Attracts Better Clients with Video | 073

The profit doesn't happen by chance, it

happens by design. Let's dig in. And today we have a juicy guest

with us. David is an expert in an area that is becoming

increasingly and more increasingly important in our

businesses. That's our visual presentation. How we show up on

screens today. I have with us David Vance of Expound Media,

and we're going to talk all things video and production and

promotion with regard to what video can do for us and how we

should use it to best move our businesses forward. Welcome,

David.

Thank you, Sharon. That was that all sounds so

exciting. I'm excited to dig in

now. I told David that I trusted him enough

to give you his own bio today, so let's let's hear it. David,

yeah, my name is David, as Sharon said, I'm the

founder of Expound Media, comma LLC. We are a full-service

creative agency located here in North Carolina. We are a premium

option for service-based entrepreneurs, speakers, and

experts to develop personality brands, and basically we create

visual elements, lead magnets, videos, now landing pages,

basically anything people look at for the service-based

entrepreneurs, so that they can get more visibility,

credibility, and high-ticket clients, ultimately.

And I, full disclosure, I do work with

David. I've known him far longer than I worked with him. He is

actually a.. he's when you talk to him, you will get.. I think

you'll get this through this interview today. He's a deep

thinker, and he sees things in a really unique way, and his

ability to do interviews, his ability to pull out of you

information that he can then use to market you that he can use to

build your, your back end in terms of of your videos and your

visual presentations, like he said, he does social media,

he'll do landing pages, he does all of the things that you need

done, and he does it in a really unique way, and David, talk a

little bit about how you have structured your business so that

it's user friendly and not time heavy on on the part of the

business owner.

Yeah, absolutely. Five years ago, or ish,

whatever, I started the company, it was really specifically video

production, right? You know, I come from a career in high-level

TV production, and then was creative director for a large

coaching firm. So, the general algebra that I had done is

people want their stuff to look better, they want cool videos,

everybody's got campaigns and stuff, they just want to plug in

nice looking video, so that their stuff is more credible,

and that it converts better. And what we found was that we would

produce a lot of stuff, people would like it, and then not

deploy it in any way. So the idea behind our how the company

evolved is to be one stop shop partners for people, because I

wanted to remove the chore aspect of all of this. A lot of

our clients are in the early scaling phases of things,

generally below one and a half million in gross, so creating

the assets needed to stand out, and you know, I use content and

assets interchangeably. Creating the cool looking stuff to stand

out becomes really time intensive. It becomes really, it

becomes really arduous to even if you're not producing every

aspect of yourself to find freelancers to do to to explain

what you're doing to create projects for all of this, so the

gamble that we made is that if we made enough good stuff on a

consistent basis, we could package that and work with

people long term, because nobody really needs just one thing,

they need consistent content coming out, so like you were

saying, we package it interestingly. Most stuff leads

with interview and video production. We'll generally do a

full day in studio with somebody and get enough interviews where

we create enough content, and then for three, four, sometimes

six months, we have enough rock content that we can then

transmute, we can turn into different things, and we can

create things one after the other, and on demand as people

need them, without having to bother people, because my

biggest pet peeve in creative industries, as well as in

entrepreneurial industries, is. Email tennis, right? That we all

end up playing this game of, well, I need this from you

before I can do this, before I can do this. So we want to make

all of this as streamlined as possible, and make things that

people love.

That's awesome. And yeah, you do. He does

things. Expound media will do days where they have a beautiful

professional studio set up, and then he'll have days where he

just records you from your laptop, so there's a.. it's..

it's a mixture, and it's not such a heavy lift on always

having stuff available. Now, everybody has a camera in their

pocket these days, David. They can just walk around and record

whatever they want to record, and you're able to take those

things and add them in with the more professional things, the

more set up things that you do, and explain why that's a benefit

and advantage.

