Consume Media - Part 1.m4a
Chris: That I normally use when I play D and D virtually with play people. And we're going to put it through its paces to see if it actually works in the conference room setting, if it actually picks up stuff, we'll see what happens. So worth a shot at least. All right, so let me go over here. This is. So before we get started, I was going to kind of run through the order of operations things. So this. The goal of this is to color all this into green. This is our project. These are the structures. And so what we're going to do is today we are going to be confirming the sitemap, the wireframes, and design inspiration. And the goal is to get that confirmed. Then we're going to move into kind of the homepage and the block library sections. So, first piece will be the homepage. We'll do a round of QA on it. Then we'll work on homepage version two and block library version one. We'll confirm the homepage, do QA on the library, do version two, and then we'll have basically everything we need for the site design. Then we'll dive into development. And at the same time, as we start development, we'll take those wireframe pages and we'll basically take the building blocks that we've already designed and kind of smush them together. And I'm realizing in this exact moment, I'm using terms that I've talked with Leo about, but not you two about.
Lydia: Yeah.
Chris: Did y' all follow what I was saying? Perfect. Wonderful.
Lydia: And you talked to me a little bit about stuff like the why.
Chris: That's right. Yeah. Okay, wonderful.
Lydia: We went like 45 minutes over our time.
Chris: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Leo: Great.
Lydia: So, yes, I'm with it. Perfect.
Chris: And so we have five pages that we will basically take those wireframes, take the blocks, and smush them together in figma while development is happening. So we'll build out basically all the core building blocks. We'll build out the cages, we'll migrate that continent. We are very happy. We ran some AI fun things this weekend and found that we can grab all of your project data, because AI is the bomb. And so we can in mass import those things. We'll record educational videos on how to actually use the site. Then we will train you guys. You guys will then have access to the site to build out whatever pages you want, import whatever blog posts you want, edit the projects, and then we'll do a little bit of QA with you, kind of talk you through what's working, what's not working. You'll have submitted some tickets during that time as well. We'll figure out what's important, what isn't as important, get you on the right track, then get you in there for round two of continuing to edit your site. And then at the very end, this tiny little thing we will launch, that is the scale of our project. Comments, questions, anything new there that you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't sign up for this.
Leo: No, I think just the level set. So they're going to be creating five pages for us. We're going to have 12 building blocks, so we can create any other pages that we want on our own. And the blogs are going to. Or the projects are coming in through an AI export import thing. And then the blogs. Just level seven of the blogs. Yeah.
Chris: So the blogs are built. So how familiar are you guys with the back end of your current website?
Leo: Yes. This one? Yes.
Lydia: No, not big.
Chris: Okay, so your website is built in Divi and your blog. So most of the time when people's blogs. Blogs are just flat text, they're headers and paragraphs and that's it. Maybe an image thrown in there every so often. Y' all's blogs have a lot of divi blocks thrown in there. Divi does not translate over to like standard HTML code. So all that HTML code and all that CSS that makes your three column layouts is specific to Divi code. So we migrate that over. That code's not going to be brought over. So we can't just copy and paste and migrate your blogs in automatically. There's a way that we could possibly flatten some of that HTML to make it a little bit more. Less divi standard and more HTML standard, but it's still not going to look sexy. So rather than import a lot of hot jumbled HTML code mess. While I was talking to Leo, y' all are just going to pick out 10, 15, 20 of the blogs that you like the most and just move them over and copy and paste them in the. Rather than trying to write these crazy scripts that will take us hours to do. Whereas the projects, you have them formatted basically the same way every single time, which is why we could AI import it. Does that make sense?
Leo: Yes.
Chris: Awesome.
Lydia: And that kind of answer because I remember when you and I were talking to. We're talking about the blogs and we're like, I mean, I don't even know how many we had. I don't know if we have a number of like. And we're like, do we actually need all of those like. And so I think this answers that question of let's pick the. Like you said, 15, 20 best, most compelling, most recent ones that have our most updated messaging, the words that we're using, all of that. And the blogs that are from seven years ago or five years ago, maybe we see them and we add them onto a list of getting updated for feature or something like that.
Leo: Exactly.
Lydia: I like that.
Chris: And your sites are going to be hosted on WP Engine. So before we go live, we'll copy the live site down to a staging environment so they have access to it. So you're internally, you're not going to lose anything. So if you want to go back and grab them later, you can go do that. So make sense?
Leo: Yep.
Chris: Fantastic. All righty.
Lydia: So I love this, by the way. I'm glad if you liked it too. I just think it's really cool. Like the steps.
Chris: I definitely did not make this. At 10:30 last night, I had the idea. I was like, you know what? We're all very visual people. And I think that if the goal is to color in everything green, that's better than a lot of other options. So we're going to run with this one. I like this one.
