Effectively Using Video Within Your Business With Caleb Maxwell

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host Andy Splichal. We're happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic which is effectively using video within your business. Today's guest is the co-founder of Hebron Films, the concept creator extraordinaire, Director of Production and all around passionate film bloke, a big hello to Caleb Maxwell. Hi, Caleb.

Caleb Maxwell 1:12

Hey, Andy, thanks for having me on the show.

Andy Splichal 1:15

Thanks for joining us today. Now, let's start with what type of companies do you believe should be using some sort of video advertising in their business?

Caleb Maxwell 1:26

Yeah, I love this question. The answer is every business and I'll tell you why. Video is essentially just a communication tool, just like a website, just like written words. And no matter what business you're in, you're always going to be talking to people, whether that's whether you're b2b or b2c business, you are wanting to communicate effectively. So you want to use all tools at your disposal to do that. And video is a really, really powerful one.

Andy Splichal 2:01

Now, what type of videos do you believe give a company the biggest bang for their buck? How? How? What's the video? That's going to be the most probably it's a must have for all companies?

Caleb Maxwell 2:15

Well, I mean, before you can work out what type of video is going to work for you, you've got to define what your goals are, like, what what does success look like for you? Because there's, you know, there's a whole suite of video possibilities. And, and I often say that people start with the idea quite often they start with what video? Should I make, you know, how, what's the video idea for this, this thing that I'm going to make I know I need video, but I don't know, you know, what it what exactly it should be. The first step you should take is define what your goals are. And you do that by assessing your brand strengths and weaknesses and identifying what is a weak point in your in your overall brand. So it might be referrals or follow up to after you've made a sale. And that's right at the end of a client's journey. So in that case, the biggest bang for your buck may be a a personalized video that you send to each depending on on the your product. And if it's gone, you know the scale at which you're selling, but you might you might send a personalized video or a slightly less personalized video to each each customer that is bought from you. And that might give you the biggest bang for your buck. So it's all it's really about starting with your goals and identifying what you need most first, we call that the highest value first video.

Andy Splichal 4:00

Now let's talk ROI. How can you track the ROI of a video to make sure it's profitable?

Caleb Maxwell 4:08

Yeah, that's a good question too. So it gets also gets back to goals. So when we're talking, and we'll get into it in a little bit, but when we're talking video strategy, that is part of it. So we need to work out before we even make the video we need to work out how we're going to track the return on investment. And that means working out what the metrics are what are the most important metrics that we need to be looking at what do we need to be focusing on and measuring? Because it's no good if you are trying to increase? You're trying to increase the quality of your sales calls. By sending videos out before someone gets on a sales call with your sales staff. It's no good to track video views. Just as a metric because that's not going to give you an accurate return on investment, because you're investing to try and increase the outcome you're looking for is increased quality of sales calls. So you need to be tracking the and put in a rating system of the quality of each sales call and get your gate your sales staff whether it's you or, or you've got someone selling for you to rate that sales call. And then gather that as your data metric to work out what your return on investment is. Because it's always it's not always going to be you're not always going to be making a pure sales conversion video. That's where it's pretty easy where you know, you're encouraging someone to buy straight after watching the video, you can just say, you know, this video cost me $5,000 To make and I made $10,000 in sales and my margin, you know, it's 50%, so I broke. That's pretty straightforward. But you need to set your goal first, and then decide what metric you're going to track to work out whether that was a success or not. So there's a few different video metrics, I'm not gonna go through all of them. But video views is in everyone knows about views, tracking the amount of people that have watched it. But more important than that is tracking who's watched.

Andy Splichal 6:22

You know, what, with video views, just interrupt,

Caleb Maxwell 6:25

Yeah, yeah, no, go

Andy Splichal 6:26

Is it? I know, in Facebook, you know, you run video ads on Facebook and the ads, you know, they consider what to 10 seconds as a view through? What are what kind of video views so is it the whole 100% of the video? Or what kind of video view statistics are you tracking?

Caleb Maxwell 6:45

Yeah, so that's that, that's really important when you're getting into campaigns putting together a campaign that's got multiple videos in it. So as you mentioned, Facebook have, they just track the percentage of the video that someone watched. So they'll give you metrics on 15, second, views, 32nd views, 45 second views. And so what you want to be focusing on there, it depends what the goal of the video is, as well. So if you are wanting someone to, if you want to wanting to gather a pool of people that may be interested in your product, or service, you want to capture those people that have watched even a little bit of your video. So at least 15 seconds, if someone's watched, you know, two seconds of your video, you probably could probably be pretty sure that they're not, they didn't really grab them for whatever reason. But the 15 second view, you can maybe assume that they could be potentially interested in what you are the message you're trying to give them even if your video is a 32nd video or a 62nd video or longer.

