you know that that's why our videos get tens of thousands of shares
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Eight Steps to Funny Sales Videos
so you've mentioned this a couple of times and i'm really keen that we spend uh the second part of the show to sort of
going through this you've got this eight-step process um to create funny sales videos which
you have which you use to create all these you know huge hugely successful videos
um can we can we go through that sure let me breeze through them and then
maybe you can come back and ask follow-up questions because i could go on for hours and i'll try not to so
Marketing
and again the this is a eight step ebook that anyone can download from
funnysalesvideos.com and the reason we created it in the first place is we're a very small company we're pretty picky
with who we deal with and we wanted to give something to the people that we just you know don't have the ability to
work with so that they can either do it themselves or take it to a local video production
company and work with them to follow these steps but you know step number one
it's marketing understand as much as you can about your customer
about their problems and about why they like or your current customers like your
solution understand the underlying reasons why people are buying your product or
service and create lists of the top bullet points of the key marketing messages you know
we used to call them usps the the um the the real
underlying reasons why people ultimately will care and the key
buttons that you have to push to make a sale remember we're not making a funny video
we're making a funny sales video if people laugh at this that's good and
they'll remember you and brand awareness is important but it doesn't help our clients on the bottom line when they
come back and say did we make enough money that we want to make another funny sales video that's ultimately our goal
and so we have to figure out what are the things that people need to hear in order
to press that button and click here to buy now or click here to fill in a lead gen form or click here to sign up for a
subscription and these principles work for bb bc
non-profits it doesn't matter what kind of product or service what industry
you're in as long as you're relevant and you're speaking to the right person and this is all in step one is brainstorm
sorry is doing the research to understand who are you talking to what
kind of messages do they need to hear we're not even talking about funny yet we're just talking about the marketing
points and maybe the objections that you need to overcome if your product is too expensive and people are saying that
over and over again you got to address that in your video the reason why it's expensive the reason why buying your
product is actually going to be cheaper than buying five of your competitors that are going to break or whatever the
objection that you need to overcome so step two once you've figured out all of your marketing copy points that you
need to present in the script step two is just brainstorming and this is a non-judgment zone right so
the worst ideas sometimes the better the worst thing you can do is stifle people's ideas and so we we set a goal
for every video to have crazy bad ideas right so a brainstorm is nothing more
than who is the main character and what's the problem that they have right and the more crazy ideas the
better now eventually you're going to hone those ideas down from crazy to you know the kind that we can produce but
literally you want to throw out dozens and dozens of ideas so once you've done that you want to
just we as an agency typically distill it down to our top five okay right so an
idea going back to the harmon brothers right the most popular style kind of video that's ever been
done was squatty potty that's right so they had okay so so their hero
Scripting
was a mythical prince and a pooping unicorn that poops out ice cream
i mean what what board meeting is gonna entertain no content
and yet that went on to be i think million views and literally transformed
a company and so don't i always tell people don't kill your ideas too quickly
because they have to be disruptive enough to stop and grab people's attention
they then have to be relevant enough that you can bring it down to a point where somebody can say oh i actually do
have that problem yeah and more importantly oh that solution actually could be
the thing to solve that problem and so step three is once you've got your brain once you've decided on the
best concept is to actually begin the scripting process and and there's three
phases of scripting there's making sure that you've got the marketing message right which we developed in step one
then there's making sure that there's a story that has an arc and most of our videos are about three to four minutes
long and people say well gosh that's an eternity in today's world and we always
have found in fact literally this weekend that video that i just mentioned the rap video we are testing a
two-minute version and we're testing a four-minute version and right now my client just texted me yesterday the long
version is kicking the short versions but wow and so that proves
that it's people don't stop watching videos because they're too long they stop watching because they get
bored yeah so that puts the onus on you to be more creative to grab their
attention and then to keep their attention and that happens with great story writing
netflix has proven people still have the ability to watch
long content online yeah and so you just have to look and feel like that high
quality high engaging story content and then you too will be able to keep their attention