Lydia: I think this is really cool.
Chris: So we have that. So what I want to start with here today is I'm actually going to zoom out of this for a minute. I want to start off with asking you some very basic questions. I've known you guys for a long time. I want to understand a little bit more about why you guys do what you do, what you enjoy the most doing. Your product offerings and services have morphed and changed over time. I think I found 12 or 14 different products on the website when I was just looking through it. So talk to me a little bit. Let's just start with the why behind all this.
Lydia: So I'll just say, I mean, our purpose is that we have gone through eos, which is entrepreneurial operating system. And so we have, you know, we defined all these things about a year ago. Our purpose that I think really is what drives us and is our why is creatively provide value with good people. Right. That's what I say it. Right.
Chris: Okay, good.
Lydia: So it's so, you know, we want to be creative. We want to expand those muscles. We want to provide value and impact. We also want to do it with good people and good people internally and externally. And that has actually helped us to be used as a litmus test of, you know, is this person that we're Hiring a good person, do we enjoy working with them? Do they embody our core values? And then same with clients and with vendors as well. I think it's really helped provided that sort of North Star and almost kind of bumpers as we, you know, sometimes not everyone hits that purpose perfectly and we kind of have to ask ourselves questions. And so I think that's where we as a leadership team decided that is why we do this. We are trying to instill or just have that beneficial impact, but through creativity. And then also our motto, which we kind of added is let's have some fun. And we want to bring joy into everyone's lives. So again, internal, external, all of that. So that's what I would say.
Leo: Pretty good. Yeah. So we started the business in 2012 in a college apartment, which then even call it that. It was right above Mad Hatter, the village idiot.
Lydia: Yeah, you look out the window and it was the back door of the Toppers.
Leo: That was our original inspiration.
Lydia: Ye.
Leo: Michael and I didn't want to get internships, so we started a video company. I really liked writing. Michael already had a lot of experience in photography and had some equipment and said, okay, let's start a company. At the time, it started with concert films, music videos, party promotion, things like that. Graduated, moved into the corporate video marketing space before it was really called video marketing, and found our niche in the software space in 2016 is when we got our first software client. And then it just kind of snowballed and snowballed and snowballed and snowballed. Now we serve a lot of the biggest funded technology companies in the city, some really large ones all over the country. So that's been great. You know, it started as someone would hire us to make a video, we'd make a video. And that still is a core component of what we do. How we've tried to position ourselves as not a video production company, but a video marketing agency. Not someone who's just going to go out there and do what you tell us to do. We're going to bring our strategic insights into, okay, this is your goal. This type of video strategy should accomplish your goal. You know, we're going to help you with art, with best practices and messaging and creativity and delivery and, you know, creativity and strategy across the board. And that's really differentiated us in the marketplace. There's a big trend right now where video production companies are less and less and less valuable. And video is, you know, with new technology, it is at risk of becoming commoditized. But as we positioned Ourselves as a strategic partner rather than just a video production company. That's really helped us. Our clients aren't churning, they're mostly keeping consistent budget. And our goal at the time currently is just, and I imagine will continue to stay this way is to help our clients get more and more value for that same budget point. As we use more technology, being more creative, strategic, we believe we'll be able to provide our clients more value at that same time. Price point. Sales people.
Chris: Right? Tell me.
Leo: Yeah, I mean I think something that sets us apart, I mean it's on our banner out there. Video skills powered by marketing brains. Like we, we love the creative process, we care really deeply about the product that we make and the relationships we build with our clients. But we also, to Leah's point, like we think strategically about it. We, we ask like, is this the right piece of content for what they're actually trying to achieve? And beyond that, I think it's like for us, customer experience is so important to us. We want to provide the best customer service we can. Like that's what drives us. I think it comes back to our purpose of we look at our relationships internally and externally as relationships and not as transactions. So I think that is huge. And I think a lot of, you know, you mentioned it on our website. It's like we are not like our niche is creative crafted video solutions. Which means like if we can make it and it's video related, like that falls within our purview which can be really sprawling, it's not super specific. And I think that's where there is an opportunity for us to think about the best way to position that on the website. Because it can feel like a little overwhelming at times. But I think that's where we're trending is that it's a lot more focused on explaining video marketing strategies and less about talking about video project types or specific video products. It's talking about how those things work together to achieve certain goals. And that's where a lot of the work is, has been going in the last year or so, I'd say on the website and on the positioning and everything that they've been having conversations with clients. But the tldr, we do a lot of shit. So it's like whatever you need, we can typically do it.