Yeah, we know that if we can get, or if we can have

studio footage, that's obviously ideal for us, and most of the

people who work with us, we know that's not realistic, right, and

we don't want perfect to get in the way of really good when a

campaign comes from it. Generally speaking, a remote

shoot can take as much as, as little as one minute for

somebody to snap something up to about 30 minutes, and it follows

a similar thing to a studio production. What we would

normally do with something shut on webcam is add more animation

to stuff, pulling people out. The question that we're always

asking is, how do we make this look more professional, look

like it's higher dollar, and look like it's on brand? Right,

so we would incorporate a lot more brand colors, pulling

things from the website, and create something that looks more

like a social media ad from these remote shoots. In that

way, we try to keep a consistent level of quality, and this sort

of coalition of, if that's a word, a harmony of design, both

visually and messaging wise, so that everything looks basically

on the same level, regardless of if we shoot it in studio or

shoot it on a webcam with people,

and it's really important whenever you are

building a brand, whether it's a personal brand, and some

business owners want a personal brand, or the brand of your

business, and whenever you have consistency of your colors and

your fonts and all of that stuff, when you have that

consistency across the board, then whenever somebody sees your

stuff, they recognize it before you even say anything, and

that's talk about why that's really important, David.

Yeah, I mean, there's the pretentious creative

artists version of this that could go into it. I think the

bigger thing is that there is an undercurrent in a lot of these

industries that we're playing, and especially online

entrepreneurial world, where people are so coached by people,

where there's been this doctrine of delivering the bare minimum

on things, and I mean, you know, we're in very crowded

marketplace right now of people demanding attention from things,

so the easiest way to elevate the things that you're putting

out and to give yourself credibility on a consistent

basis in your social media is to have those branded elements. You

don't have to be an expert on it. You can hire somebody who

is, or just have the basic color correlations going on. The

innate thing that you're wanting to convey through brand harmony,

through getting those colors on everything, of everything

looking similar. You've actually got a great brand internally. We

all love your colors a lot, but just picking one and sticking

with it is going to create that visual identity, because

remember the first things people are clicking on now aren't

websites in almost all in almost all industries. Now, the first

click is going to be one social media or another. I know yours

is Facebook, ours is Instagram. As we track it, so we want

consistent content that looks the same, feels the same, and

creates the brand image that we're trying to create, because

ultimately that's what a client journey is,

and what's it? Yeah, what's important in terms

of why this, you know, why, why the brand identity, why the

keeping of the colors, and that kind of thing, is you know, when

you're on social media, most of the time you're scrolling,

right, and you want to, it's a way to stop the scroll, and it

takes a human adult, and these numbers are old now, so it might

even be more, at least seven times, to be exposed to your

information before they're ready to even look further, so if

they're scrolling by and they always see that my social. Media

is, oh, it's always that you know that purple gold or purple

orange and teal colors, they, that always comes up whenever

you see my social media, as you're scrolling through. Oh,

yeah, there she is again. I'm going to stop and see what she

has to say, or, you know, what, I'll just keep scrolling, and

what it does is it builds up that memory in your, in your

brain, so that you've seen it before, you've seen it before,

you've seen it before. Now, oh, maybe now today I'm going to

actually look at that video, or I'm going to make sure I always

stop and watch those videos, because I know who they are, and

I know what they're going to provide. Some of my favorite

things on social media. I will stop and watch silly videos.

There's, I think it's called The Break Room Chronicles. I'll be

honest, it's two women, and one of them lip syncs, and the other

one kind of dances in pink heels. And I don't care what

song they're doing, I will always stop and watch it,

because there's.. they have a repetitive thing that's always

funny, I have that kind of sense of humor, so that when you're

building your brand, if you have that consistency, that somebody

will go, oh yeah, that's them again, they'll stop, they'll

watch, they'll interact with that thing if they, if it

resonates with them, so it's really about, you know, your

voice and what is resonating, and what, why is your voice and

what you're presenting out there, and consistency, what

will that get you in terms of connecting with people on

socials?

Yeah, I think what you pointed out is really

important. There's also this this element on social media

where there's a lot of trainings right now, trying to get people

to follow influencer formulas and chase vanity metrics, and I

believe it's hurting a lot of people who are trying to scale

businesses, because the metrics that influencers care about are

different, the look of what they're doing, and their end

goals are different, they're trying to find brand

partnerships to get Gucci bags, whereas a lot of our clients,

and I think a lot of your viewers, are ultimately trying

to create a brand that leads people towards making a high

ticket decision, sometimes in the multiple 10s of 1000s of

dollars. So, any training, when people are talking about voice,

I would be wary of anybody trying to push somebody to chase

TikTok trends or social media trends specifically to get raw

viewership. It's always fun to watch a number uptick from it,

but I always recommend to people when we're looking at voice to

create things for the internet that are reflective of a

something that you like and can support. People are always

looking for templates, and the most interesting things that you

can create are things that are interesting to you, because that

means they're probably interesting to your specific

audience. Also, the voice that people are creating on social

media needs to be one that is positioned in such a way that

sets somebody up towards understanding that what they're

offering is a premium service, so everything that you're

creating has to have some version of, if not luxury, then

at least value behind it. Some people will try to channel their

voice through a very accessible image and try to be people's

friends. I think there's an elevation of voice that you have

to see when building a brand for a small business.