so in the scripting you want to tell a story and this goes back to um donald miller's story brand
arc of of marketing which is you gotta establish a problem show somebody
we call it the the brand hero who has that problem introduce the solution using a guide and
then show how their life is better because of that guide introducing the solution
so once we've got and so we'll actually have a marketing script writer
then we'll have a story script writer and these are typically all different people
then once we have the story written so about a three minute story we will bring in at least five or six
comedy writers and again this isn't just somebody who thinks that they can crack a joke here
and there the these are typically comedy writers or stand-up comedians and if you're all if your audience doesn't
know how to connect with those people i'll give you a real quick and easy tip use fiverr or use up work or use one of
these online freelance sites where people are dying for you to hire them
and they are the exact kind of people that you want to hire because they have experience writing jokes just go to
fiverr and type in comedy writers now there's good comedy writers and bad comedy writers so i would tell you to
look at their reviews and make sure you're hiring the good stuff but these are fairly inexpensive ways to
get other trained comedians to read through what your scriptwriters have
written and just throw on the page as many jokes as possible now one word of warning
sometimes our funniest jokes end up on the cutting room floor in other words they're not used
because it has to be relevant to advancing the sale if it distracts from
the sale as funny as it may be it's got to go okay it has to be something that will grab their attention
keep their attention but ultimately further the sale and if you get too many jokes the video is going to get too long
and people will stop watching um and it may also be detracting from your
brand so you have a lot of executives that i talk to their number one concern is well we've never done anything like
this before i don't think our customers are ready for this and i immediately say then you're the perfect client for us
because the more disruptive in other words the more you stand out from your competition
the more likely people are to notice you but you got to do it in the right way you can't do it and all of a sudden say
something offensive that's going to get you bad press or banned from facebook it's got to be
what i call safe but still disruptive humor that was going to be one of my questions
Vegan
actually because as you're talking uh on my desk here i have some uh these are uh
these are amiga three capsules okay dull and boring products and but they're vegan they have a
fascinating story behind them um really interesting product and i'm just thinking if i was gonna do
some scripting or get people to script with that should i avoid because it would be easy to go there the
stereotypes say around vegans or vegetarians or
or do you actually go there that's a great great great question you
Most loyal customers
don't want to offend your most loyal customers to get new ones
unless you know your most loyal customers aren't bringing you in the money and you know the other audience
would i mean it is a very hard conversation to have and we recently actually did a video
where we we tackled that head-on it's actually i can't remember it's on our website or not it's called peeler it's a phone case
that's compostable and we really leaned into this and we just made a video that
makes fun of hippy you know granola extremist environmentals but we did it
in a way that even if you are in that audience you laugh at yourself rather than take
offense at least percent of the audience would you're never going to please everyone in fact if you make a
video that pleases everyone you've done something wrong you have to be somewhat
polarizing to get people to connect with you right and so as long as
eight you're you're not offending of your audience i would say you're about on on the right track and so in this
video you know we we kind of we did this big hippie drum circle and we used a lot
of the stereotypes of you know these environmentalists but we did it in a way
that i think at least from the comments didn't get the negative energy
that if you do it the wrong way you would have so i i don't know if that answers your question but you you want
to test before you go into production and that's one of the steps that i'll i'll
go over so step five after you've got your script um and and you've you've read
through it you've shown it to people who are in your customer avatar
and they're responding well to it they're getting the jokes they're asking the buying questions of you know once
they've read the script they say things like well where do i get it or how much does it cost or you know things that really help you to understand yeah this
script is connecting with people then you go into the production and i always tell people don't waste
money going into production with a script that's half baked it it won't link to good things
now in production as somebody who for years has run a video production studio you'd think that my first thing would be
to say you know use the most expensive cameras and use the best lighting and get the right crews and that is
important but it's not the most important part the most important part without doubt is casting the right
actors okay now a lot of people get this wrong they think let me be in my own video
Marketing is like a salad
i've never had pizza yeah go for it yeah now there is a time and a place for that
