by: AskPat 711 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn, here. Welcome to Episode 711 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
All right, here's today's question from Lucas.
Lucas: Hey, Pat. Lucas Sanchez with Mud Brick Studios. First off, I just want to say thank you. You are a rockstar. My question for you is this, where do you start when you've already started? Let me explain that. I've been in business for about a year. I also started listening to you about a year ago. I've made lots and lots of mistakes. I look back, and I look at where we're at now, and I can tell you a million different things that we should have done, and that we should be doing. All of that becomes very overwhelming. I kind of need to know what's the most important thing?
I have a team of five people. We create explainer animations and promotional animations. We've created a bunch of different demos of what we can do. We have a nice website and just built our structure, our process, built a really, really great team. We need to start moving the needle as far as generating more income in order to support the team. What's the most important thing that we should be doing? I don't have much of an email list, if any. I don't have a huge fan base. We don't have a real way of collecting emails. What is the thing that I should be focusing on the most right now? I know those are all things I need, but where do I restart? Thank you.
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, Lucas? Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. I appreciate the rockstar comment even though I don't feel like I am. I just appreciate it so much. I'm here to help you. I'm checking out Mud Bricks Studios and I like what you have going on. I like the videos. In terms of what I've seen in my world with explainer videos, for example, I see you offer all kinds of services for video renderings, and animations on your site, but explainer videos in particular. I've seen a lot of different examples of that. There's the whiteboard animations, which work really well. There's other kinds of, more ones where it looks almost South Parky where people are using stop motion to portray certain ideas.
For those of you listening, an explainer video is essentially a video that goes along with your product that will help show people why it's great, the benefits of it, and also some other things to help people take action. That's really the benefit of explainer videos for you is it gets more engagement, more click throughs, and more customers if it's done correctly. It seems like you guys have a very unique style with your kinds of explainer videos, which is a great advantage to have. I just was glad to see that it wasn't another one of those sort of whiteboard video services. There's a lot of them out there, which proves that this does work and people do need explainer videos.
What is your next step? You've put all this together, you have a nice website, you've got good animation, you know what to do. You just need people to know you exist. You said earlier, you don't really have an email list and you haven't gotten much exposure yet. You need to move the needle. The quickest and easiest way to do this would be, based on the kind of business that you have, is to run advertisements. The easiest and quickest way, it's not the cheapest. There are other ways and I'll mention that in a second that you can go out there and gain exposure for what it is that you do. The quickest and easiest way to go about it and test, and put yourself out there, and get exposure for your brand, and get new clients is to run advertisements.
I would do two types of advertisements for what you're doing. I would do, one, Facebook advertisements for one of those services only. You don't want to do it for Mud Brick Studios in whole. You want to do it for one of those particular kinds of videos. I'm looking at your website here, and you have explainer videos, or 3D animation, asset modeling, training videos, product visualization. That's a great suite of services to offer. When you're running ads, you want to go to one specific thing because that will help you figure out who you should target. I would actually start with explainer videos and just try that. It seems like to me, because you've talked about this on your homepage right in the beginning, it's the first thing that's mentioned, are these explainer videos. Also, when you serve people like small businesses, or small business owners, they know the value, or you can teach them the value in these explainer videos, are likely to, if there's an ROI there or a future ROI, they're going to part with money in exchange for those services. These explainer videos I would work on those and just hone in your radar on that.
Then you reach out to and target different kinds of businesses, or profiles, or Facebook pages that you know specifically the people in those audience would benefit from explainer videos. What you do is, obviously in that video advertisement that's on there, you would have examples of your work, and a clear call to action, and get people to at least reach out to you. If you're really struggling collecting emails addresses first could be a smart way to go about it because it's a lower barrier to entry. The reason I say that is because on your homepage, for example, or in any contact for it's name, email, phone, and how we can help you. Maybe it's just a simple as just email only. You want to decrease the number of options people have so that it's more likely they're going to move forward.
Having a specific landing page from that advertisement for explainer videos, maybe it's simply just, “Hey, give us a call and we'll talk to you.” Test out the phone number, test out the email, and make it really easy for people to contact you. Then if you can't get any leads that way, then you know something is up. Maybe it's the advertisement, or maybe it's the landing page. At least it narrows it down for you a little bit and you're taking it in more of an iterative process. You're advertising people to contact you. You're not advertising and offering a product at that point because you want to try to get your first customers. That's the whole goal here. You want to just try to get one. Likely if you can get one, you can get more. The more you can succeed on using platforms like Facebook advertising, the more likely you are to be able to easily scale from there because you'd have a system and a model that works that you just pump more money into and you get more money back.
That's really what the beauty of paid advertising becomes at some point. Once you've mastered it and figured it out, is you put a quarter in and you get a dollar out. Then you put two dollars in, then you get . . . I shouldn't have done it that way. You put a quarter in, you get a dollar out. You put 50 cents in, you get two dollars out. That sort of thing. You just put more money into it, you get more money back.
I would also consider using Instagram for advertising as well. With the visuals that you have they're so striking. They can really make an impact on somebody who is going through their Instagram feed. I really feel like that would be a great platform to potentially collect clients as well. Again, just make your goals really simple. Just try to get X number of phone calls from your campaigns and see if that will work. To get that exposure quickly that's what you can do. You've built the business first, now you need the exposure, that's the way to go about doing it.
Now, there are other things that you can do. The one thing that comes to mind is offering some of your video services to influencers who would see those videos. Offering it to those influencers for free. Picking a person or a company out there and actually doing it for them knowing that in most cases, or maybe in exchange for sharing the final product, and talking about the process of using this explainer video, you would then get exposure through their audience. Kind of doing pro bono work and helping each other out at the same time. That is something you can do. There are a lot of people who have approached me in the past who have offered things that are similar. Sometimes I say, “Yes,” because I need it. Sometimes I just say, “No, not right now.” You never know unless you ask. You go out there, you offer this help and then, for me at least, and I know a lot of other people who will when they have something awesome like this happen and given to them, they're going to go back and return the favor.
That's what I think. I hope that resonates with you, Lucas. Thank you so much for your question. I appreciate you and I want to wish you and your team all the best of luck. As a result of having your question featured here on the show, I want to offer you an AskPat t-shirt. We're going to send you an email in the next month or so collecting your physical address so we can send you the shirt. For everybody else out there listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
All right, cheers, and here's a quote to finish off the day by two-time SPI Podcast guest Neil Patel. He says, “Don't try to plan everything out to the very last detail. I'm a big believer in just getting it out there, create a minimal viable product or website, launch it, and get feedback.”
Simple as that. Take care guys. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.