Project Ignite Podcast by Derek Gehl YouTube Marketing Tips: Get More Views, Get More Subscribers and Make More Sales
00:00:00 00:00:00
  • Episode  85
  • Derral Eves

Summary:

Derral Eves reveals the YouTube marketing tips and strategies he’s used to generate billions of views, millions of subscribers and millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients. If you want to tap into the real marketing power of YouTube to grow your digital business you need to listen to this guy!

Transcription Episode 85: Turning YouTube Views Into Paying Customers – Derral Eves Reveals His Best YouTube Marketing Tips

Welcome to the Project Ignite Podcast, a podcast designed to just skip the hype, skip the BS, bring you real actionable tips and strategies from people that are actually doing it to help you grow your digital business on the internet.

This is your host, Derek Gehl, and today we’re going to be diving deep into YouTube and video marketing.

To say that today’s guest lives and breathes YouTube video marketing I think would be a bit of an understatement. He was actually one of the first people to be certified on YouTube as a YouTube certified consultant.

He doesn’t just help companies use video marketing to grow business. He also really walks the walk. You just have to visit his YouTube channel for just a moment to realize that.

First of all, I’ve got to go on record, say his YouTube channel is freaking awesome. You have to check that out. He has over 280,000 subscribers to his channel where he teaches people how to use YouTube. His videos are packed with information, but they’re really entertaining as well.

He’s generated over 8 billion. Yes, I said billion views on YouTube, 1 billion views on Facebook for himself and his clients, and those have resulted in millions of dollars in sales.

Guys, numbers speak for themselves here. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome Derral Eves to the show.

Derral, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, Derek. Really appreciate it.
Cool. Now before we dive into the YouTube marketing stuff and really roll up our sleeves and get into that, expand on my introduction. How did you become the YouTube marketing guy putting out these wacky but info-packed videos, and being the YouTube marketing guy? How did you do that?
There’s definitely a story behind everything. Everything is a story, right?
Yeah.

I do crazy work. What’s fun about it is my kids are like, “I don’t even know what my dad does.” When people ask my wife, “What does your husband do?” Her response is “I really don’t … I can’t explain it.”If I was to explain it, did you ever see a Poppy Unicorn ad on YouTube or on the internet? They’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of a weird job.”

Being an entrepreneur, it started at a young age. My dad taught me how to go and raise money. I bought my first piece of ground when I was 12 years old and negotiated with the owner and made monthly payments to him, was able to make some really decent money off of that.

Went to school when I got back. I served an LDS mission, a Mormon mission in South America for two years, and came back and went to school. Got married and all that other stuff.

I really wanted to get done with school quick, because I really didn’t like the way that they actually taught, because I didn’t really think it was applicable, because they were talking about things that happened years and years ago.

I got my degree in marketing. I didn’t really feel like they were on the forefront of where things were headed. I tried to get done with it as quick as I can, and I got a four year degree in two and a half years, which was great.

I got my dream job, which my dream job was working at a hospital. I wanted to be a hospital administrator. I went the PR route. I was the assistant director of public relations, and had my eye on the prize. I wanted to run that hospital, because I love where I live.

I live in southern Utah. The only high paying jobs in the area is construction. I didn’t want to necessarily do that, build homes and stuff like that. I didn’t want to go be a doctor and then get all that schooling, and then come back, and then try to set up practice. I’m like, “Hey, administrators get paid quite a bit, so I’m going to go that direction.”

I worked with them for six months, and in that time, I was able to save them $685,000 off their bottom line, because they didn’t have to outsource any of the stuff that was there. I actually did the graphic design work. I did the corporate website.

I’m a programmer and a designer, which is really weird, but I am. I went to my boss’s boss, who was a CFO. The CEO came walking in and notices and says, “Hey, Derral. You’re just doing a great job.”

I’m sitting down with the CEO and CFO of this company, and I says, “Hey, I saved $685,000. I’m just looking for a $10,000 a year raise. That would make me super happy. I am accepted in the master’s program to do hospital administration.” They’re like, “Derral, you just do so amazing. We can’t really give you a raise, because you’ll be making more than your immediate supervisor.”

Whoops.
I’m like, “You kidding me?”
Oh no.

Talk about deflating, because here I brought all this value, and I had a lot of things, and this is the kicker right here. The CEO, he goes, “Derral, I see in 15 years that you’re running this hospital.” I’m like, “15 years? I could do it in 5. Come on.”I literally picked up the phone after I left, and I called my wife. We just had a brand new baby. I just barely finished school. I pick up the phone, I says, “Honey, I need to quit this job.” She goes, “Okay, honey. I support you 100%. Just don’t start your own business.” “Oh, okay.”

I had all these job offers, Derek. I had job offers, but they were pulling me outside of where I live. I really love where I live, because I’m surrounded by family and my kids are best friends with their cousins. You’re four houses away from grandma and grandpa’s house. That means everything to me. I didn’t want to leave that.