right so i say marketing is like a salad you've got to have all kinds of ingredients so there's a place for ceo
videos and unboxing videos and raw testimonial videos and you know low quality videos to me this is a top of
funnel video meaning it's the very first impression video nobody you're going to assume that
nobody knows anything about you and you're just trying to cast a wide net you want to give your best impression
first and so unless now a lot of people say well what about the dollar shave club that was a great video that went
viral and the ceo was the hero for it what they don't know is that that ceo was also a trained improv actor
in college so we had the skills yeah yeah exactly so unless you have those
skills don't try to do it yourself i will typically audition in fact on a weekly
basis that's one of the biggest things that i do is i audition actors for different projects and i'll
go through actors to pick the right one that's how picky i am about getting it
right because if you've done your writing right and you've done your casting right you've done of your
work you can't pick a bad actor and try to get them to look good with good editing
or good lighting or good camera work it's not going to work you have to have somebody that is right and so you know
spend time and a lot of people don't understand this it doesn't cost a penny to to audition actors
it only costs when you hire that actor that's just the daily job of an actor is
to do audition after audition and especially after covid every actor that's worth its soul
already has a setup like what we're doing right now where they they have a home studio or a home room that's set up
with lighting to do on camera auditions from home so when i say i can come to
you you can do it exactly okay exactly so what i do is i'll do round one
here's a section of the script do it in front of camera email it to your agent and they'll email it to me
again that hasn't cost me anything i'll go through maybe you know i'll go through actors pick out my top
that i think would be good to audition because i'm looking at their reels their videos
and then out of auditions i'll maybe select three to bring back on zoom and
do a live audition where i can then direct them coach them see if they can do this faster put the emphasis here or
there because you want to make sure that you don't bring somebody into the studio or onto set that has never really felt
the pressure of being on set because it's very comfortable for them to audition in their own home without
anyone watching and select the best of takes that they do but you need to make sure that they can take direction
in a live situation and then sometimes i will bring them in in person
um bring the client into the studio and we'll do live in-person auditions but
most of the time i can get it done over zoom and get a really good feel for how they're going to react
Top tip
absolutely so so where do you go to find these actors acting agencies every single dc you know
decent sized market will have multiple acting agencies just go to google
type in your city and then acting agency and you'll find
local people that as you know local businesses that have agencies okay top tip there i would not have
known that okay yeah yeah i mean again again it doesn't cost anything and these actors that's part of the gig they
understand it that's how they work so once you've picked your your your actor you've got your great script that's when
i say if you really want to stand out and look different than anything else that the competition are doing
you know you can do it with your phone but what is everyone else filming with that is on your facebook feed they all
look the same because they're all being filmed with a phone there's there's something that a professional production
company will bring to the table that will make it look so much different than everything else out there
and ultimately the most important part of your video is the first five seconds so the more that first five seconds can
have content that's disruptive and that's in the script but also visually look
very different than anything else the more likely people are to stop so the second part of production is making sure
that you do it right if you have the budget and obviously of the eight steps i would say the two that i've harped on
already make sure you spend the money on getting the right scripting make sure you spend the money on getting the right
actors and the other six you can kind of get away with doing it on the cheap
but you're not gonna get the results that you are if you do all eight steps the right way does that make sense yeah
totally okay so step six we're almost there is editing now you've heard this time and
time again when it comes to comedy it's about timing so we could film the same clip and the
actor could deliver their lines deliver the joke deliver the punch line and if we did no editing it may feel a little
flat but having an editor that knows where to make the cut where to switch from a wide shot to a
close-up to get the facial expressions where to chop out the breath to make the timing just hit right
can be the difference between a joke that is ho-hum and a joke that really feels funny so having an editor that
understands timing will really really improve your results and also back to
people don't get bored sorry people don't stop watching because they it's too long they will get stopped watching
because they get bored an editor will know how to speed things up if you watch any of our videos i dare you to find a
spot where somebody stops to take a breath because that's where people get bored i