Andy Splichal 8:01

So besides video views, what are some of the other some of the other metrics that you?

Caleb Maxwell 8:06

So it's things are pretty limited on Facebook itself, but other than video views themselves, I would be if you're using the video with a Learn More button, for example. Then you would be tracking click through rate. So how many people are actually clicking on that Learn More button on Facebook, for example, or Instagram and going through to your website. Or if you are looking for I suppose email addresses captured after that then you would be tracking how many email addresses you've that you've captured. But it's really it is first defining that goal if you are trying to build community and this is part of our full funnel strategy. It's after you've introduced someone to your brand you're looking to build community, build a community of people that are interested in what you do and have find it valuable. So you would want to be tracking engagement on your video not really the number of views because you know you're looking for quality views not number of views. You you wanting engagement so engagement looks like interacting with the video whether that's liking commenting, sharing all those types of things.

Andy Splichal 9:29

So when a new client comes in to you at Hebron Films, do they typically have an idea already? Of what they want to use the video for what they want the video to be of? Or they just sometimes videos?

Caleb Maxwell 9:45

Yeah, so we get a mix of both. It video is still an online video is still quite a a new thing and in relative terms of marketing. So we get a lot of clients coming in and just saying Hey, I know I need to make video because it's everywhere. And I've heard all these stats about how important it is, but I don't actually know what I'm doing. So we take those clients through our, our strategy process, and to work out what their highest value first video is, and then plan out a content strategy for them that spanned six months or 12 months, that, that makes it super easy for them, and gives them confidence that they're going to be able to achieve success with video. But then there's some clients that come to us and they go, I need to promote this event, or I need to, I need to make more sales. So we work with them to figure out what type of video is going to work best for them. And that's all through our video strategy process.

And speaking of that strategy process, so we spoke earlier, you know, you had suggested to find where your weaknesses are and address that with a video. But But is that what the strategy process is about? Or is it more than that?

Yeah, it's, it's very involved. So we work on a seven part framework for for video strategy. And I'll, I'll just run through the the first three for you. The first one, you need to start with audience right, and I talked about your kind of your brand audit. Now, that's part of the second step. But firstly, you need to know your audience, like the back of your hand, like you need to know them better than you know yourself. Because if you know where they hang out online, if you know what's important to them, if you know what they're afraid of, then you can actually talk directly to them. And they will be able to see themselves in your video content and relate to it. And that is the most powerful thing. So and outside of that, you're going to be able to adjust what you're doing your services and your products and how you talk about them to make sure that they're actually achieving success for your audience in some way, they're actually making their life better or solving a problem for them. So that's, that's the first step in our in our process, we go into an in deep, a deep dive into audience and getting to know them better. And the second one is goals, which I touched on earlier, it's really important to do a bit of a brand audit, we've got like a spider graph, questionnaire thing that, that we can, you know, we go through to work out just like anecdotally, from the business owners perspective, what what, you know, right, different strengths, different aspects of your or your brand, and how your customers perceive your brand. And that gives us a good idea or a good starting point to work out which which area might need some help. Whether that's brand awareness, whether that's community, whether it's conversion,

Which what's the most common, most common?

Oh, that's a good question. Generally, generally, people aren't doing a lot of follow up, to be honest, and that a lot of people miss out on a massive amount of sales, because they're not reaching back out to clients that have already bought to them bought from them. The the relationship with your customer doesn't end when they buy something from you. It is there. I don't have the stats on hand, but it is exponentially more effective and, and much easier to sell to someone who's already bought from you than it is to get a new customer that doesn't know about you. So video can be really powerful in that in that space. And it doesn't have to be really high production value video, either. Like it doesn't need to be expensive, you can do a lot of things yourself in in personalizing video or or making things you know, making videos yourself that that people are going to be okay with because they've got a relationship with you already.

Yeah. Hey, you speak to that. So if can you mess it up? I mean, if you're shooting a video on your iPhone, you know, does it look cheesy? Does it do they're like, Oh, this this company's pretty low budget there?

Yeah, so it depends on what other things your customers have seen. So if they've seen a really high production value marketing content somewhere else, you know, that's, you know, that's fine. They're gonna go yep, that these people know what they're talking about. Especially if it's a customer that's bought from you. They they know like and trust you already, so you don't need to be trying to impress them with fancy looking videos. If they get a video that's short on your iPhone. And it's, it seems somewhat personalized, they're going to that's going to make them feel special because you're not you, you it's like talking directly to them. You don't have to, you know, when you go out for a coffee with someone you're not putting on a broad show. A Oh my goodness, what? What's that that straight?

A big show?