Lydia: We're the video marketing agency that can make any type of video your business could need. And I think that's really important because there are a lot of companies that are very focused, like they've decided, okay, we are the go to company. For animated videos. And they only focus on animated. They don't have that live filming and editing component or vice versa or some are cinematic 150k budgets or nothing like, you know, and that's all they do. And if you wanted to, hey, I just want a video just interviewing a customer. It's not really something that they would just do one off. But we do all three of those things and we create like we take those three components and. And develop these strategic and custom packages for people and I was gonna say something I forgot. Nevermind, keep going.
Leo: The three components, I wrote them up there in green are authentic, which is, you know, often utilizing filming with real people testimonials, thought leadership, mission videos, things like that. Animated, which animated, you know, projects, planners, demos, things like that. And then cinematic, which is like your big budget commercial or big budget media campaign actors, locations, things like that. And just for more level setting across the industry, I believe that the companies that Lydia mentioned that only focus on the cinematic ones are in deep trouble. Because Sora, nano banana 3, that's what's replay. It's common to either a lot of. And there definitely will be more technology for animated and authentic as well. It's not quite there yet. It's kind of weird, but kind of on that note, across all three of these phases we're thinking how can we provide more value for our clients at that same price point. So with cinematic, we're experimenting with nano banana VA3, things like that. With talking head content, we figured out a way to be a lot more efficient there animated. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but I imagine in the next year or two that same sort of technology will be available for us to be more efficient there.
Chris: So what you did with Tim and Brian for the thought leadership stuff.
Lydia: Yes, next gen thought leadership, that's all the AI stuff.
Chris: So basically they just send you voice memos. You've recorded them for a day and then they send you voice memos. And it just.
Lydia: So it's actually the opposite. So they. So we do a lot of work in the pre production. Not a lot but like the bulk of the work takes place in pre production. So where they send us voice memos of the. They're not polished. It's just. This is what I'm gonna talk about. And we just. It doesn't have to be nice, it's just getting the content from there. We have a GPT that we put together that takes that voice memo and then produces a document that we then can edit that provides the proper interview Question to get this topic, the hook options. So for the first three to five seconds of the video and then the top messaging points for each video. Now when we do these shoots we're filming for like 25 videos. So it's really important to have that playbook. So when we go into filming our direct like the client has seen it and they're prepared but they're not reading off of a teleprompter. They're still being again, authentic. But our director and our producer have the playbook of hey, you missed this one message point. Why don't you give us a sentence about that, blah blah, blah. And, and because we do so much work on the front end, we're able to post, script and edit it quicker. And what used to like for that budget that we are charging people now. So like I'll give you an example. Like 25, 2560 second videos. Right. Right now that's costing maybe like less than 20 grand. Less than that for sure. Like that used to, that 20 grand used to get you when we didn't like had an utilizes AI technology, etc. We'll get you like five videos. Totally. So it's like we've 5x the output for that same budget and that's the one that we've seen the most people of our new product offerings. Most people. I mean I think we have, we have two shoots, I mean coming up and we just, I mean I think we've done three or four already. Like that's exciting. What I was going to say also earlier is that the thing that we differentiate ourselves and we try to kind of make this, we want to make it like obvious on the website but not too obvious. So like if you go like on the bottom, we have to sort of like our FAQ on our homepage which is like we're not necessarily the company that you reach out to when you just need like a 60 second event recap video. Like if that's all you need and that's all your focus is, we're going to be more expensive than a standard videographer who has a camera and then will go home, dump the footage and edit your video in a week. Like that's just. But we are the company that if you are open and maybe and a lot of times they think they want event recap but they're open to okay, but now we're gonna come on site, we're gonna get an event recap but we're gonna set up an interview room and we're gonna get next gen Bot leadership. We're gonna get, you know, testimonials from your customers culture videos to help your recruiting efforts because you're this big funded tech company and you, you're set to hire 300 engineers in the next two years or whatever. Right. Like, and then that's where we can really provide that value. So like, for example, we're at a conference, we're going to two conferences in the next like months where it's not about an event recap video, which tends to be. I come from the events world, so that's why I think about that. Like, everyone's like, oh, we need an event recap video. It's like you do, but like, but like, let's get you content that can live six months from now that, that you can actually post that it doesn't date you back to six months ago, that this was at your event, at.
Chris: Your event and nobody cares about the event.
Lydia: Exactly, exactly.
Leo: Really more fun for the people who planned it. And they're like, look at this.
Chris: What's the impact of it?
Lydia: And so that's where like, I think we just wanted, like, that's the type of clients we're looking for. That maybe they're not immediately thinking that way, but they are open to broadening their. Their viewpoint.
Leo: Yeah. To follow us from that. The general trend that you've heard is that we have an innovative mindset. Right. We're not thinking about video the legacy way. We're trying to be innovative in every product that we offer. And to Lydia's point, again, like, sometimes people will come to our website and they want an event recap video. Like, I think the point is like, we've had a handful of qualified clients come to our websites and become customers in the past year just for big metal marketing, you know, just for my CEO purposes. It's mostly referrals and repeat business.