mean literally my videos will bombard you with so much information visually and audibly that you won't be able to
get bored yes people do still click away but it's not because i'm giving them a
space to get bored and so an editor will really know how to speed things up keep the tempo fast paced so you don't have
time to get bored do you use music as well to help deliver
Music
that tempo that's a really good question i only ever use music if there's a need
for it see music can be a crutch you know you can get a video that kind of feels
boring and then you add fast up-paced music and you feel like oh it's just made it a little bit more exciting but
actually music can detract from the message the vocals if people don't understand
what they're saying that's that's a huge problem and so i'm very very sparing when it comes to music i
definitely use a whole i mean i have a i have a sound engineer who his only job
is to put in sound effects right so i use a lot of sound effects even more we use visual graphics and and
images that just keep your attention um but but for music if there's a reason
most of my videos will have some music but it's really just like to underscore one sentence when they say
it and put a fanfare behind it to draw attention to that's the most important part but just a background music track i
don't think other than obviously the rap video that we launched this weekend yeah obviously that has music
um but but i don't just throw music beds in
now last thing about editing you'll be amazed to find out that every video that we do and where the budget
will allow we do the same video and we edit it
different versions okay that seems like a so whenever an
Versions
extraordinary when we deliver yes and and again this is the difference between
the results that we get and the results that some people that try to do it themselves get so it's not
russian roulette right we're not just making one video and throwing it out there and hoping that it lands on black
what we're trying to do is figure out which version of our
different versions performs the best again back to the the wisdom of the crowd the more different you know
options you have the likely more likely you are to hit the winning one and so let me tell you how we get to
we will script and record three totally different opening hooks
in fact if you go to my linkedin account i did a whole vlog showcasing the difference between the same video
that had three different opening hooks now an opening hook is simply something that
grabs someone's attention and gets them to stop scrolling um and and so if you
if you go to linkedin type in joseph wilkins funny sales videos you'll be able to see that but there was three
hooks one and the rest of the video is exactly the same but hook number one
did a row as return on ad spend so for every dollar we spent on that video
we got one dollar and nine cents in return which is kind of a you know not very impressive not losing money kind of
a break even campaign hook number two got more people's attention and got them
to watch longer and got a return on ad spend so significantly higher income
hook number three had a return on ad spend
so more than double i mean the difference between a ho-hum campaign and an extremely profitable campaign and we
never would have known the difference if we only produce one version of the video then we produce three different versions
of the offer so you've got three hooks three offers that's nine versions then we do a long version and a short version
of the video so now we're up to then we'll do wide screen versions and square
versions depending on if we're using it on facebook or or youtube and so it ends up being different versions that the
digital marketing team will figure out and facebook has made this um quite easy to automatically rotate through those
ads to figure out which one is the highest performing and that's how we get to our version that we finally throw a
ton of money at so you're not wasting money you know opening the flag gates on a campaign that's not that's the as
opposed to the roads and the the the difference there the thing that you mentioned just going back
to the you called it the opening hope this is where you said the most important part of the video is the first five seconds right yes and so
what you're doing is you're not you're not creating different videos you're creating these different versions of the
same video but exactly the one thing you are the two things you're changing one is the opening in five seconds and the
other one is the offer and you're yes what i like about this joseph is you've you've not assumed
that you actually know what's going to work well you've got an idea absolutely and you're like
are there many times i guess let me put it to you this way are there many times where you have gone you know what guys
we have totally nailed this this is gonna absolutely blow everything out of the water that opening best one i've
ever heard and it's just fallen flat and the one that you didn't think was going to work after testing you've kind of
gone goodness me didn't see that coming glad we tested almost every single video
seriously you you absolutely have to rely on data
not your gut for final results you have to rely on your gut to get you to those
first places but that's why the more versions you can test the closer you're
gonna get to hitting the target that's incredible so yes great question so step seven comes right
in with this step seven is testing right so you've got to and really it
should be step one a step two a step three a because after every one of these steps the more you can test the
better you're off you're gonna be so you know i often wherever possible i love to get focus groups or even virtual