I knew that this is where I wanted to raise my family. Yeah, there was some really lucrative offers out there. I went back to my wife and says, “Look, honey. This is not going to work.”

We prayed about it. We’re religious, of course. She felt really good with actually me starting my own company. Let me tell you what you do when you start your own company. Anyone that’s listening to this, you need to understand, you go to Staples or Office Depot.

I went to Staples because I had to buy a desk. I couldn’t use the table, the kitchen table anymore. I went to go buy a desk. I was in the electronics kind of seeing, “Hey, I might want to pick up a printer while I’m here.” This guy says, “Hey, excuse me, sir, can you tell me the difference between this printer and this printer?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah.”

I start rattling off, because I’m like a techno geek. I like really weird data stuff. I told him everything about the two different things. He goes, “Oh, man. You are like the best Staples employee ever.” I’m like, “I don’t work at Staples.” I look down, and I’m wearing a red polo shirt. I’m like, “No, no, no.”

I told him my story. I says, “Look, I just quit my job, starting my business.” Derek, I left Staples that day with a brand new desk, and a check for $300, and my first client. He’s still a client today. That was back in 1999. It was great. It was something that I thought, “Hey business is going to be super easy.” I had everything all perfect.

Little did I know that there are a lot of course corrections and pivots when you’re an entrepreneur. I was oblivious at the time, and it went pretty good.

That’s how I actually started my business. What I specialized in, this was back in ’99, I specialized in internet marketing. In ’99 that was known as SPAM. I became really good at spamming people, really keyword stuffing pages and getting all the manipulation in the search engines to go from there. I was on search engines like Ask Jeeves. I don’t know if you remember that.

Oh yeah.

Yahoo!, Alta Vista, all that stuff. It was great. We started a hosting company, because I’m like, “Hey, I’m designing websites. We’re ranking them. Let’s host them so we’re kind of all one solution.” We did a lot of marketing, and it worked out really good.Then Google came in in ’99, 2000 into my life, and I started to see, “Okay, this is going to be a really good search engine.” We were able to really stuff the keywords and get some amazing ranking. As the adoption rate actually came onto Google, we just got more and more profitable, because what we were doing worked.

The problem was was the engineers were like, “Hey, these guys are manipulating the algorithm. Let’s go ahead and change the algorithm.” It would change and change, and we would have to kind of re-address and relearn and reverse engineer the algorithm itself.

Before you know it, I kind of got frustrated with that a little bit. I was looking for the best options to do it. At that time, it was 2005, so we had quite a few years of business, and we had quite a few residual clients that we were doing this for.

I went onto Craigslist, because that’s what you do when you expand your office as an entrepreneur. I was looking for, believe it or not, a desk. That’s what happens. If a desk in my life, something great’s going to happen here.

I go search for a desk, and there was this ad in 2005. It says, “Hey, come check out this video sharing website. If you can get 100 people to sign up, we’re going to give you an iPod.” I’m like, “An iPod? That’s so freaking awesome!”

These are the iPods, Derek, that these are the brick. If somebody throws it at you and hits you, you will die. I went onto this place, it was called YouTube. This is fall, November-ish 2005. I’m like, “This is cool.”

I put my internet marketing skills to work, and I spammed the heck out of a whole bunch of people, got 100 people to sign up, they sent me an iPod, and it was great. I’m like, “This is really cool. This could be fun,” because I like video. I always have.

I found that I started to rank really easy for those videos. I didn’t have to do any of the manipulation in anything. I just had to have a really good title. In 2005, 2006, I found that a lot of those videos were ranking number 1 in Google, and I didn’t use anything besides upload the video and then put some time in the meta information.

At that time, they didn’t have a lot of meta information that you could put in. It was really good, and I’m like, “Wow, this is amazing.” 2006, I’ve noticed that those videos started to convert. Getting someone to a page and explaining what they need to buy in a page was difficult. You had the long form sales letter and all the other stuff from that, but when you’re able to connect with someone on video, it really changed.

At that time, I was working with local clients. I was doing a lot of doctors, dentists, lawyers, anyone that needed a lead, that’s who I was working with. Their phone went off the hook and went from there. I’m like, “Man, this is super easy.” At the end of 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.3 billion. They’d only been running for a year, which is crazy.

At that time, then it became super easy for the next couple years to do anything on YouTube and get it to rank in Google. We were getting a ton of traffic. I expanded my business quite big. We had a lot of clients. We ranked over 685 different videos, and all of them hit page 1. We didn’t really need to do anything, and it was just bringing out leads. It’s like printing money. It was really, really good.

I kind of got sick and burned out of working with so many different clients, and the type of contract that I actually had with them, it required more interaction than I actually liked. It would have been better to say, “Hey, I’ll put up a video and own my own channel, and just give you the lead, and kind of go from there.”