Chris: So you would say 90% plus, I'm assuming.
Leo: I can think of Develon. They were a good customer for a little bit, maybe a few others.
Chris: But do you know how they found. Do you actually know for sure that they Google?
Leo: Yeah, they find us because they're probably in the Duluth or Norcross area and.
Lydia: They Google video company near me or something.
Leo: Yeah, that's how, that's how we get those.
Lydia: And it does tend to like, those ones tend to be like one that we did one project with was like a family plumb, family owned plumbing company and we were, you know, they wanted just us to come and film and we were like, okay, but we could. And they Were going to edit it. We showed them what we could do. Da da da da. They ended up signing on for like a $15,000 project. Not huge, but not nothing. But they're not our icp. And so it's not like we're not at the point where we turn away anyone that's not within our B2B, SaaS, professional services, et cetera. Professional services, more like law firms or accountants and things like that, consultancies, et cetera.
Leo: But.
Lydia: It would like, I would say, like the majority of our, like, our tech clients that come to us, those are almost always referral or like, and it may be a direct referral, like you referred me, or they have a. They're part of a community of marketing people who, you know, or what I love. And this is, you gotta love this. You have a client that we do a video for, they post it on LinkedIn and then someone comments and says, this is a great video. Who did you use? And then that person comes to us and you're like, hell yeah.
Leo: Like, the other scenario is very common, which is, you know, you know, the CMOs do business marketing. They're pretty short lifespans at these tech companies. Work with them here, they move on to another company. Oh, we'd like to work with the same. Let's bring them here. That's been a big part of our CMO effects.
Lydia: Yes, 100%. Those are those, like, we call them like the champions that like, no matter wherever they. We go or they go, they will say like, we should consider bringing and consume or, you know, all that, which we love. Saying our name for the first time in a conference room, it's a wonderful thing. Yes.
Chris: I'm going to shift over a little bit more into the product side of things. Did you have any questions about the messaging and stuff like that? All right.
Leo: So.
Chris: As a visual, so that we can kind of touch on a couple of different things here, we're not going to dive into the full sitemap, but I did at least want to pull this up. So when I went looking around the site, basically, so there was a handful of things, the products that were in the footer that didn't line up one to one with the stuff that was in these four items that were underneath the main menu bar here. We don't need to necessarily go into all of these things. Specifically, I want to know from a product standpoint and what you guys like selling and what you guys like doing, where does that mesh up? Well, because there's a lot of stuff here. For example, I can build websites and WordPress and Shopify, all these other different things. I can work with small businesses. I can work with mega companies that have millions and millions of pages. This is my like what we're doing here may be a little bit larger than this. That's my sweet spot. So it's these like founder owned businesses that have been around for a while. They're probably making a few million dollars that have enough in their budget to spend 15 to $30,000 on the site and maybe some retained work afterwards. There's a lot of different styles and structures up here. What is your team not most capable of? That's not the right phrase I'm looking for, but I can't think of the right phrase I'm looking for. What are you leaning into from a marketing standpoint and a Legion standpoint out of these things?
Leo: Yeah. So I would say from a marketing perspective we've really shifted a lot of. Well when we go to current customers we've shifted a lot of our messaging to these new innovative product offerings that we have brought to the table because they already know that.
Chris: Which are the first four? Which are the top bold.
Lydia: Well, so goal based is technically like taking our legacy products for the most part and kind of combining them into packages. Thought leadership is next gen. Thought leadership is a new product offering. Interactive video and organic social at scale are like considerable. We consider our NPOs or new product offerings that we rolled out last year.
Leo: Yeah. So what our thought process was and I think that it does need some creative rethinking was okay, we have this new solutions tab. We're going to put anything that's new that we want to market as a new product offering in that bucket right there. And then anything that's just like a video kind of landed into that work page on our website. I'm not certain that's the right way that we should be positioning it. That's how we position it though. Yeah. I would say our most successful clients tend to lean on us for. For prospect conversion pieces of content. Most those are animated explainers, testimonials, demos, things like that. That's probably what we sell the most of customer success. Has started to find a little bit of a rebound recently. Done a few projects there and employee training videos, onboarding videos, things like that. Or training employee videos would be the player branding at the bottom.
Chris: That's what we did with Trulia. Right. The employer branding stuff. You told the sole story of Trulio.