Yeah, no, I a big show, I'm trying to say you're not trying to put on a big show for them, when you're just trying to go out to coffee with them, right? You you, people are totally fine to get a rough little video that's sent directly to them. They feel special that makes them feel like they're part of the family kind of thing. But the one thing I will say is the most important thing in video, no matter where it sits in your customer journey is audio. A lot of especially if you are talking directly to someone, it's a personalized video. The one thing that audiences cannot forgive is bad audio, if they can't hear you. That's that's done. If if they if the video is not great, or you know, it's a bit glitchy, or whatever, it's just if it's not sharp very well, that's, they can forgive that. But if they can't hear you, you're done.

Do you have a favorite success story of one of your clients that you would be willing to share?

Yeah, yeah. I, I love, win win wins, we try and find clients that we can help, that's going to make sense for us and that their customers are then going to benefit for benefit from as well. So we call that a win win win. We had a really classic example of this. I think it was last year, we started with this client, he ran a program an in person program that introduced wellbeing dogs into schools. And they weren't, you know, they're not assistance dogs or anything like that. They're they're bringing dogs into schools to assist with well being and, and be used as actual teaching assistant in the classroom. So it's a super cool program. The, the issue was that, you know, COVID blew up and, and they couldn't, he couldn't get in to do his in person, program as much. But he was already at max capacity. So he couldn't, he couldn't spend any more of his time he had, he was in demand. And, and there was no, there was no more time that he could spend to scale his business. So he came to us. And we were able to work out that the highest value video that he could do was actually an online course. And he was already thinking about that. But he had no idea how to make one. So we let him through that entire process of structuring, setting out an online course and then producing all the videos and the video lessons within it. It was it was just fantastic. Because that enabled him to scale his business now he could run the same program in schools in, you know, across the country that that he would never have been able to travel to. And he was able to sell it at a fraction of the cost because it didn't take that much of his time.

Right. Right. Yeah. That's amazing. Now you're you're based in Australia, right?

I am. Yes.

And so are all your clients also in Australia or?

Yeah, so mostly, we help regional businesses perform on the world stage. That's our that's our kind of tagline, right? So we are focused on regional Australian businesses at at the moment, because we're a pretty small team, high functioning team, but we're a pretty small team. And so that's our focus at the moment. But we I actually love referring, referring people to other really creative and like minded businesses like us, we've got a network across the world, actually, mostly in the States and the UK. So yeah, if if I mean, if any of your listeners are think, Man, this, I would love a production company like this to talk to. I'm always happy to talk to them, but it would be of more value if I could refer them to someone closer to them in their local area and be happy to do that.

Do you have referral connections here in the US center?

Sure do. Yep. Yeah, we've got we've got some friends who run very similar businesses to us. I'm part of a couple of groups actually once a Video Strategy Group and one's a video coaching group and every business in there is phenomenal. There's probably more than probably more than 20 businesses across this across the United States that I could I could refer to.

So when you're working with a client, are there any challenges that you struggle with? And providing results for your clients?

Yeah, yeah. So the biggest struggle is when a client doesn't see the value in video, or doesn't, doesn't really work with us or trust us. To be honest, the video process itself can work for pretty much every business, I haven't run into one where it wouldn't, wouldn't work well and have a great impact on their business. But it's the trust factor with with the client. But it's also you know, bringing, bringing the value to the table. So making sure that you, you understand or you you're willing to take the journey of what, what the production company is saying that might be the result and and take a dive, some people don't, you know, are not really big risk takers. And they see video as a risk, because it's something I don't understand, which is totally fine. But yeah, that's probably the only challenge that we really ever have is, is convincing clients that this, this is actually going to work. It's okay, let's give it a go. Yeah.

Now, personally, have there been any business books out there that you could attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I, I'm a big believer in the the statement that Leaders are readers. So there are some great, great books that have contributed to, you know, my character over the years, but some business ones I actually love Great by Choice by Jim Collins. That's, that's a fantastic book that runs through how it compares is a big study he did on onbusinesses that were able to succeed in the face of really turbulent economic situations, and it compares them with businesses that failed in the same situation. So that's, that's a really, really good book, especially for this period of life that we're in at the moment. And I was actually thinking about this, I think, another one that I would really highly recommend. It's not as much a business book but it every entrepreneur needs to read this book, I would say, it is. Don't, you Can't Hurt He. It's Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins.

I have not heard of that book.

That is a that'll, that'll change your perception on what you think is possible in within yourself. It's it's eveyone runs through his but it's, it's really, really, really impactful, I would recommend it to every every entrepreneur.

I'll have to put that on my list. Now, what problems do you do you solve for your clients? And how do you have your agency stand out from your competition?