Technology wasn’t necessarily at that moment the best for call forwarding and tracking and so on and so forth. That’s the way I should have set it up, but I got burned out, and so I would only take the higher end people that would pay more money a month. That left me with lawyers, dentists, doctors, and pest control companies, and some auto stuff.

One of my clients was out doing his job, and he was out spraying for cockroaches and stuff, because we live in a desert, and there’s tons of those. He’s in a piano store. The owner of the piano store says, “Hey, do you know anybody that understands marketing, and can build a website, and also do some stuff on YouTube?”

He goes, “Oh, you got to use Derral. He brings me all my leads. You just got to use Derral on this.” The piano store owner called me and says, “Hey, you might want to check out what we’re doing. We’re looking for someone to kind of help us out.”

I looked at what they’re doing, and they were using video to actually sell pianos. These pianos are not cheap. The thing that I noticed as someone in the business is they were amazing videos, but guess what they didn’t do? They didn’t sell any pianos. I’m like, “This is not going to work if that’s your main goal, but,” I go, “you got something going on here.”

He realized, too, that he actually had something going on, because a couple of the videos that he launched had millions of views, and they were from all around the world.

He’s like, “Hey, we’re ready to kind of go serious on this.” We put together some plans and stuff like that, and these guys are some of the most talented musicians that I have ever been around. What happened within 18 months, they went from a non-existent YouTube channel to 1.8 million subscribers and hundreds of millions of videos views.

What really hit it to me, Derek, more than anything else was… it was utilizing video to generate leads, but the power of an audience is even more powerful. To send one email out and make $30 – $40,000 by just sending an email out to an engaged audience is crazy. The way that they are able to be in this community and have this culture and actually become advocates for the brand, it was just nuts.

I worked with these guys, they’re called the Piano Guys. I don’t know if you have ever heard of them on YouTube. They’re pretty big.

I actually have. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. They’re still touring and doing their stuff from there, which is great. I just realized it. The light bulb clicked on for me that video is where it’s at, and I needed to go all in. What I did is I sold off all my local clients, and I went 100% into YouTube. I was going to say I was going to become the guru behind the biggest content creators on YouTube. During that time I’ve worked with some of the top brands and businesses and YouTube channels in the world. Some of them are still in the top 100 most subscribed. Also the biggest brands are Adobe and Red Bull.

I did some stuff with Bill Gates. Really the stuff goes on from there. What I really love about it is that I can choose what projects that I work on, which is a really big deal for me, and I can go the speed that I want to do, which is a really big deal for me. It’s all around video.

At that moment, I was building, building, building, and got a huge reputation. Everything was word of mouth, and it was great. Then I just really got sick of answering questions. This is in 2013. We’ll fast forward a little bit. Got sick of answering questions for my clients. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to just start a YouTube channel that’s going to tell people how to YouTube. I’m going to give it to my client.”

Only going to spend, keep this in mind now, I’m only going to spend 45 minutes a week, and I got to do everything on that channel in 45 minutes a week, and do it from there. That was in January 2013. My main goal for that was to get 10,000 subscribers in that first year, which is a pretty big feat, and a million video views, which was a pretty big feat.

Within 4 months, I was able to get the 10,000 subscribers and had over a million video views. I readjusted. I pivoted and made a bigger goal. I want to be at 100,000 subscribers looking for by the end of the year. I was able to do that.

It’s just been growing at a great rate with only 45 minutes a week that I designate for that. Now you might say, “Hey, why don’t you go more into it?” I don’t need to, because this is kind of like a hyper-localized niche. There’s not everybody that wants to know how to YouTube.

My main course of business is consulting and then producing ads that are out there, and working with content creators, and strategies to develop money. This is just a great calling card, but it makes me a lot of money, in the sense that people look out and say, “Okay, this is the guy, the how-to guy,” because in 4 months I became the number 1 most subscribed YouTube channel about how to YouTube, beating out some people that had been in there for years, and just did it on 45 minutes a week, which is great.

Okay. We need to dig into that, because I think there’s some magic in there that I’d love to uncover. One thing I want to point out to the listeners before we get into this YouTube stuff, because you say video to a lot of people, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I can’t do video. I’m not a video person,” but not once did you say you have a background in acting, a background in video production, or any of that. Is that correct?

I do have a degree in marketing, and I’ve had classes in different types of shooting and production, but it was a semester. We were doing stuff on tape, did some editing from there. It was surreal. I’m like, “Okay, this is not where it works.”No, I’ve always had a fascination with learning. I think the best source is, hey, if you want to learn something, just go out and find how to do it, and find out who knows the best about it. I usually just find a video or two and pick up a technique or whatever, and kind of roll from there.

Away you go. Okay, so let’s jump into a concept that you keep saying, and that’s audience development, right? A lot of people, they start off on YouTube and they think, “Hey, I’m going to upload a video,” and they just start looking at views. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. You’re talking about audience development, but I don’t think that’s a concept a lot of people are familiar with. Expand on that. What is audience development?