Lydia: And yeah, that is so that's interesting because that is technically it Kind of is more about what is the purpose and what is the use case. Because we, I would consider that more brand awareness, which is like this is our mission, like a mission video. This is like the, the why you're trying to pull on people's heartstrings. You're trying to get them to feel something. Da da da. Employer branding is more so like specific to recruiting culture. So it's like the videos that live on the our team or about us like, or like our we're hiring. They go on their glass door like this is our. And it's people talking about how much they love working at relations and the benefits and the da da da and like that kind of stuff. So, so that one, I would say of the four kind of like goals tends to be the lowest one. Because people, you know, that makes sense. That's typically not the marketing. Yeah. And that the marketing team's not usually in charge of the culture and recruiting efforts. So normally once we've kind of gotten them some successful projects in the other realms, then it's like their HR team reaches out and is like, hey, we love that video. We want to get one made for the, you know, for our recruiting or whatever.
Chris: So we talked a lot about the thought leadership videos. That's the smaller packet. How you're shifting to these three core product offerings in terms of this is how you're pitching, this is how you're selling.
Leo: I would say current. Current, current.
Chris: Okay, so is everyone else.
Leo: Our current customers know about all of our other offerings.
Chris: Okay.
Lydia: So like new customers coming in. I would say the bigger thing that we try to. Because if someone comes in and they're interested in customer testimonial videos, like it can be a lot if you're trying to say oh like you should do an interactive video customer, like that's a big sort of leap. So typically what we do is actually we, we try to see if there's a goal based strategy that fits their goals. So like in our discovery call, they may be originally their initial ask is a brand video or an animated explainer. We go through discovery, we ask more questions, we understand what the ultimate goal is. And then after we've talked through them, we'll go through a quick like five to seven minute presentation. We'll ask them if they're happy.
Leo: We'll do the same presentation.
Lydia: Yeah, that general capabilities presentation, typically that gets, you can literally see it as they're watching, as their interpret like their gears start turning, they're like, oh my gosh. Okay, so there's animated explainer. But we could also do ad spin offs or we could do, you know, a product demo. Or they start thinking and we'll say, you know, how are you feeling? They're like, okay, well now I'm starting to think a bit bigger and a bit more. And then the next step is we put together a package. Now we have sort of like foundational quote unquote packages or what have you that we don't really like go into full detail on the website because at the end of the day we're going to tweak it and make it be what makes the most sense for the client, for the price range, et cetera. And that's what we like a new client is more often than not getting that type of offering presented as step one. Now whether they go forward and pick one of the packages or just go forward with a single project, you know, to be determined, budget's a big factor, things like that. So I would say like the new clients, right? Wouldn't you say like, I'm not really with the new client unless it's like, I would say next gen thought leadership is actually probably the one that we pitch the most to new clients because they're like, we want some thought leadership content. We're like, we can get you 25 videos for the price of what it used to cost to do five. And they're like, tell us more, sign us up. And they see it and we're like, we're gonna get 25 videos that you can have in a library and put in your content calendar to post every other week for the next year and you're golden. And they're like, yes, do that.
Chris: What do clients say is their core problem?
Leo: Usually it's sales conversion.
Lydia: I was gonna say converting pipeline or like shortening the sales cycle.
Chris: Do they come in with preconceived notions on how video is going to do that for them?
Leo: They usually come in because someone's told them that they need a testimonial video. That's usually what they come to us with, or they need a signal video. And that's when we come in as strategic partners and consultants and give them the whole lay of the land, essentially.
Lydia: The other thing that's interesting is I feel like we've seen a lot too where like as Leo mentioned before, there's a lot of movement of the sort of higher level marketing executives or like VPs, et cetera, that move around. And a lot of times it'll be someone who's moved over and they started a company that like has no video content on their website and that tends to be like, we need a video for our homepage. Because like people come to our homepage and they don't know what we do because, you know, it's a tech company that provides a solution for blah, blah, blah, like what it's like, what do you do? And so I feel like there is a little like we get a lot of we need a video for our homepage or we need a video that succinctly explains the problem we solve and how we solve it and how they're going to benefit from it. And I think we get a lot of that as well. And whether that turns into like an animated explainer or customer testimonial case study, I think we get that's a big one.
Leo: And let's talk energy around those types of clients. Like, is it like we don't. This sounds bad. So like, I don't mean it this way. We don't want to waste our time with these types of clients because we're trying to get this type of client. Like, are y' all coming to those calls and meetings? Like, for example, we. I care, but I know like there's been projects recently where it comes into our inbox and we're like, this is not the type of company that we're going to build a long term relationship. That's usually when, if we are dismissive in any way, it's because this company has three people and they own $5 in revenue. But if it's a B2B tech company that just raised their Series B and they're starting with a small project, we're like, okay, let's do this with them because they're going to raise their Series C next year and they're going to want to keep growing. So, okay, more of the vertical and the vertical and the company. And I would say the project.
