John Corcoran 11:49
one for our gig. And then
Tom Breeze 11:52
he made him feel confident that like, thanks to you for him. So I was like, constantly on the hunt for new new clients, and didn’t have any continuity program at that point. But the I was like, right, COVID just get someone in the room. That’d be great. And I, because my business has been newly formed, I will get like flyers and offers. And one of the things that came through the door where I lived, and I lived in New York, a flat with friends and my wife, and I would, I had, like, this thing comes through the door for Google AdWords. I didn’t even know what that was back in the day, because I’d use Yahoo. So Google wasn’t really even a thing. And I was like, okay, cool. I’ll check it out. And because I got like, a 75 pounds free credit, I think it was, there was a certain amount of money that you could spend on them to try and get the campaigns working basically. And so I went online and watched a few of their videos that they recommended, here’s how to set things up. And it was like really basic, it was only search that was available at that point. And it would say, like, have a think about what your customers are type in and put those keywords into this box here. And I was like, okay, cool. That seems pretty easy enough. And I put them in, and I said, and what do you want your ad to say, and I’d like this. And so I just type it in. And then the, at that point, I would then press go. And I’ll say, Here’s my daily budget. And here’s how much I’m willing to spend. I was like, Cool, let’s see what happens. And it wasn’t my money. So I was spending it. And it was all kind of going out of Google’s back pocket. But bear in mind, I’ve tried loads of things up into this point, I tried kind of some PR and got no success with it whatsoever, but got into some quite big publications. I tried Yellow Pages didn’t really get anything working. And I was like struggling to get customers. And I set up this Google ad, that same day or two people call me because I literally just put my telephone number in the ad as well as on my website. They literally call my mobile phone I picked up and we had a chat for about 20 minutes. And I turned both of them into new clients for about 500 pounds each because I do like a 414 hour session. So I’d sell it as a one time session. And so I made like 1000 pounds off the back of about 30 pounds spend and the day had been like, Okay, I was like, Oh my God, I’ve literally unlocked a part of the universe that no one knows about. And, and the same thing happened the next day. And I just booked out my diary for ages in advance. And I was doing all this one to one work, and it was very lucrative, very profitable. And but I just didn’t have that much business sense to feel like oh, there’s other people that can do what I can do, or there’s people who can do a better job of sales, and there’s better people that can look in the diary. And so I kind of learned all that stuff as I went but still have a pretty bad job of it. And so that was my kind of I got good at Google ads. That was like my thing to get make my business successful. And then running a one to one. Business is actually really difficult, especially when you’re providing a service to As a consumer, rather than a business, because as soon as you hit in the UK, at least as soon as you hit a certain amount of income, you have to then start charging tax on top to the to the person you’re selling services to. So let’s say for example, my my fees to you might be like 500 pounds, let’s say, if I had to put a tax on top of that there might be now you have to pay 600 pounds, and I only get 500. But the government would take 100 pounds on that. And you get this threshold where you like, call people, you find out where the people are maxing out where they’re willing to pay. Yeah. And then you realize that actually how much like I’m giving 20% of that immediately to the government. And if it was a business, they could claim that back, but it as a kind of individual user, it was more difficult. So there’s like barriers as you go that make it very difficult, because just 20% of your top line gone. Jeremy, you don’t get back. So there’s little things like that, that were frustrating running a business. So I thought the best way to do this, to figure this out will be to do more group sessions. And selling group sessions to people that are already fearful of public speaking is a really hard sell. That’s like saying, you know, the one thing you don’t like doing is get in front of groups. That perfectly for you. Really hard game.
John Corcoran 16:16
You’re all gonna share how much you hate being here in a room together?
Tom Breeze 16:19
Yes. Yeah, you’re all together in the same boat. Right? All
John Corcoran 16:23
right. I’m gonna make you all miserable. Yeah, exactly.