I think everybody’s familiar with it in the marketing world and as an entrepreneur, let me tell you why. They just need to shift their mindset a little bit. They’re like, “How big is your email list?” That’s an audience right there. That’s just a type of audience. What you’re doing is building different audiences. “How many likes do you have on a Facebook page?” Or, “How many Twitter followers do you have?” Those are audiences, and it’s no different leveraging those audiences to help you get your end goal, whatever that may be.

Now to develop an audience on YouTube, it is different. They need to be able to connect with a message or an individual. There’s certain things that need to happen, but it’s similar to everybody else. I think a lot of the skills, if anyone is generating emails, get people to sign up for an email list, have learned how to do some things that would lead to audience development and getting that list built.

All you do is apply the same principles, but you do it a little bit more direct, and there’s certain ways to do that, if that makes sense.

It absolutely does. Let’s continue down this path. When you say there’s certain ways to do that, I’m business X. I’ve set up my YouTube channel. I start uploading videos, creating videos. I see people get views, they may have tons of views, but they don’t have subscribers.

Yeah, and that’s kind of a big deal. The reason why they don’t have subscribers is the view count, there might be a couple things. Is the messaging right? What I mean by that is – is it consistent that, hey, people can come to a YouTube channel and say, “Oh, this is what the YouTube channel is about.”When I watch a video, it’s related to that specific niche. I know when I watch the video it’s formatted in a way that I know how it’s built, but I don’t know what’s going to be said, so there’s a lot of sense of familiarity to it that you’re comfortable with that help you stick through the video itself, if the content is engaging.

The biggest factor why most people do not, they might get views, but they don’t get subscribers, is because they repurpose their content. Just to give you an example, there are big marketers in the space that they have all this footage. They’re like, “Hey, I want to just put it up on YouTube. I’ll get all these subscribers.”

I’m like, “No, that’s not going to happen, because that content wasn’t made for YouTube.” Yeah, that’s great stuff. People will consume it, and if you do a lot of the meta information right and set them on, you’ll go from there, but you’ll never get the subscribers, because you’re creating a community, and you need to engage that community and get them to be more involved with the type of content you’re actually putting out, and even give you suggestions on the type of content they would like for you to cover.

Does that make sense?

It totally makes sense, and I want to go even deeper there, because I totally agree. I see it all the time, right? Somebody has a whole bunch, and I’ve done it. I’ve got a conference I spoke at, boom, put it up on YouTube. Yeah, it gets views, but you’re not getting subscribers off it. What are you using in the YouTube specific content that is causing people to click that subscribe button that we’re otherwise not doing?

First off, if you’re at a conference and you’re presenting at a conference, a YouTube strategy is you could do an intro where it might be a minute or so on and say, “Hey, you guys. I wanted to talk about X topic. I think there’s a lot of things that we can actually do to really grow in this X topic. I was at a conference. I made this presentation. What I want you guys to do is watch this segment, and then we’re going to come back on, and we’re going to actually have a little dialog after it.”You play the segment, you come back on after the segment.

“Guys, what did you think of that video? Go ahead and put in the comments your thoughts on it. Did you learn anything from that? Also here’s a couple added things that I’ve seen, even after this conference that I had people come up to me and talk about. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Put it in the comments below, because when I look at the comments, I’m going to be replying to them,” and go from there.

“Guys, if you’re interested in X topic, make sure you hit that subscribe button to subscribe to this channel. Look forward to the next video on Tuesday.” What did I just do? I engaged them completely around your content, even though the content was not meant for YouTube, I made it YouTube friendly because I had an intro and outro that dovetailed that content that they were actually interested in.

Right. To boil it down to its purest form, you’ve got calls to action in your video telling people exactly what they need to do to engage them. You’re telling people to subscribe.
Absolutely. If they go to a website and they just see a form that says “name and email”, but you don’t tell them to opt in to a newsletter, are they going to ever fill it out?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Here’s a question for you. Where do you place the value, on the subscription or the click? If you’re creating a video to draw a click or an action to a website, but you’re also asking to subscribe, is there ever a conflict there?

Okay, so that’s a great question. One of the things that I always do is I gotta figure out the purpose of the video. If the purpose of the video is to get subscribers, my CTA will always be ask for subscriptions, okay? If the CTA for the purpose of that video is to get people to go to my website, then I wouldn’t even mention subscribers. However, you got to realize that YouTube’s number 1 goal is to make money. If you send people off of YouTube, they’re going to devalue your authority on the channel, because you keep on sending people off the platform that makes them money. Keeping in mind is yes, you need to have strategic videos that are lead generation.

I’d probably get more leads via organic videos than most of your listeners. I might get 300 or 400 leads a day that I just uploaded a video. I didn’t put any money on it. I didn’t do anything. It literally takes people to this segmented area where I want them to be. It takes them through a process.