focus groups so if your custom if your listeners have you know a group of customers that they know that they can
go to and say can you give me your opinion on this or you know back in the days of the infomercials we
would literally hire focus group companies to fill one-way mirror rooms
full of people and watch as they responded to watching our ads and so
you know the more you can do to test the script um and then to obviously test the
final video to see which versions are people responding to the better off you're going to be and
then step eight is forget going viral organically
realize that everything that you do to create this video is only half of the success equation
the other half is making sure what are you going to do with that click once somebody clicks on your video at the end
of the video that says click the link below where are they going to go they should go to a squeeze page that's fully
optimized to convert whatever that means now we haven't talked about the fact that most of these
videos the offer is so good that it's not actually going to make any money
what makes money is upselling on that squeeze page so a
lot of our videos we say you know click below to get a day risk free trial or click below and get you know buy one get
one free or click below you got to give them the lowest hanging fruit to take advantage of an offer that seems
irresistible and then you build value in this in the back end so you know whether that's like true
earth eco strips we get them into an auto ship program or we get them into a
you know risk-free trial where they can send it back but you know hopefully the product is good enough that it sells
itself once it's arrived so there's all these things to make sure that the back end sales funnel is optimized for
success and then also having somebody who really understands how and where to buy these
ads to run these videos in the first place is your customer best approached
on facebook is it tick-tock is it instagram is it youtube and with all these changes with facebook you know
more and more of my customers are not leaving facebook but trying to figure out how to balance their social
portfolio and you know find success on other platforms that they typically haven't
been you know utilizing in the past and the beauty of these videos is that as long as we understand from
day one who we're speaking to as long as we're speaking to the same person it doesn't really matter if
they're on facebook or on instagram or in you know these other platforms the message still works
one of the um well firstly thank you i mean there so we've got the eight steps and just to
just to go over them according to my notes here uh we've got research brainstorming scripting comedy
production editing testing and then forget going viral you've done these eight steps right you've got your
you've got your video you've got it up and running one of the questions i've got for you
here is that i guess the purpose of the video you just call it a sales video you're you're making uh funny sales
videos so i guess one of my questions is in the video
are you trying to sell the product are you trying to get someone to think that they will
purchase in the video or are you using the video to get somebody to decide to go to the website
do you see what i mean i think there's a difference between selling the click and selling the product and i'm just curious
as to where you lie on that i'd say there's actually three things that we're trying to do
beyond a shadow of doubt our number one goal is to create an immediate sale
but that's still not going to happen on the video that's happening on the squeeze page so but but yes we are trying to go from
the harmon brothers call it zero to sold in three minutes right so cold traffic
is the key to these videos creating a video to send to a hot list
really those lists aren't typically big enough for it to be worth your while
spending the kind of money that these videos cost to go out to a small audience it has to
be out to code traffic to a large audience so you're trying to educate them create the desire and call them to
action within three or four minutes so yes that is always the number one goal is to
create an immediate sale unless it's a bb company where it's a long longer sales funnel and we're just trying to
generate that lead um but obviously we're also trying to get
there and it's different in today's world but we're trying to click through to the link so we can pixel them get their
information capture their information and retarget to them because a lot of the time you know not
everyone is sold on the first impression some people say it's seven some people say it's a lot more than that with these
kinds of videos the third thing that i was going to say is you're getting them to at least like
you and that sounds kind of weird but it's about top of mind awareness
i'll give you an example you know i've i've been researching buying a tesla for the past two years right i was never
going to buy a tesla on my first time i went to tesla.com it's going to take me
a long time to get there but because every time i engage with tesla i see something different i see
something that's you know not anything like what ford is offering they're always on the top of my mind and
i'm actually about to buy a tesla right so it's taken me a long time but i like
them i become a part of their tribe you know it can kind of get cultish
almost sometimes with some of these companies like apple and you know tesla is a great example
and so just getting them to become a member of your tribe even if it's only mentally