Tom Breeze 16:26
So um, the end, I ended up selling a few of them. And we do these weekend workshops. And they were really good. People love them and got really confident because they basically say, I’ve got a presentation on Tuesday, on Saturday and Sunday, I’m getting together with a bunch of different people, I’m going to practice my gig and it’s gonna be the friendliest crowd, I’m gonna get over myself. And then come Tuesday, they had so much more confidence needs to love it. But getting in there was hard. But at the end of the way that I sold, it was our do a build on my list of people that wanted to do work with me. So I do your Google ads to opt in. And then the, that list of customers or prospects, I would sell a lot of them would sell one to one. But then I’d say, hey, look, you can all come to a weekend workshop. And I’d sell that by sending out a video to the whole of my list. And the video was pretty new. No one was really leveraging video. So
John Corcoran 17:21
we’re putting it up on YouTube at that point. Yeah, I put up
Tom Breeze 17:24
until YouTube YouTube was a new thing. But I had also like accounts at cycle Vidler, which is now not available any longer. I’m quite happy about that. Because I got so much crap into the welfare. That’s just gone. Gone. Now. It’s disappeared somewhere. Yeah, I’ll put on Vimeo put lots of different places, because I just wanted it to be a neat looking video. Yeah.
John Corcoran 17:47
In mid 2000s, or so there were a lot of competitors. YouTube wasn’t the only video platform out there. There were a lot.
Tom Breeze 17:54
Totally Yeah, exactly. And so you have lots of places you could upload, like Dailymotion was another one of these platforms. And I’m so put I’m put them up on these platforms, and then the send outs my list, and then they would buy straight off the page. And so then I was like, right, cool. I’m kind of doing email marketing, as well as getting people to these like workshops. But then, on this workshop I did, it was a weekend workshop. And it was mainly geared around business. So it’s like saying, you’re getting a business pitch or presentation. So a lot of business owners turned up to it. And either lunch or the first day, a few of them came up to me independently said, How’s that video is doing on your website? By the way, that looks really cool. Can I do that? And they were like, hey, after this next week, can I pay you to come and show me how you set that up? Because I’d love to do videos like you do and send it out to my list? like, Sure, no problem. And so it became like, I thought the cell was going to be like, here’s how to speak on video and get really eloquent and communicate effectively. And what I realized that I was saying, well, well, I’ll just film it. I’ve got a few editing skills. I’ll just give you the video back afterwards. So perfect. Your I’d be like almost like your little director, editor. And then the client would say cool, yeah, go for it. And I just kind of like
John Corcoran 19:11
morphing into like a video production company at this point.
Tom Breeze 19:14
Exactly. Yeah. So I was like, Director of film like videographer and then editor, and then I would, and I’ll give him back the video. But the beauty was, I managed to say to them, like, have it back, and then pay me out of the results you get. So I’d say like if it’s like if it’s closing a workshop or something, just give me 10% of sales or something along those lines by using that video. And that may that was a really lucrative process because I do the video production for free as long as they were it was good work for them, so to speak. So I started getting into more performance based relationships with people
John Corcoran 19:49
and were you worried that they would be honest and would report back when they made a sale?
Tom Breeze 19:54
All totally yeah, I’ve got quite a few times but it was worth the burning, so to speak like you You’d get one client that would be like, close, it’d be like an 8020 thing. And the good clients would close a lot, and be happy to pay for it. And I keep on doing more and more video with them. You know, they’re like, this video works really well, no one else is really offering it. Let’s just do another one. Yeah, they would see such an uptick. They’re like, cool. This just makes sense to do, but I would, I would invest my time and energy into them. So I was like, okay, cool. So like this. Don’t say like that. So this, they couldn’t get that anywhere else. So it was really not doing
John Corcoran 20:26
any YouTube ads at this point. But eventually it morphs it morphs into YouTube ads, or the ad platform becomes more robust. Yeah, well,
Tom Breeze 20:35
exactly. So we ended up doing these videos will be like content driven, we’ll put them up on YouTube. And then I partnered with a business partner, and they were an expert, SEO. And so they would take the videos, and then get them ranked all over Google and YouTube and all the backlinking and all that keyword structure and everything like that, and then would almost be like, hey, look, we’re awkward, the video, my business partner will rank them for you, and you’ll get a ton more business. And we did that for about 18 months, worked really well. And I was like, Oh, my word of cracks, Google ads. And that was becoming a little bit more challenging, it’s getting a lot more competitive. And then SEO was a new route I was on my words is working really, really well. And then the SEO started making some changes. So Google started making lots of updates to their platform, and lots of websites will just disappear overnight because of it. And same thing happened to our videos. And so I was struggling, create all these clients at this point, I’d sold them in and like, hey, we’ll create the videos, we upload them, we’ll get them ranked for you working really well. And they charge a monthly fee. And then the SEO world just turned on its head really quickly. And basically, the business is gone. And our clients are leaving. And so I had these videos that are really good.