The great thing about it is that just happens automatically, and I don’t need to do anything. Do I send everybody in every video to that same landing page? No, because that’s not the purpose of my channel or my purpose of that video. It was only the purpose of a couple of videos.

The way that YouTube works is it’s more of a long tail strategy. They’re like, “Okay, so this video is sending people off, but he’s bringing so many people on. They’re staying on and they’re engaging with his content. Let’s give him authority.”

When I actually upload a video, most of my videos will rank in Google immediately because of my YouTube authority, and they’ll rank number 1 spot on YouTube because my authority. That’s kind of a big deal.

You have to look at why are you making a piece of content. If it’s always skewed one way, if it’s always about getting subscribers, then you’re going to lose out on different ways to monetize. If it’s always skewed on monetization, then you’re basically losing out on subscriptions.

It’s going to devalue the true opportunity of what can happen, which is if YouTube views you as an authority, then you actually show up in related video search. That’s where the 80%, 90% of your video views can come from, that you can just get things to take off. You can build an audience bigger. This is an important YouTube strategy.

The whole reason why YouTube exists is for audience development. You use video to develop your audience and it enhances the channel, if that makes sense.

Marketing on youtube

Absolutely. One of the interesting thing that you’ve been talking about is you’re talking about driving leads to businesses, driving opt in and stuff like that. I haven’t actually ever heard you say that you’re making money off ads displayed on your videos. Is that something that you do?

Absolutely. I’ve had some clients each month that make anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000 a month just off of the ads standalone. On my personal YouTube channel, it’s niche. I don’t get as many views, but I make several thousand dollars for my efforts from marketing on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah, that happens. I have other channels that I have that make a lot more money than that, but yes. Yes, you can make ads. Ads is definitely by far the least effective YouTube strategy to make money on YouTube. It’s a good staple. People are already used to it. You’re not going to get a bounced rate, because they’re already used to it. If they don’t want it, they’ll actually get YouTube Red or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

The most powerful way is getting brand deals.

I had a client of mine that started a YouTube channel, started to grow really fast, got a lot of business, and asked for $1,000 for a brand deal. He thought, “Man, that’s a lot of money.” I’m like, “No, it’s not. Put a couple zeroes behind it.” We put together a proposal for him for a quarter of a million dollars for a brand deal for 2 videos. They didn’t even flinch, and sent them around the world. It’s one of those cool things.

Wow. With the ads, because I get this question all the time is when you post an ad, if you allow them to split, if you post a video, you allow them to display the ads on the video. Does that detract from the call to action? Have you ever been able to test that?

For the first year that I launched my YouTube channel, I was more worried about the growth for subscribers. I didn’t monetize my YouTube channel for a solid year. I turned monetization on, and I actually grew more. I know that seems really weird, but it happened. I was able to split test it on several different occasions. There’s certain types of ads I don’t turn on for certain channels, and others that I just kind of have a mix in my monetization, because what I want to do is bring up CPMs. I actually grew quicker because YouTube, and I really this is to be true, and there’s no documentation, but YouTube is saying, “Oh my gosh, this channel A and channel B are exactly the same, but one’s monetized. Who do we want to promote?”

I was actually just about to ask you do you think the algorithm actually started favoring you because you turned monetization on?
Absolutely.
They’ll never admit it, but I bet-
They’ll admit a lot of stuff, but never on record.

Oh yeah, yeah. Exactly. Awesome. Okay, so let’s shift gears here and talk a little bit about how to actually be found on YouTube, because again, it’s one of those things. YouTube isn’t what it used to be. There’s a lot of competition there.

I’m the new guy in the niche. I create my channel. I optimize it. I upload a video, and that whole, “If you build it, they will come,” is probably the wrong approach.” How do you get a new video, a new channel moving, getting views?

It’s like what is your overall purpose? Why are you using a YouTube channel? Is it more for selling what you’re doing? If that’s the case, I wouldn’t worry about subscribers. I would just worry about putting together a really good ad that you can use and leverage. That story is in case studies behind that. Also, that would be for leads coming in, too. It really depends on what your business is. If you’re there saying, “Hey, I want to develop an audience. I want to get subscribers, and that’s my number 1 purpose of starting this YouTube channel is I want to do that,” then there’s a different approach. You have to look at it from both perspectives. You can still gain audience from the ad approach. It’s just done in a different way.

When you say “the ad approach”, are you talking about creating videos that are effectively just an ad for your product and-
That’s exactly what I’m saying.
Then promoting them?

That’s exactly what I’m saying. To utilize video, you got to really look at why you’re making the video itself and what its purpose is. Once you understand that, you start to talk about, okay, what’s the core audience and demographic this is going to go to? How are you going to actually bring value in that video or video ad? What’s the tone and message? Then what’s the best way to distribute this? Is it best way just to do an organic approach, or should we put a paid video marketing strategy behind it, because ultimately to generate leads or get people traffic to the website that’s going to convert people into sales, yeah. Yeah, you need to look at that as well.