so that when they next know that they're going to buy something that's in your category you're the first
one that they think of so there's immediate sales and then there's branding that leads up to future sales
and that's hard to quantify on the spreadsheet but it's actually i'll say a fourth thing so true
earth eco strips they're a laundry detergent and a lot of the big box retailers had never heard of them
once we started playing our videos people started coming into their stores saying do you sell true earth and they
started getting phone calls from the buyers at these big box stores saying we want to stock you we want to start queue
so that again there's all these other ripple effects that you can't track on
the immediate sales that are benefits of brand awareness and getting people to
talk about you well there is so much there and joseph like
yeah i feel like i could go on asking you a whole bunch of questions around this but i want to be respectful of your time
uh you've already been super generous um if people want to reach out to you if they want to connect with they've got
more questions what's the best way for them to do that oh you can you can shoot me an email
joseph funnysalesvideos.com or you can just go onto our website
uh you know it might be worth spending some time just looking at some of the videos that we've done
um and then the final thing on the website there's a lead form that you can fill out fill in to create a free
brainstorm session with me or a member of my team where we could talk to you about some things that
we could do for you or just connect with me on linkedin fantastic and we will of course put all
the links to your website and uh your linkedin profile in the show notes uh but joseph thank you
i forgot one more thing sorry if they're listening to this they probably like podcasts i also run a
podcast it's called how to make a video go viral and it's on all the podcast platforms oh well
that i didn't know i know about the other stuff but i didn't know about your podcast so i'm gonna i'm gonna subscribe to that uh
i'll have a look at that i'm really intrigued to hear how you get on with the podcast because podcasting sounds like a funny medium to try and do video
uh if that makes sense yeah it it it definitely is basically what we do in our podcast is we interview
anyone that has a sales video that has over a million views we interview them
to find out how did they do that so that other people can copy you know half of them are our clients but half of them
are people that you know we just want to selfishly learn you know how are people doing it because we don't have all the
answers oh no it's great i mean it's one of the reasons i love doing this show you get to meet amazing people and just
kick everything out of there yeah absolutely no it's brilliant well thank you joseph really appreciate you being
on the show thanks so much for being here thanks thanks for sharing everything uh and i'm
looking forward to seeing this rap video yeah i'll send you a link i'll send you a link yeah yeah do that thanks very
much well a big thanks to my very special
guest today joseph wilkins wasn't that a great show now
i reckon right if you've been with your notebook and pen going along there you've got a lot of notes but if you
haven't uh been able to do that you've been driving in the car or for whatever reason haven't been able to take notes you can of course
get them from the website ecommercepodcast.net if you want to head straight to that
episode just go to ecommercepodcast.uh to get there you know i love this
show i love speaking to people uh like joseph you know to and i i took pages and pages of notes
and i've got three million ideas buzzing around in my head on what we can do now so uh if
you're like me do connect with joseph say thanks for being on the show let him know what you've got because it's just
brilliant what's going on isn't it and i just like say i fanboyed out a bit in that one
next week i am speaking to nick truman we're talking about how seo ranking can
improve your customer experience so as we normally do i'm going to play you
an excerpt from next week's show here it is
so if you then just mention these words all over the place you're not really going to scratch the edge what you need to do is all the all the old seo stuff
about page speed and tags and code and site structure and hierarchy all of
that's really really important but what you need to work out these days is you need to work out how do we build the
perfect experience around our keywords
[Music] yes that's nick next week you're not
going to want to miss it so make sure you are subscribed to the podcast wherever you get your podcast from
whether that's apple or you know i want to say spotify uh yeah this spotify shopify i get those two mixed up a lot
in my head being e-commerce so and i'm not the only one we've got a few guests who do the same thing uh but you can get
on shopify you can get on stitcher you can get it on podbean wherever you get your podcast from make sure you subscribe and all of this will magically
appear in your podcast inbox totally free but of course if you put if you prefer youtube we're on there as well
just go to youtube.com ecommerce podcast and you'll find us and you can subscribe and get notified so uh
make sure like say you're subscribed for next week's show thank you so much for listening thanks again to this week's
show sponsors uh and of course a huge shout out to joseph for being on the show and sharing with us his insight
have a fantastic week i'll be back next week bye for now
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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