John Corcoran 21:53
What happened there? So what happened that you said the world turned on its head? What happened was a
Tom Breeze 21:59
Google made a series of changes to how the algorithms work with the SEO results. So they had this like Penguin and Panda updates,
John Corcoran 22:10
which a lot of people got affected by hugely Yeah,
Tom Breeze 22:13
like massively, and businesses, it’d be like really go from like, big, kind of really big companies to very small companies on the digital world, you know, and everyone was scrambling. It was like a crazy time. And I was like, looked at, I was like, do I try and master SEO and go deeper? Or do I go back to what I know, which is Google ads, and a really reliable way of driving traffic? But now I have these video assets from clients. And I was like, Okay, think there’s something here. So out of pure, my business partner ended up, we ended up parting ways, and they carried on the SEO world. And I was like, Cool. I’ve got these clients, of course, their videos. And I personally put some money behind it. And I said, Hey, look, I’m gonna try out some ads for you let me know how they go. So I put my own spending behind these videos. And one of our clients said, okay, cool, I’ll pay you the equivalent of 10 pounds a lead, which is about like, $15 a lead at the time. And I was like, okay, cool. And I ran the traffic, checking on the numbers, they were doing really well. I look back now and realize that they got a great deal with me because they’ll make about 150 pounds per lead and pay me like 10 pounds.
John Corcoran 23:26
And you’re paying for the ad spend yourself.
Tom Breeze 23:29
So I paid for the ad spend, but then it will cost me about three pounds to acquire the lead. So okay, I would spend three pounds 10 pounds, and then make 150 pounds. I was like, Yeah, this is a great deal. This works really well. Everyone was really happy. And I scaled that up like crazy. And that’s really how I got into YouTube ads. And then I had all these clients that do exactly the same sort of deal, performance-based ad spend the money, they approached me for results. And we scaled up like mad across numerous different niches and industries. So that was really my growth, journey into YouTube advertising. And 10 years later, we’ve run for lots of different household names and that type of stuff. So the business model doesn’t always flow in exactly the same way. Like when corporate clients, they’re not going to be like, Yeah, I’ll give you a percentage of profits or something. Yeah.
John Corcoran 24:22
But you still do offer a paper from the performance model for some of your clients, I believe. And I want to I want to ask you, why have you stuck with that model? Because a lot of businesses, you know, maybe we’ll start off with something like that when they’re unproven when they’re just starting out, and then eventually they say, Oh, my time’s worth money, you know, pay me 1000s of dollars. So So why Why have you stuck to that?
Tom Breeze 24:46
Because it’s always worked out better for me financially and also as a relationship builder with clients. So the and also from a mom Think standpoint. It’s it’s a talking point, you know where it differentiates you?
John Corcoran 25:04
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Especially in this world that you’re in? Yeah.