Not everybody that utilizes YouTube and video should go at it the same way. You need to really define what you’re going to use it for. A lot of people, they don’t know. They just kind of upload videos. That’s a pretty damning things to do as well, because if you put content that’s sub par on there, you’re never going to develop an audience, and all you’re doing is wasting time and money.

Sure. Yeah, yeah. That makes total sense. Okay, so now one of the things that you’re good at that I really want to drill down into, because again, not many people have cracked this code. Well, I guess there is, but it’s the biggest mystery is creating videos that actually sell products. You’ve had some incredible, incredible results in this. What goes into a video that actually is taking viewers and turning them into buyers?

Okay, let me just turn the tables back on to you, Derek. Was there a video that you watched today or yesterday that you shared with someone?
I’m trying to think. Dammit, you put me on the spot. I’m supposed to be asking questions.
I turn the tables all the time here.
Yeah, I did share one yesterday, yes.
Okay. Do you remember what it was?
Yeah. It was kind of a really good entrepreneurial speech kind of thing.
Okay, great. Who did you share it with?
I posted it out on my Facebook page to my followers.
Okay. You posted it out on your Facebook page for your friends. Do you remember at all what you said in the post? Did you just post it directly, or did you say something?
I put a little message in there. “This is so true. If you’re thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, you need to watch this powerful message.”

Okay. Okay. The reason why I had you go through that is because you need to understand the audience today. The online consumer, the new online consumer is a different type of breed of people.What we’re doing is creating this social presence. If you understand what goes into it to help them facilitate that social presence is a really big deal. Google likes to call this “micro moments”. They’re broken into different segments for different types of micro moments. There’s five of them.

“I want to know” moments, when people want to know what time the movie is at the theater or they want to know who played in this specific movie, or they want to know when this person died, that is the type of micro moment that you’re actually creating is.

If you can kind of wrap it around there, when people want to know something and you’re providing that, that’s a pretty big deal, because that’s what the online consumer wants. They’re not going to wait around and guess. They have the answer right in their hand. All they need to do is search for it. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

How-to videos work really well. This is what my YouTube channel is based on is “how do you do this”, because people want to know. Is this something that I’m going to gauge an audience and I’m going to get billions of subscribers? No, because they’re using me as a reference library. When they want to know something, they know where to go. If they get stuck on YouTube, they’re going to come to see me. That’s the way that it is. The next one, the next micro moment is “want to go” moments. There are so many people going on vacation or out in a city, and they don’t know where they’re going to eat their next meal. They don’t know where they’re actually going to sleep that night.

What they do is they pull out their phone, and they say, “Okay, Yelp,” or, “Okay, whatever service, where am I going to go?” They review where they’re going to go moments before they go, okay? The social connection, “Oh, Johnny here said that this place was good, so let’s go over to this place.” The only reason why he knew that is because Johnny left a review that gave that specific restaurant 10 stars or whatever.

Okay, the next one is “I want to do” moments. When people want to learn something and want to do it right then and there, they’re going to pull out the phone and do it. Just to give you an example, my son was playing on his iPod and wanted to see what was in his iPod, so he ripped it apart. He had a YouTube video right there, followed step by step.

I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” I come walking in, but he wanted to do something. He wanted to switch out the battery, which he was able to do, which is crazy, because he’s only 9. That’s kind of the type of moments that are there.

Now the biggest one that I think most of you would focus in on is “I want to buy” moments, because people are ready to pull out their credit card and do something. They’re ready to purchase. Once you can tap into that and really pull it into a few other things that we’ll talk about here in a second, it just really makes sense.

Now the next one is “I want to watch” moments. Anyone that’s ever been on the Netflix binge, I just finished one last night, which was really bad, and I should never do that, because it was 3 in the morning.

The thing about it is I wanted to watch. I wanted to watch at my own pace. I didn’t want someone saying, “Oh, you need to come back next week.” That’s why Netflix works so well is because you can consume it at the pace that you want to watch. If you want to just watch 10 minutes at a time, you can do that, and you can come back and pick up. If you want to watch all of “House of Cards” in one sitting, and you want to stay awake for 48 hours, you can do that, too, whatever that may be.

Those are the types of micro moments that are there, and the types of people that you need to look at is the mobile viewer, because mobile is really just transforming. There’s more mobile searches happening on Google than desktop. There’s more people watching videos, it’s almost like 80% now, it’s crazy, on YouTube on their mobile device instead of a desktop.

You need to keep that in mind that you’re creating this for an experience. Your micro moment needs to bring value. If that doesn’t bring value, then you’re actually losing out on an opportunity. Each content needs to bring value.

Let’s use the case, the video you actually shared. It was a speech. There’s only three ways to actually bring value, Derek. The first way is to inspire. The second way is to educate, and the third way is to entertain.