Well, it you probably guessed it already, that it's the strategy side of things, a lot of production companies, and traditionally have just operated. Like, you know, your client comes to you and say, hey, I want a video and you say, what is it tell me what it is, and I'll make it. But we and we operated like that for a little bit. We just did what our clients wanted. And if they didn't really know what they wanted, we just came up with an idea. That sounded cool and made it and, you know, we've made great, we make great content. But great content is not necessarily what people actually want. businesses and business owners, a lot of the time they think they want a video, but they don't want a video, they want the result that the video is going to get for their business. So we were finding a misalignment in what we were making and, and the results that people wanted it we weren't we weren't actually getting people real physical results. We were just making cool videos. And and that's, you know, I'm not satisfied with that I actually want to help people. So we went on this journey of learning and discovering and formulating and Systemising strategy. So we we run clients through our complete video strategy and that ensures that they get success with the videos that they're making. They don't just You know, throw it up on YouTube and their mother and grandma see it and 24 other people, they actually get a result from the videos. So that's how we stand out.

Yeah, you know, I mean, that's a, that's a great lesson for any type of business is nobody wants your service, right? They want the results that your service can give them big time. So you should be always keeping that in mind. So thank you for that. Now, let's talk about what kind of services you offer?

Right.

So Strategy Session, videos?

Yeah, other than strategy. So we, we do do one of projects and we also handle a lot of campaigns. So outside of video strategy, we run and strategy consultancy, we run all the standard services that you expect you would expect from a video production company, we take projects through, from concept through to completion, production and post production. And then we have some strategy services that we're able to, to offer, where, as I mentioned before, we were able to make online courses as well, which has been a really great success for some of our clients.

And what type of budget do people need to get involved with a video production company like yours?

Great question. Yeah, because a lot of people don't know most of the clients that come to us that they, they just, you know, they come to us and say, Look, we don't really know how much this is going to cost. We work within the $5,000 to you know, up to past $100,000 range. But the what I would suggest to, to businesses is to work out, we have this little graph that we we help we use to help clients work out how much they should be spending, or where they should be spending their money and video. And it's kind of two upside down triangles, it's a bit hard to explain it over audio, but the gist of it is that the highest the volume of videos that you make, so the most amount of videos you make, you should be spending the least amount of money on and that's at the end of the customer journey, that you should be spending the most amount of money on the least amount of videos you make, which is at the top of your customer journey funnel, which is your brand awareness area. So the you should be putting the majority of your budget towards the top of funnel content. So the the videos that are introducing new clients to your brand who have never, never known you before. And that that area in if I'm talking in Australian dollars, which is just a little bit, a little bit more than US dollars, we'd be about, I'd say 10 10,000 We'd be a pretty good real roughs stab in the dark for most businesses. But you need to understand that video good video isn't cheap. And it's not just about what's put into the video, but it's about the the thought that's put behind it. So the strategy and the development of it. But I'd say about 10.

Do you get you said most people who come to you don't have any idea? Do you get much price resistance when you tell them how much it is?

Well, we've we've used video in our sales structure and and used it really well. It's it's a working really amazingly for us. So we get qualified leads coming to have sales conversations with us. And that means that they have seen.

So they know already?

Yeah, they already know that we are going to achieve their the result that they're after. Sometimes they they just don't have the budget. And sometimes we decide that they're not the best fit for us because what they want to do, it may actually cost less than $5,000. But and then in those cases, we we happily refer them to a network of freelancers that may be able to do it at a cheaper rate. And there's the videos that you can do. There's plenty of videos that you can make for less than $5,000 We just don't do those ones. So But no, we don't we don't often get anyone coming to us and and and saying, you know that's that's too much.

Now, who's, who's the perfect client for your agency? Who do you guys work with?

Yeah, regional based companies. I call them legendary regional companies. So they're their businesses that believe that there is no ceiling to their success and growth. They're risk takers. But in terms of the type of industry we work with, we we work, you know, across education to manufacturing to you ever everything in between. So it's it's really the perfect business for us is one that is willing to take a risk and has a marketing budget. That's a big one. Yeah. And he's wanting to wanting to see some success with video.

And last question, how can a interested listener, whether they're in Australia or just want to pick your brain and get a referral close to home for video, how can they contact you?

Well go to our website, you can book in a call with me and you'll go through the video process that I just mentioned, you can book in a call with me on our website. That's very easy to see how to do that there. Or you could just connect with me on LinkedIn if you want. And shoot me a message. I'm an open book I love. I love talking to people no matter where they are, and seeing if I can help out.

Oh, great. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Caleb.

My pleasure, Andy. Thanks for having me.

Well, that's it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Hebron Films are connecting with Caleb you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our all new podcasts Resource Center, available at www.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all the different past guests by show topics and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information about any services for topics I have discussed in previous episodes. Again, go to www.makeeachclickcount.com. Click on the link for the Podcast Resource Center found in the top navigation menu. That's it for today. Remember to stay safe keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.