You're either winning or you are learning.

The biggest obstacle that I see video business owners face is the fear of marketing, because if it doesn't work, you take it personally. 

In actual fact, you are either winning or you are learning, and marketing is simply a series of tests to figure out what doesn't work until you hit on what does.

What makes this more complex is the market is always evolving. 

What worked before may not work now, but today I want to share with you my approach, confess where we got things wrong and what we learned, and how we're moving forward. 

Mentoring options : www.denlennie.com

Connect with Den on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_lennie

Transcript

 I've been running this podcast since 2019. That's almost seven years, and we've recorded over 400 episodes. And one of the interesting things about starting a podcast is that, A, you get to have a direct voice to you, the listener, but weirdly, without knowing who you are. I, obviously some people tell me and it's great when we get feedback, and I'm, I'm very, very grateful that if you've been listening to this podcast for a couple of weeks or ten years or six years I'm really grateful that you tune in. Now, I also know that you don't listen to every episode. In email marketing, it's estimated that one in every five emails gets read, and I, I see that data. It's why when I'm running a launch or making an offer, I, I email so much because I see some people not open an email till email five. And so if you only send one, you don't get the message through. And I always believe that in, in a business that we're all in, my obligation is to make sure that you see the opportunity and then decide if it's something that's relevant to you, if it's timely, and if it's something you wanna take part in. But as a, as a marketer, and this is true for any business, my job is to put that offer in front of you as many times as possible, so I either get a yes, a no, not yet, or look, I'm not interested anymore, unsubscribe. And all three of those outcomes are great. But I think the thing that challenge us-- challenges us as creatives is the thought that we might be bothering someone, we might be spamming them, that we might be annoying them. And the thing is, you have to overcome that fear if you want to grow your business. Because i-in, in simple marketing terms, marketing is putting the right offer in front of the right people at the right time. So let's say you're using LinkedIn, which is a terrific platform for finding clients as a video production business. You identify people that you think you'd like to work with. You connect with them and ensuring that you've got a well-written profile and bio so that when people see it, they go, "Oh, yeah, that's relevant." You know, if I'm in healthcare, for example, and you're a healthcare video production company, and I see that you specialize in helping healthcare companies, communicate better with their patients, I'm probably gonna accept your connection. Now, after that, you would potentially follow up and say, "Hey do you have a video supplier just now? Curious to learn more about that." But, but where the real marketing happens is in the posting of content. And I know a lot of people struggle with what to post, and I get it. It is difficult. But actually, with data, we can make it a lot easier. And we're building some tools just now that I'm gonna be sharing at my London workshop, which is, you know, on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of June how to do that using AI to support you. Now, I, I say AI to support you because I see a lot of people writing verbatim posts using ChatGPT. It's so obvious it's not even funny. Even Claude now is spottable. So you've gotta do it very carefully. But the idea is there's a trifecta of connecting with people, making sure your bio is, is appropriate, posting content, and then following up. Now, I've had clients of mine follow up with prospects over the course of a year, and in some cases a year or 18 months later, someone drops into their DMs and says, "Hey, I've been following you for a while. I need help with this thing, and you stand out because you've been the most consistent." And so in much the same way as me creating this podcast to communicate with you, the listener, it can sometimes take months or even years or even a decade before someone is ready. But I recently had, um... You know, we're launching this, this campaign to promote the London event. I think we currently have eight seats sold. We only have capacity in the room for 15 at absolute max. One of them has to be me, so we've got 14 seats. We've got six left. To be honest I think we might get 10 or 12. But I always like to push out on the basis that we've got the room for 10. If we add more people, great. If we don't. Um, so we're kind of full in one sense, but we do have two or three seats, maybe four or five seats left. If anyone's interested, please DM me, and we can chat about if it's something that's relevant to you or not. But you see, that's me making an offer. I, I'm not afraid to sell my stuff because I know it's gonna help people. And so far in the room, I've got at least two clients, maybe three, who've been to workshops with me before. So it might've been six years ago, but they knew the value of being in the room, and they're coming back for more. And so the, the best people to sell to are people you've already done business with. And so with that in mind, you'll notice that there's a shift happening in this podcast. I... It had always been called How to Scale a Video Business, and then I got bored And I was re-looking at my marketing. I was working with some mentors, and they said, "Look, you've really gotta push down that personal brand channel." So we shifted away from that into the Den Lennie Show. And it was a great lesson because what we actually saw was a decline in listeners because the title, The Den Lennie Show, wasn't descriptive. And here's the, the wonderful confession, okay? 