Lydia: Yeah, yeah, you're right. I think we try to, we try to look for the long term. Like does this again, for example, they're like, I talk about like Chen Plumbing. We kind of knew that they weren't going to be one that was going to like we were going to build like a hundred thousand dollar retainer with this, you know, home, you know, this family owned local plumbing company. But you know, we got on the call, we listened, we asked our questions, we pitched them and they're like, actually we could absolutely do this. And we're like. And they would pay our price. And we're like, okay, like, we'll do this for you, we're not gonna. Again, we're not in the business of like turning away business, especially if they have the budget for it, is the main thing.
Leo: I would say we're pretty good at scoping where that. Because a lot of services firms fall into. Like, if you're providing services for someone outside your icp, you're probably going to go over budget and you're going to lose money on the project. And that's when it's not a good decision. Right. We're pretty good at scoping where that's rarely the case.
Lydia: Yeah, I agree.
Leo: And so part of why I asked that question is like, should we try to lean into weeding out those types of clients on their website or just kind of keep it? I would say we want to weed out the people who come to us and say, come with your bar mitzvah.
Lydia: Yeah.
Leo: Or your wedding.
Lydia: Yeah. Like, we're not like social and we don't. To be totally off. We don't at this stage, like, we don't really get those, like, I mean, maybe like personal a couple times a.
Leo: Year, maybe that's who we weed out. Right. I don't think we weed out the person who wants a testimonial. Okay.
Lydia: Yeah. And so like in our. Again, like, we have these frequently asked questions on the bottom of the page because we didn't used to have any of this type of information on our website before. And we did like a little bit of a refresh last year at some point. And you know, I mean, there's things like our question like our, our answers are, huh? Yeah, like, you know, what makes Consumed medium unique amongst other agencies. And it's just, it's talking more about strategy and that component versus we can come out and film whatever you need and turn around a video in less than a week. And like, like that's not our offer. There are videographers and production houses that are like, well, you'll hire us. We'll come out and film tomorrow and get you a video. And like, that's just not what we do. And you know, like, what organizational departments can benefit from video solutions. And we try to like broaden it so it's sales teams, product marketing, success teams, people, ops, partnerships and integrations like we want it to. Because I will say the majority of who we serve are, or at least our initial contacts are within the marketing function of an organization. But there are so many other departments within those organizations that can benefit from video. And we have like, we get that occasionally. Like we just did an interactive video experience for Salesloft's onboarding team. So all it is is you're a new client of Salesloft and. And now you're presented with this experience where you watch all these videos and you get onboarded to their solution. And, like, that's not sales because it's not. It's not being sent out to prospects. So we want to do, like, we want to make sure that we're capturing all of that. I mean, in our FAQs, we talk about annual retainers, like, things like that. Can you scale to fit different budget sizes? That's sort of where we kind of decided, like, maybe that's how we do that. Like, where we sort of put in some bumpers where it says, like, our video solutions typically start at around 10,000. So, like, again, is someone coming down to the very bottom and opening this last question? I don't know, but maybe they are. I mean, I know that if I'm like, vetting a potential vendor for something, I'm clicking around, reading a lot of stuff. So I think. And since we have done that, I feel like I've noticed that there is a little bit less of the. I've got $2,000 and I want you to make me a video with actors and done. And you're like, get out of here. Like, you don't say that. Sorry, you don't say that. But, like, remember, Leo, I feel like, you know, before we kind of changed some of these things, we did have to send more emails to people that instead of just sending them a discovery call link, we would say, hey, like, thanks so much for reaching out to us. Just so you know, our video solutions start at $10,000. Is that within, like. And kind of weed out that way? And now I feel like we don't have to send those emails as much. Obviously it's like less inbound leads from a quantity standpoint, but, lady, I'd rather not waste the time on having to send to someone like.
Leo: So that was put in recently? Somewhere around a year ago, I was gonna say maybe.
Lydia: Was it like, last summer? What, this? Yeah.
Leo: FAQs. Yeah, it was towards the end of last summer.
Lydia: Ish.
Leo: Last summer.
Chris: Ish.
Leo: This past one. It's not recent? Yeah, it was pretty recent.
Chris: Okay, give me an idea and a feel for how willing you guys are to make kind of on a product by product level pricing blatantly obvious, not hidden behind an faq.
Leo: I think it's okay. Because.
Chris: It'S okay. What do you mean it's okay?
Lydia: And when you mean Pricing. Sorry, I just want to like make sure I'm on the starting Valid starting at $10,000 or are you saying like so.