Yeah, I like what you said about influencers

and talk, I'll ask you to talk a little bit about influencers,

but I literally watched a video yesterday about an influencer

who was he made his name on social media doing something

really cool with mirrors, and he said this video popped up and he

said, "Hey, you probably haven't seen me for a while. I thought

I'd reintroduce myself, and he literally told a story about the

fact that he wanted, he wanted eyes on his videos, that was his

goal, and he did get that, but he also, he also ran a business,

he also did some other things, and what that influencer track

did not do for him was build those other things, because

everyone was just looking for his mirror videos, and he was

really talking about, you know, I, he said I got what I wanted,

what I wanted was a lot of people watching my videos, so he

didn't want anything beyond that, he didn't plan beyond

that, and so he found as, as that sort of influencer that he,

it wasn't fulfilling in his like complete life, his business, and

what he wanted to promote that way. So just tease a little bit

into that influencer position, and you did a little bit on why

we're different, but just. A little bit on that influencer

piece.

Yeah, we actually had a similar experience where

we had a fractional account with a law firm type thing, and we

grew the social media following really well based on their

stated goals, but they were having very little conversion

into even free consultation from them, what they, and I'll accept

my level of responsibility from, had done was exactly that,

right. So that's the other end of it, that they had spent a lot

of money on creating a thing, or things they wanted to create,

because they had a marketing consultant who wanted to get

them organic viewership on TikTok, but ultimately they're,

you know, they're family office lawyers, right? It's not where

their audience is, and viewership doesn't convert over

to what they're ultimately looking to achieve. So, content,

content is important. Getting it out consistently is important,

but there is that there is that facet of remembering what your

ultimate goal is through all of this, finding the key points

that you want somebody to find after a speaking gig, or after

downloading a free resource, or just googling for what you're

doing, and always keeping in mind that your body of work is

at some point going to have to get towards having somebody make

a decision to get on a call or give you a credit card, right?

So an influencer doesn't have to worry about that, whereas

unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you think of

it, we as small business owners absolutely do,

yeah. I love that, and I think it's really

important to have that distinction, because I think

sometimes, as business owners, you know, we're following that

shiny object. Oh yeah, all I have to do is get more views. If

you're getting more views on something that doesn't directly

tie or make that jump into what it is you're doing, then you

have eyeballs, but, like you said, you don't have that

traction, you don't have people calling you and making

appointments with you and doing business with you specifically,

because you've chosen sort of a more entertainment route, not

that your content can't be entertaining, but it also has to

have a purpose. So, what is that? What's that look like when

you're actually mapping out what do you, what do you actually

want from your content?

Yeah, it's an interesting time we're in, or

especially what we're entering into in that 10 years ago, when

we were looking at social media campaigns, their full marketing

campaigns, there's a lot of function on volume, right, of

you're going to win this, we're in the attention economy, every

business coach learned the word attention economy and said it a

whole whole whole whole bunch, and some of them made a lot of

money saying those words out loud. Well, right now, what do

we do in an attention economy when technology is making a game

that we can't really win on volume, right? And there's some

people, my peers, people are trying to play that game, the AI

game, whatever, of you know that I have people showing me things

that can generate random posts every two hours, and I don't

think for our clients that is functionally what we want, like

we can probably get raw viewership, but we're never

going to compete, so then we ask what the competitive advantage

that we have in competitive or in a competitive marketplace for

social media content, and I think that's the humanness of

people, especially when you're a human forward brand, someone

they like yourself, you know, somebody like a, an attorney,

somebody, anybody selling high ticket services, where you're

answering the question of why would I work with you

specifically. Then we do know algorithmically for social media

there's a big gap between posting three times a week at

least and not posting three times a week, so there is a

number in the sand, but we're starting to see this movement.