'Cause I'm gonna just be completely honest with you 'cause I always am, and I always have been. We fucked up. The very thing that I... One of my absolute north stars is your video company should be called something that relates to the industry you're in. That is my goal, okay? It's always what I like to do, and I didn't follow my own advice, and we lost SEO ranking because of it. So over the last week or so, I've been discussing with my mentor that we're gonna move it back to a slight modification. It's gonna be called Scale Your Video Business with Den Lennie. So I'm kinda bridging the two. And if you've been listening throughout the shifts and changes, I'm grateful. I am sorry that it kinda shifted around a bit. It might have felt like we weren't respecting you, the listener. The truth is, we were just testing, and I don't ask any of my clients to do anything that I haven't done or I'm not willing to do. And sometimes you test things, and they don't work, but you always get data. And so I want to say to you, I am now fully committed to this podcast being audio only. It's the thing that I've always loved, and it's gonna be raw and honest and real. And if you've been watching any of my socials recently, I've really leaned into more authentic, genuine, honest me stuff. I think I was always a bit scared to, to share too much, to reveal too much. Wh-what's, where's the line, you know? But the fact is, I've just been, um, yapping whatever's on my mind on a given day, and I've seen my statistics drive up, and I've had lots of messages from people saying, "We love this. This feels like the real Den." So I wanna continue doing that, and I'm gonna continue to kind of ignore what would be regarded as the common consensus of how you should run your business and how you should market your business. You know, we put a lot of money into YouTube, making weekly videos. They're okay, but I don't feel they're really doing very much. So we're canning that, and we're gonna rethink how we do YouTube. And I think it's probably gonna be more of what we call a middle-of-funnel area where I'm just gonna share interviews with clients and success stories and things that they're doing and things that they've learned. Because then I think if you're thinking about getting some help in your business, at least you can go and watch a 30 or 40-minute interview with someone talking about the journey. Because I can tell you something for nothing. Building a business is way messier than you think it's gonna be. And it's not a straight line path. It's always a complicated path. It's always a struggle. It's very, very hard. It's so, so hard, and the hard days outweigh the easy days. And you have to build such resilience to run a business. But what's the alternative? The alternative is you just stay being freelance, and that's okay. That is still a business. But you're always relying on someone calling you, which doesn't put you in a very strong position. And I'd, I'd say that what I'm hearing in the UK is that the freelance market is really tough. Certainly in broadcast TV, a lot of very skilled, talented people are not working, so they're gonna start creeping into the corporate world. So if you're running a corporate business and you're doing well or you're doing okay and you think that it's gonna continue to be like that, here's my sage advice for you: never take anything for granted. Since 2009, when I started this business making DVDs on the 5D Mark II, the 7D, stills in motion, a video on assignment, how to create the film look, uh, you know, how to shoot interviews. Uh, there's a whole range of projects. It has changed dramatically every year. We were selling DVDs in 2009 for $100. Those are worthless today. There's courses that I made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling and s-- and, and sold hundreds and hundreds of copies to many people around the world, and it benefited them enormously. You might have bought some of those programs. Uh, they go on... I put them on YouTube a while ago, and they got no views, so I've taken them off again. Everything always changes in a business. And so we're changing the podcast again. We're going back to the, back to its roots. I'm just leaning into what I believe you want, which is me being brutally raw and honest with you about how hard it is to run a video business. And hopefully it resonates, and hopefully you feel like finally someone who's not full of bullshit because everywhere I look, there's a new coach. Some of these guys, I saw one the other day . He was 21 years old, and he was coaching some ... His, his pitch was how he made a million dollars a year as an agency. And I'm like, "You can make a million dollars a year in revenue and keep none of it." It's, the whole thing, it's, it's the Wild West. It's gone absolutely bananas. I want to just be even more raw and even more honest and respect you, the listener. So if, if you've ever felt like I haven't respected you, then I want to apologize, that in our journey of testing and figuring out systems and ways of doing this in a more efficient way, I think we lost sight of the connection that we have with you, the listener, me sitting in my studio here recording this on a Monday morning And then posting it so you can hear it. So that's my promise to you. We're back. We're gonna be back as the Scale Your Video Business podcast with Den Lennie, bridging both gaps. And I will be pus- putting out probably an episode a week. As you can tell, it's not edited. It's just raw. It's off the cuff. I think that's the future, and I would encourage you to lean into yapping and more authentic content for your own business. And thank you.