Chris: Right there? Section number two, three core levels of pricing. And if you wanted a deeper dive, it kind of gets you. And obviously our creative spaces are different, but it's hard to pinpoint down like that's. That these lists are not 100% accurate. Just because you have E Commerce doesn't mean your website's Gonna cost you $35,000. It could be lower than that. Some of these things are move aroundable. But I was like, screw it. Not just not to use myself as an example. Sorry, but who's that guy in the orange shirt? I definitely don't have five of them. I just, I got tired. So this is the thing. This is the thing I've realized as an introvert. I realized the people that like when I go and meet new people, if I recognize you from your like LinkedIn photo or something like that, there's a higher likelihood that I will go up and say hello because I already know what your name is. I know you. And I was like, okay, well then if I feel that way and they see it like in my. I also do a lot of like coffee meetups with people I don't know and I've gone to the wrong person, been like, hey, Bob, how's it going? And that sucks. And so I was like, if I just wear an orange shirt when I.
Leo: Go out and meet people. Yeah.
Chris: And so. And then I also just got orange kicks too, because why not? So anyway, I digress.
Lydia: I'm derailed. I'm sorry.
Leo: So.
Chris: No, it's fine.
Leo: Leo and I have gone down this path so many times.
Chris: I have no doubt about it.
Leo: My current thought process is that. And let me just kind of work on it a little bit. For people coming to our website for the first time, I think that it is good to have some sort of idea of what the cost is for different types of videos.
Chris: It becomes much less.
Leo: The videos cost less after you have done a few projects with these folks.
Lydia: So how do you show that?
Leo: And do you want to show that?
Chris: Because. Can I interject something there? If the first ones cost more, the second third ones cost less, are they going back to your site?
Leo: That's where my brain.
Chris: Oh, sorry, okay, sorry, I interrupted real quick.
Leo: That's where my head keeps going. Inherently. The website is for non clients. It's for people we want to convert into clients. So I think where we're going here is like, we have that FAQ we're trying to level set, that should be more explicit across the whole website. Like you've never worked with us before, we're trying to get you in here.
Chris: One thing I'll tell you with my very small sample size is that since I put that up there and I don't get bazillions of hits, these are all people that have had connections to me in some way, shape or form. But I've had two people text me, you're included in that saying, oh, the website for this sizing, it costs 15, 20, 20. They actually text me and say, I think this is what it's going to cost, is that right? And I say yes and I'm done. No proposals, no nothing, just finished. So again, we're different industries, different ICPs, the whole nine yards. I get that. But my small sample size has had a lot of success with it. I've also had a lot of success with the simple fact of talking to somebody on a sales call and using my homepage as the like, walkthrough of the entire like process. Now, do I think you need to have a five mile long homepage like I do? No, not saying that, but I've had calls where people have been on my site which I did not know and I'm going through with them. My thoughts and like, oh, this is like you're like following. I'm scrolling as I talked with you on the homepage and like, so the pricing is going to be X.
Leo: Yes.
Chris: So for me it has lowered the barrier to entry and the sticky pricing discussion. You all have a lot more fluid, not fluid offerings, but a lot more ways to package things up. So there's a little bit of a difference there, which I do fully realize.
Lydia: Question on this, and I'm just curious is like the whole concept of anchoring and the whole thing of like whoever says the first price first loses. I'm not saying that's right, but that is something that I was taught, you know, when I did sales training 20 years ago, now 15 years ago. And it's the anchoring that makes me a little nervous because even if you have 35,000 plus, you have a plus sign that's like, it could be more than this. People are like, this is $35,000. And so then when you come back and based off what they've asked you say it's $47,000 and they're like, well, wait a second, like I don't know. I just, I. That's my sort of concern with the kind of throwing out numbers before we have had discovery and figured out everything and been able to go through and put together with our and figure out, okay, well where can we throw a discount for them? Where can we find some costings? Where can we add this da da da da and get it together? So I don't know. I'm not saying that I'm opposed to it 100% by any means, but it feels like, it does feel like it goes against what I have been taught and what I have done in my career. Again, not saying it's the only way, of course it's not clearly. But like I was always taught to like on a call, if someone's like, so, like, what do you think this is going to cost us? You're like, we'll get back to you. Like, well, I'm going to go put together a custom, custom project for you. You're going to get the best pricing. And again, is that the right way? But like, I would rather do that than to say, oh, it'll probably be about like 20 to 25k. And then you do the number and it's 27k. And now you've gone above what you've told them.
Chris: Yeah.
Lydia: And now you're like, well, fuck. Because they're like, well, you said 2020. So like that's where I get nervous, the right word.
Chris: But yeah, there is no, there is no one right answer, of course. And so my opinion on it is that for me it's a positioning thing because in the world that I live in and the world that you guys live in too, people don't publicize their pricing. So it's an immediate differentiator for folks to know that I don't have to pick up the phone to call to get a general idea. I think where the explanation that you gave versus what I'm doing differs a little bit. You were saying 35k plus. I think where the difference might lie is how do you showcase packages and kind of general ballparks of different options so that people can self select into them rather than just saying this general package costs this amount of money or more than the anchor to that low price. I think if there's different options within each of them, people can logically see like, oh, I don't want 25 videos, I want 50. 50 is in this one. So now you've moved that anchor point not from the lowest price but to the middle price. Yeah, so.