It's called the vinylization of online communities, right? It's

asked the question of why does somebody buy vinyl in a world

where Spotify exists, and our forecast for what's coming up in

2027 and through the end of the decade, is that we'll go into

these smaller, more insular ecosystems, right, that we're

not going to want our social media content, our videos, our

YouTubes to resonate with wide audiences, which is a game of.

Again, that's tough to play, harder to win. We're wanting to

create rabid fans on things and create real specificity of

message, of tone, of things like that. So that's the overall

thing that we're looking at from it. Video continues to be our

number one metrics. We were just monitoring it on our monthly ad

meeting. We're still seeing video ads outperform what static

ads by factors of five to seven times on cost per dollar, cost

per acquisition. So we're still wanting to see a lot of video,

but really, I would urge any coach watching this, or anybody

who's in that service-based things, to start returning to

some level of thoughtful pose, short form video, and knock our

out 12 posts a month, and they'll be looking good. That

was a long answer to a short question.

Give very great, thoughtful answers. I

started this with what a deep thinker you are, and you know

David - he's very modest. He didn't say this, but you are.

You have recognition for your interview skills. Share some

about that.

Yeah, I was named the number one interview in the

country. Interviewer,

he's the number one interviewer in the country.

Yeah, that he's so modest. It was

very impressive, but you know, interviewing is

not that hard. Well, you know, you're interviewing me, so I

don't want to say it's not that hard. Interviewing is just about

curiosity, right? No, making people look good. A lot of the

content we create is from interview, which I think is a

differentiator for us, because a lot of creative firms are built

around marketing scripts, templates, and getting the words

right, whereas I think it's easier to be able to talk to

people on a human level, and it's easier to create something

compelling when somebody is having a human conversation than

when they're paying attention to the commas in their script, so

for that reason, most of the videos I think we are on like an

8020 split nowadays. Most of the promos we create, and a vast

majority of the social media content comes from having

conversations like these and getting to getting past the

syntax and into the actual content of what people are

trying to say, how they're trying to move people in, what

they're trying to do in the world.

Yeah, I mean, it's like David is very good at

asking probing questions, so that you're saying the things

that your audience wants to hear, as opposed to what was

that marketing stuff that I came up with, and what are the exact

things that I'm supposed to say that sometimes can trip us up,

and by working with someone like David, by having those interview

questions, you're getting into the heart of what you do, as

opposed to, you know, up here in your head thinking about what

does the script say. So I think that's a really powerful

differentiation.

Yeah, absolutely, and it's, it's interesting

creating short form video content for enough, enough

people, and it's always fascinating to interview

somebody who's never been interviewed in a long term, in a

long form interview format like that, because one of the things,

especially when I'm working with a new client on things, is to

try to break down some of the key word isms behind things of

getting past the left brain, especially when I'm working with

engineers or attorneys, often getting to a point where they

can say what they mean and say it in a way, ideally, that they

sound passionate about it or sound interested in what they're

doing, because that's going to be more compelling in long-term

social media than even the best script that I could write for

somebody.

Yeah, absolutely. So, David, I have a

question for you. Every business owner has a moment when things

didn't go as they planned. What is the moment in your business

that didn't go as you expected, and that forced you to change

how you operate?