Tom Breeze 25:07
Yeah, totally. Yeah. So I see business being like three big departments for big departments. One is like the vision and where you’re headed and keeping an eye on the horizon and where you’re going towards like, that’s the CEO, stroke, found integrator kind of role. Let’s head in this direction, so to speak. Like that’s questioning, should we even do YouTube ads or not? Those sorts of questions, you probably shouldn’t question too often. But it’s kind of like you’re heading in this direction. And then your three departments underneath, you’ve got sales and marketing, operations and finance. Right? So those are the ways I look at it. I’m like, How can I make these as easy as possible just to keep on running? The hardest one I’ve always done is operations, like, how do you keep on top of things? How do you deliver great products? How do you wow your clients constantly, it’s the it’s the meat and potatoes of the business. That’s the kind of the thing that makes all work is the operations and that’s where a lot of complication comes in. But like, especially because it’s on advertising, because the landscape is constantly changing. So my call, I’m gonna spend my time on that. So get our product so damn good, that clients love us. And if you’ve got that, and it’s working really well, and you perfect it. Normally, finances take care of themselves, like you know that you’re doing a good job, and you’re gonna get paid anyway. But I’m, I look at the sales and marketing. And I’m like, What’s the easiest way of making that work? Like, what’s the simplest way of in loads of referrals, Lowe’s, like, all ads work, everything’s just simple. And all I’ve always found is the, it’s the offer. And if your offer is so good, on the front end, then as long as it’s structured in the right way to complement, once you are getting successful clients and make it as easy as possible, like we’ve got a deal at the moment, which is like $1, to get started with us as a, as an agency, client, so to speak, you’ve got to qualify and that sort of thing, but it cost you $1. Most of our prospects laugh at that. They’re like, Wait, did you say Dolla dolla to get started? That’s like marketing
John Corcoran 27:02
That’s like for like a vitamin supplement or something or like some kind of smoothie supplement or something.
Tom Breeze 27:08
Exactly, yeah. How much work for $1. Because I know that then our monthly fee kicks in. If there’s one, one strategy, we run for clients, our monthly fees, and they’re going to be really happy, like 90% of the clients that do that thing, as long as they qualify will get really good results. And like, I don’t want to be spending time doing proposals and meetings. That’s where our time goes. And then you go to the marketing of like, pitching it and sharing with people how great it is. If there’s $1 People like, Sure, let’s do it. And it speaks for itself, you know, so I try to make the sales and marketing as easy as possible and then deliver such good results. The finances like people like yeah, I’ll pay up pay for this forever. You’re like, cool. Well, let’s, let’s actually talk about that. And how will this work? And so we came up with like, it gives us a perfect opportunity to just focus our time and energy on do the thing, right, you know, not to say we always get it right, I’m just saying that, like, then that’s how I find it easy. And so performance basis is we might lose, like 30% of the time, let’s say we spend a lot of money on a client client doesn’t work out. And we can’t make it work profitably. or for whatever reason, it doesn’t figure itself out. But I’m like, the 70% of it. Way outweighs the loss of 30%. You know, because it’s a loss for a month, probably one or two months, tops that like 70% will last for years and years and years. And like cool. I’ll happy happily take that front-end loss because I’d have to do sales and marketing for performance-based. Yeah. And we make a lot more money on the back end.
John Corcoran 28:35
Are there particular industries that you’ve found or just avoid? entirely because they just repeatedly haven’t worked?
Tom Breeze 28:42
Yeah, there are certain things that don’t work for that model. E-commerce has hard margins, and a lot tighter inventories. When you’re selling
John Corcoran 28:49
a $5 widget. That’s difficult. Yeah. Yeah,
Tom Breeze 28:52
it’s really hard that one, but the high ticket educational community, products, software, works really well like that. Those sorts of Enders. And a horse has to be like, naturally YouTube. What I mean by that is like, that people are going to YouTube and looking for information on this already. Or they’re looking for solutions to a problem that you can fix on YouTube already. Like, if someone’s looking at heavy machinery, you can do a brand play on YouTube, for sure. But like if you’re saying tractors, while this actually might work, the idea is like, I don’t know, many people are going to YouTube looking for that sort of content, like what’s the best tractor to buy compared to a high-end fitness product? Or has it been my business product or those sorts of things? So service-based businesses and product-based businesses and software-based businesses can work really well as long as it’s relatively high, high. High-value low customer
John Corcoran 29:51
got it? So you’ve been in the YouTube world for a long time. Now, this is going to be a bit of a broad question now but in terms of The content of videos today, let’s let’s narrow it down and just talk about AD videos that you’re using for the purpose of an ad. What sorts of strategies are you seeing working today as we record this in mid-2023?