Video marketing

If you can literally inspire and educate at the same time, then you have this golden opportunity to get people to do something, if there’s a call to action. If you can get them to inspire, educate, and entertain, then it even takes it a step further where they’re more apt to do it.

I would assume that you watched this talk, you were inspired, you learned something, and you even probably laughed or cried a little bit, whatever it may be, right?

Yeah.

It entertained enough. It had all 3 of the value propositions that that video needed to have. You took time out of your day. You hit “share”, you put it on your wall, you put, “Hey, you guys got to check this out,” and you just became a convert. You converted. You became their social army to actually spread their message. Think about that for one second. That right there is the most important … When you’re making content, that’s what you need to look at.

What type of value and message do I need to have to turn people in to take action? That action will be to buy, of course, but the biggest compliment is when they buy and then they become your advocate. They become your social army. They post it out there.

That’s why I’ve worked on campaigns that we’d have 2, 3, 4 million people that actually shared that video. It was free advertising for us, because they shared it with all their friends, and then you even had millions more that would tag friends in a comment. That’s where it can really happen, but it’s understanding the value proposition that that video needs to have.

You don’t have to be the most engaging person to bring value on video. I’ve seen some pretty boring videos, really boring, but they brought a lot of value. They brought a ton of value. One of my most valuable videos is a Steve Jobs Stanford speech to the graduating class.

It was boring. He wasn’t really an engaging speaker. He pretty much read the whole thing, did the whole Steve Jobs thing, but the inspiration, the entertainment that was kind of pulled together, it made it brilliant. That’s why it keeps on today being shared, because hey, we got to think different. The way that we’ve been thinking is different. It brought a lot of value for that specific content.

Every project that you work on, you need to look at 8 things. I’m going to give them to you really quick. Why are you making the content, who your competition is and are they really competitors, who are you trying to reach with that content, who is that core audience or demographic, what value will you bring in that video or video ad, what’s your core message and tone for that content, and then how are you going to distribute it for maximum reach, and what does success actually look like? Once you ask those 8 things, then you’re ready to make some videos.

What you do is you come down, and you’re like, “Okay, now what would make me as a viewer take action and get someone to share this video or to subscribe?” How long does it need to be? People say, “Hey, video ads only need to be 30, 15 seconds or a minute at the most, because you’re going to lose out.”

I’ll share with you right now, I’m making an 18 minute video right now. It’s being launched next month. The thing about it is it’s going to bring enough value that people will watch the whole thing. When we actually did Squatty Potty, the pooping unicorn one, it was 3 minutes, and we had friends, video marketers that we showed it to in our little focus group, they go, “Derral, you’re ridiculous. You need to shorten that ad.”

I talked with the other executive producer, the guy that brought me on to work with this project, who is Jeffery Harmon with the Harmon Brothers, who is brilliant, we had this little parlay. We had this little discussion. I’m like, “Dude, no. I really think listening to what they said of what video marketing is, they’re absolutely wrong. I truly believe that this is where we’re at.” He’s like, “I agree.” I go, “It’s engaging, and you can hold someone for almost 3 minutes. Let’s do it.

Okay, that first month, we had a ton of feedback. People said, “Wow, this is way too long.” These are people in the industry. I’m like, “Did you watch the whole thing?” They’re like, “Yeah.” So did 92.6% of the people that watched this video watched it until the end. Your conception of what works and what doesn’t work is skewed. They sold a whole bunch of stuff.

Wow, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Okay, I want to take a step back, and I want to drill into something, because I know this is probably a part where a lot of people are scratching their heads, and that is the … I love the way you broke it down. Inspire, educate, and entertain. Educate, that’s pretty easy. Everybody goes, “I can educate.” Inspire and entertain, I think that’s where a lot of people go, “I can’t do that. I’m not inspiring,” or even more so not entertaining. You, Derral, are an entertaining guy.

Thanks.
I watched your channel video, the main channel, and it was awesome. Totally entertaining.
Yeah, if you ever want to see who is Derral Eves, you’ll see my weird side, I guess.
Yeah, and I would highly encourage our listeners to go and check this out. You’ll learn a lot and it’s entertaining. You’ve even said edutainment, I think that was it, edutainment ? How did you phrase that?
Oh, on my YouTube channel it says “Edutainer of the year” voted by my wife and kids.

That’s right. Yeah. Voted by your wife and kids, brilliant. I guess I’m trying to figure out the best way to phrase this. How do you bring entertainment in? Where does that come from?

The biggest thing is value. You don’t need to have all three. You don’t even need to have two of them that brings forth content, because what you’re looking and saying, “Okay, what is my core message and tone for the content?”If I’m actually doing tax return videos saying, “Okay, if you’re trying to get this tax return, this is the stuff that you need to do,” I don’t need to educate. I’m sorry. I need to educate them. I don’t necessarily need to inspire them to go out and change the world.