Yeah, one stands out early on, a lot of our early

marketing came from trade shows and event sponsorship stuff. We,

we paid for a $6,000 booth in Orlando with cuts it. Was called

something like the Total Health Conference, or something like

that. Their marketing and sales conversations had talked about,

you know, there would be a lot of doctors there who tend to be

good clients for us, there would be a lot of practitioners,

people creating health-based services and things, and they

said there would be 8000 people over three days, and getting to

Orlando, paying for flights for me, and or me and my employee,

paying for hotels, paying for all of that, we were probably 10

grand in the pocket, and over three days, there were 180

people, or so, that showed up to the conference, which was a

first for me, because generally people will couch things, and

there were there were near riots from sponsors, and no one could

figure out if this was an intentional scam or an

unintentional scam, but something happened from, and it

took me a long time to be able to write that off mentally,

because it, it in the moment, I was like, okay, surely somebody

will make this right, and nobody had any intention of making, or

of making it right, so that was my first encounter with a big

marketing swing that was just totally a totally a bummer on

things, and how did that,

how did that change what you did moving

forward? Then,

yeah, number one, it it made me realize I needed

to have cash reserves on things, and just have a mentality that

no one thing can ruin us. In things, you have to take swings

on some things, but you gotta have enough money to play, and

you gotta, you know, in black jackets, you talk about play the

shoe, not the hand, right. So that's one thing. The other

thing is being this might be pessimistic, but being more

selective about the things that we're sponsoring. Early on, I

was throwing money at just about everything on things, anybody

who had a spot for me, I would take it, but it really led to a

philosophy of finding the right ways to spend money for

exposure, conversion, lead generation, rather than just

spraying it all over, so those two major things. The other

thing is we ended up finding reining in the ways we were

marketing on things. We do a lot less in-person, in-person expo

hall stuff than we used to, so it just changed philosophically

a lot of the things of who we trust, what we do, and a real

streamlining of the lead acquisition process.

Yeah, and you know this is something that I

was told in one of my trainings was that respectfully promoters

are liars. They are telling you their ideal of who they want to

have in the room. I had a similar experience, however, I

did get some of my money back, because that was the deal, where

they promised us hundreds of people, and it happened to be a

really rainy weekend, it was a multi-day event. We never, I

think, we had 60 people, including all of the vendors and

speakers at the event. So, yeah, they things don't always work

out when you're, when you're investing in one of those big

things. So, yeah, you need to have a strategy around how are

you? How many people did they have last year? What worked? Ask

other people who were there, did they really get what they said,

you know? Did they get the results that they were

promoting? That's a huge one. Have to sort of take everything

that a promoter who is wants you to join their whatever with a

small grain of salt, and you need to have, like David said,

that discernment of figuring out, is this a good investment

for us, and looking at, you know, being being really

proactive, having all of your ducks in a row before your

money, your time, do the research on the event, do you

know, do all that homework before and build that sort of

template, that system before I commit to this event. I'm going

to find out all of these things, I'm going to find out these

things about the event, I'm going to look into my finances,

I'm going to make informed decisions, not knee-jerk,

excited, e. Go driven decisions.

Yeah, I think you're right in asking the right

questions, because your leads have to come from somewhere, so

you're going to be paying somebody money in some capacity

through it. But the question, especially for a virtual

sponsorship, which is more common now, I basically won't

take one without a minimum guarantee, and that's what I'm

doing all of my conversion math based around it. Everybody will

talk about tickets sold from things. The other thing, like

you were saying, is asking somebody who's sponsored in the

past through or through things, what was your experience like

there? The other question I would have people ask, if

they're interested in sponsorships, as their cold lead

generation thing is ask people where their tickets came from on

things, because a big, a big red flag is if all tickets came from

their list affiliates or some sort of giveaway on things,

because that means that their show up is going to be much

lower than what they're going to tell you optimistically, and

in-person event, like you were saying, is like I want to see

three years now worth of things, or endorsements from something

like a content marketing world, or something, they're not going

to give you a minimum, but they have the stats to, or they have

the numbers to show you of what you can expect. So, barring some

sort of act of God, they're going to replicate something

like that.

Yeah, that's great advice. I love that. And

David, you said that you have a gift for our listeners. Can you

share that with

us? Yeah, you can go to expoundresource.com and

download our video marketing starter guide. It's everything,

it's a combination, it's 15 easy pages of if you don't know where

to start with video marketing for your social media, email,

and landing pages. It tells you everything that you should make

and win, so go download it. I think it's good.

I love it. That's a great gift, especially

if you're looking at this, you know, you're actively doing

videos, or you're starting to do videos. It's a great resource to

get you focused, get you streamlined into what you need

to focus on first and the most important things. So, thank you

for that awesome gift, David. And also, we will have it in our

portal, Profit Connectors dot club, that's Profit Connect

Doors, because you're doing the connecting, Profit Connectors

dot c l u b, that's our portal, that's our community. You go in

there, it's free to join, and you'll get David's gift

information about David, and also this interview, and all of

our other podcasts that we've recorded so far, and all of the

gifts from the previous guests that we've had. So, you go to

Profit Connectors dot club, you can grab that gift. And thank

you so much for being here with us today, David. You always have

such incredible insight and valuable information, and so it

was my honor to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you, Sharon. It's always fun to talk to you

anytime.

Thanks for joining us. Remember to build

with clarity at Lead with Purpose. And thank you for

joining. We'll catch you next time. Thank you. there's the

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