Tom Breeze 30:15
Yeah, okay, cool. So I’d say the one thing that I always recommend people to do is to do a video that supports organic and ads. And there are two types of ads that it can support as well. So there’s one type of ad that is, it’s a really good strategy. So I would say like, aim for about seven minutes. That’s recently changed a cigar for longer than that, but Google is just about to announce that eight-minute videos are going to be penalized. So anything less than eight minutes is probably going to be the optimal length. Create, an eight-minute video. Put as much content and value that you can together in that video, like, give a proper demonstration of proper education and give insights to people give value to people that people think like, this is really good. Like, like, think like, I give, I give presentations from the stage and I say something and I see loads, people writing them writing that bit down. I’m like, okay, cool. That’s what you like, is it great? Or if I get loads of comments, or if I even go on, like Reddit, and type in something, I can see what people really want to know about those types of things can be really useful. And you’re like, cool, I’m gonna create a video that really answers that question that I know people are already looking for information about. But I’m not going to tease it and give it all 100% Give as much as you can, in that video. And when you do, that’s the kind of video you create eight minutes in length, maybe a one minute, or sorry, let’s say seven minutes in length, of which one minute of that might be a call to action, saying, hey, it could be like this stuff, here’s what I’ve got for you, as you lead people into that kind of the next stage would be booking a call with you
John Corcoran 31:50
know, the at the, at the end of the seven-minute video that you’re making that call to action, or somewhere in the middle.
Tom Breeze 31:56
Yeah, you can do it in the middle. But I tend to aim purely for the end, I’m like, Oh, it comes across to your customer. So you’re using it as like, Oh, and by the way, if you are interested in taking, so it’s almost like an after-the-fact call to action, so to speak, it’s kind of a, hey, if you are interested in taking the next step, here’s what you need to do next. Because what we’re doing is for like for that period of time you’re getting people to know like and trust you. But also around the five-minute mark, people are starting to consider, I wonder if this person’s got any products or services, They’re thinking that naturally without even having to do anything. But if you start showcasing like a case study of one of your clients, or you kind of subtly seeding that anyway, so you can do things where you can still provide value, but use a case study or a story or, like showcase a community that you have built or something along those lines. So you can like subtly sell the fact that you do have products, it’s not gonna be an alien concept to them at the end of the video that like wait a second your business, and it’s not going to be you can like make that a little bit obvious as you go through the content. But then, yeah, seven minutes in length, and just provide as much value as possible, we have a whole framework for it, called advocates. And, that kind of gives people a bit more of a breakdown of how to, to kind of put one of those videos together. And then what you do from having that video, then the actual strategy I’d recommend from YouTube will be to use something called an infeed video ad. So this is an ad where you will get your video with its thumbnail and its title will appear at the top of the search results on YouTube. Or if they’re watching a video, it might appear on the right-hand side. And it’s very subtle, you don’t really see the fact that it isn’t an ad, but you’re just promoting and you’re seeing what the ad will show to the user if they’ve typed in certain keywords, keywords that you’ve chosen, or words around that theme content as well. And you can spend like $5 a day $10 a day on those sorts of videos and get really good results. I’m talking like you can we’ve seen it like 10x return on ad spend. Because the way you optimize as you say, right, here’s my video, It’s gonna be shown to all the people in this location of this demographic when they type in these keywords. So you can really pinpoint your audience, your Your video thumbnail only shows those people and other people that click play in your stats and your analytics of your ad account. You can see how long people watched the video for selection because it was seven minutes. And you have 60% of your audience still watching after 50% of the way through the video. You know that like cool this this content is good. The key word I’ve chosen it’s good. And a lot of people watching a lot of content with a call to action at the end of it. And that works really well. And that will work both well as an infeed video and then also an in stream which is the ones that interrupt people on YouTube all the time and just wait for the five seconds to skip the Add button. That’s also a really effective way of advertising on YouTube but It’s probably recommended, to get started with Infeed if you’re a content creator, or if you can, if You’ve got good value and insight to share, that’s going to be a great strategy for you to put together and make it work really well.