They’re coming, why? Because that micro moment, they want to know moments, they want to know what to do, and they also want to do something. Maybe they’re stuck on something.

It’s just cutting to the chase, give them the education that they’re looking for, getting to say, “Hey, if you want more things with this common issue, go ahead and hit that subscribe button, because we have tons of videos that actually cover this.”

That’s really simple. You don’t have to be engaging on camera. You just need to bring value. If your value is information, then that’s great. If your value is information and you’re a little entertaining, then that’s even better.

Yeah, so bring the value. If you can add a little flair to it, all the better. Okay, so last kind of question. I know this is kind of broad. You’ve been so generous in sharing here. For somebody that’s just getting started, just looking at YouTube, they’ve got a website, they’re generating some traffic, they want to add another lead source to that, drive more business, what would be the first thing or most important thing that they need to start doing?

I would ask what value could you actually bring someone in making a video? Try to figure that out and figure out why you’re actually making the video.Then definitely go subscribe to my YouTube channel, because I cover all the best practices of YouTube to really help you maximize your presence online utilizing video.

I think the biggest mistake and the common mistake that most entrepreneurs and business owners have is they get the idea that this is the way that it needs to be, and they don’t do enough planning before-hand to actually put together a good plan.

Let me tell you what I did when I started my YouTube channel. I only wanted to spend 45 minutes a week. Remember that. I knew that I needed to have a 100% plan of what I needed to release for a solid year. What I actually did is I actually created a schedule. I went off the most frequently asked questions in the industry that I was doing.

When I first started my YouTube channel, I uploaded 4 videos all within 48 hours of each other, just so that when people would go to my YouTube channel, they’d say, “Oh, he has this type of content.” Then I followed a schedule, answering the most frequently asked questions that would come up in Google and YouTube. I searched out what those were, and I had my content for a solid year.

I knew exactly what I was going to make, when it was going to be released, and I was very strategic on it.
That’s where I would take the common mistake would be people just don’t put enough planning into it. I would say put together a plan of what you’d like to make. Then look at what videos would actually yield the most type of views, and what’s the messaging.

I’d go, “Who’s your competition out there?” See if there’s any related type of videos. Take all the good that they do, leave out all the bad, and kind of put it together in your own way and with your own personality. You’re starting to put it together.

Then at the very end, I’d figure out, okay, what’s the purpose of this video? Why am I making it? Is it to get subscribers or leads? You can really pull that in. Who is your core audience? Who is your demographics? I know I’m repeating myself, but this is the process that I go through. What’s your message and tone need to be? How am I going to distribute this? Is this going to be an ad? Is it going to be released organically? By doing all that prep work beforehand, then when you pick up the camera, you have your content ready to go.

Now a lot of people are impulsive. They would rather just kind of record and then just kind of upload it, which is fine, but do that for live video and put it on a different platform. Do it on Periscope or Facebook Live. If that’s what you want to do, that’s what that medium is for.

Give more thought to preparation before you actually pick up the camera on YouTube, and you’ll yield higher results.

Every client that I work with, they literally explode, because that’s something that I hammer into them, because that’s what they need to hear. They need to put more thought into it than just picking up a camera and just kind of ad-libbing.

There’s strategy behind this as well. The more that you can put in preparation, and don’t take too much time that you don’t get anything done, but just say, “Okay, I’m going to spend the next week and just put out my plan for the next quarter or the next half a year or the next year. I’m going to do the research. I’m going to figure out what type of channel it is, the type of content, and then go for it.”

Awesome. That’s fantastic. We’re running out of time. You’ve just totally over-delivered here. Before we wrap up, though, where do our listeners find out more about you, your business? Where do they connect?

Yeah, so you can go to derraleves.com. Or you can just go to YouTube and type in “Derraleves” or any of the social handles. It’s just “Derraleves”, all one word, except for Facebook. That Derral Eves is my private one, but if you go to Derral E, then you can follow me there. Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of where it’s at. The big thing for this interview, too, is I treat it like I’m doing the video. I want to bring value. I thought about, okay, what would be the best way to bring value? Even doing these small little things, it doesn’t matter what type of content that you’re putting, it could be a Facebook post. You can go through the same preparation steps, and that will make your content a lot better.

Absolutely. Fantastic. Derral, thank you so much for your time today, and again, over-delivering. Seriously, just tons of value and tips there. Thank you so much.
Oh, thanks, Derek.

All right, everyone. That was video marketing extraordinaire. As always, the links that Derral did mention there to connect with him as well to his YouTube channel, we will include links to those in the show notes. You’ll find all of that with the transcript of this episode at projectignite.com/podcast.Guys, now is the time to actually take all of these video marketing, YouTube marketing tips and strategies that Derral shared with you today, and actually apply that final ingredient to actually make it work. That ingredient is action.

Go forth, take action, apply what you’ve learned, and stay tuned for more info-packed episodes of the Project Ignite Podcast.

This is your host, Derek Gehl, signing off.

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