John Corcoran 35:12
Right. And now, this strategy doesn’t require people to be constantly creating content, right, because I know, I know a number of people that have built bigger YouTube channels. And one of the things that, that they’re kind of petrified buys, if they’ve been putting out content regularly is if they stop, I’ve heard stories of, you know, content creators on YouTube, that they lose their ranking their exposure, and then all of a sudden, subsequent videos, when they start up again, don’t get the same visibility that the previous ones
Tom Breeze 35:40
did. Yeah, you got to be careful, organically. But I mean, if, if you stop, like producing video and your organic channel, then yeah, you’ll start to lose the rankings. But oh, that you lose those views and exposure. But that’s not to say that it’s over, it’s just more case, like, you just have to build up more work to bring it back to life again. But um, from an advertising perspective, if you create this video, you can have an organic, and then you can put ad spend behind it. And you’ll grow that YouTube channel faster than anything you’ve ever done, it will grow it so much quicker because you’re paying for the exposure. But if you’re making it work profitably for you, you get the best of both worlds, you get that paid media to help you grow really quickly, and get your customers. But then you’re also going to have this like earned media, which is where people are starting to watch your videos, just naturally, organically, that’s not costing you anything. And there. And you’ve got to know that owned media, whereby you started to generate a lot of subscribers and a community there. So every time you release a new video, is getting in front of more people that know like, and trust you, and you’re gonna get that growth from your channel that way as well. So there’s a lot of a lot of benefits to running the ads, other than just customer acquisition, you can run the ads and start gaining a lot more brand on YouTube and, and being seen as that expert in your field as well. So it can really help you grow really quickly.
John Corcoran 37:03
Now I want to ask you about this, your focus has evolved, and you’ve actually created a software, it’s called X-ray or the X-ray, which actually looks at your YouTube channel, downloads your data and then gives you some actionable advice. Tell us about how that works.
Tom Breeze 37:20
Yeah, exactly. So the way that the software works is that you connect your accounts, as you said, it’s the xray.io, you can go there, and it’ll take you through to a page where you can connect your YouTube channel to that software, you just need to authorize it. So it asked you just to say Hey, call you right to connect this is very basic information, it brings me your channel. But what it will do is it will pull down every single video and all the retention stats. This is private stats, the comments, stats, everything you would want to see that your YouTube analytics really doesn’t give you it can give you insight behind each video independently. But then you want to be like Well, I’ve released 100 videos, or at least 50 videos out of which ones are my best. And so we always found it was really difficult to work out which videos do the trick, and which videos don’t. And it’s like, well, I got more views for this video. But that doesn’t tell you, it’s a good video for business, it’s just, that it’s great, and it’s got a bit more exposure than the rest of the videos. But it’s not the full picture of what you want. As a business, you really want retention. As a business, you wanna say if a star watching this video, they’ll watch 678 minutes of this content, because it’s so good. But you can’t get that stat, you can’t get those numbers from your YouTube analytics very easily. So we built this tool, it downloads all your videos that will show exactly which videos get the highest level of retention. But it also does something really useful. So it’ll look at every single video, and find the best five-minute sections of every video. And then it’ll give you a score based on the number of people there and how long they were watching for and some other factors as well. You can then rank all of your videos, the best five minutes, and then that five-minute part gets transcribed, summarized, and put into new scripts. And so you can immediately be like, cool, I know that now I can create a much better video because it didn’t say the best bits, show me how to improve it. And so now I can do a seven-minute video that would be based on what people love already, but following the new framework, and I can then release that video and put some spin behind it. And that’s what the software does it really analyzes your videos and tells you what to do next. To just really create much better content promotion worthy to then allow you to grow much faster.
John Corcoran 39:32
This sounds amazing. Tom, we’ll be sure to link to that in the show notes. Tom, this has been great. I know you have to go. So we’ll wrap things up. Where can people go to learn more about you and Viewability and X-ray software?
Tom Breeze 39:44
Yeah, so the best place to go is to viewability.co.uk right, as you can get to viewability.co as well. I forget that we have that we have that as well. But we have clients all over the globe. So we have clients in Australia through to America, Europe everywhere and So just because we’re a UK company, we’d actually work with people globally. And then if you want to go like us for the agency side, as well as some of our consulting, and then if you want to go and figure out how to look at your channel and look at the stats around that as well go to the xray.io. Currently, it’s completely free. So you can go and download it, get all that data, and understand how to optimize your videos as well. We’ll probably be doing a paid service around that in due course. Just add more features to it, and be able to do that at the xray.io. And, yeah, there’s two places to go.
John Corcoran 40:36
Excellent, Tom. Thanks so much.
Chad Franzen 40:41
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.