Lydia: I'm not again, so we go like, we'll do bronze, silver, gold packages, but again, that's part of our creative brief where we do that kind of here's the get in for what you're looking for, here's the slightly elevated version, here's the top tier version. And we show. Because at that point we're showing examples of what those packages equal in terms of quality for video. I think that sometimes can be hard from a video perspective. So I'm just like, I'm working through it. You're like very much like five pages, right? Like, okay, five pages. But like gold, silver, bronze for an animated explainer equals different levels of quality and output. Yeah, right.
Chris: I'm thinking through that for myself, which I totally get. Like, we've got a project for 50, 60k. The design quality is going to be different than lower quality.
Lydia: So how do you make sure that that anchor too, like our, you know, our bronze package for an animated explainer has predominant screen recording aspect to it and not very, not a lot of unique graphics. And it's all very different. Silver is different. Like there. So I hear. I'm not. Again, I'm not trying to like poo poo. I'm not saying that I don't want to do it. I'm just trying to think through those implies because those are the things that we have to make sure when we're doing a creative brief presentation. Hey, here's an example of what gold gets you. Here's an example of silver. Here's an example of bronze. And based off of the client and what they're looking to do, what we show for gold, silver and bronze changes like bronze. For Michael, I'm going to show him a different video than I'm going to show for Claude. And then I'm going to show for Leo because they all have different goals. And, and maybe, maybe I show Leo and Michael the same one, but I show Claude a different one and I show Chris a different one. So that's where I want to just like be thoughtful.
Chris: Leo, is that more based on industry?
Lydia: It's based on, yeah, definitely industry. But also like, like we try to showcase where they can feel like they can see how this video could become their video. So like, if we know that they are gonna, they really want it to be super, like, like their brand is like fun and quirky and da da, da. Like, we're not going to show them a video that's of like a super freaking, like methodical, traditional B2P SaaS video. Yeah. But if they are, we're going to show something more aligned with them. But if this is like I Don't know, like, like I don't always show like full story is one of our tech companies that is a bit more fun and quirky and like bright colors and da da, da. I'm not going to necessarily show that example to a company that is presenting like very different from a brand perspective. Does that make sense? And that's not always 100% true. Sometimes we want them to think differently and to think outside their box, whatever. But yeah, am I like talking on my ear?
Leo: The key point is that how we position the product can be client and scenario dependent. I think like, that said, like, I think there's a world where having three tiers for each product offering on the website is valuable. I think that requires a lot of. Not a lot, A couple whole days of work and focus on our end to really lay that what's up, Lando? Which isn't out of the question. Like, I think for testimonials you could, you could do that. For next gen thought leadership, you got a package, you could do that. Animated explainer is a little bit tricky because like we have three different tiers of animated explain explainers and oftentimes these animated explainers within each tier can have a gold of silver and bronze package. There could be nine options for animated explainers, but there's only three for testimonials or so on.
Lydia: Yeah, I think that's just where.
Leo: It.
Lydia: Could balloon and snowball into really, really big and complicated quickly. So is there a way for us to do it that doesn't do that? Because I don't want to be. I don't, I actively don't want it to be where they are. Click on every single type of video and see three options for every single. Like that is too much information. And then if we try decide to change something, we decide to change our rate for how we scope certain elements of our budget. Now we're changing. Like that's just. Yeah, I don't want to do that. So how do we do it broader?
Chris: My gut reaction to this basically says for the simpler product, actually I'm going to mimic a lot of what you just said for testimonials and thought leadership stuff that those packages are fairly locked in. We showcase that for stuff that's a little bit more on the custom side, that's a little bit more creative, that has a lot of the animation stuff might have three tiers and within each tier might have different tiers that we leave out of it. And so that way you get the ability to do the easy sales easier. But Be a little bit broader on the creative side of things. And I think by showcasing that you are very. Strict isn't the right word I'm looking for. But you're very open and honest about with these products. We pretty much know what you're going to charge you. These are a little bit more open ended and I think having that juxtaposition when you go service by service by service I think shows a lot of honesty and openness whereas most other companies wouldn't show that. Claude, what are your thoughts? Put you on the spot. Put it on the spot because I got one direction real quick. You're back.
Leo: I have a lot of thoughts actually.
Chris: The next thing is I just want to go in case what you talk about is short. The next thing is kind of talking.
Leo: A little about the side map. That's actually where my thoughts are. I want to throw a wrench in this site map for us to discuss. Is it too much to say that your primary product offering is marketing strategy and then the packages as you're kind of having them and more of your capabilities. Is that two different from your brand right now?
Chris: I think what's interesting is like right.
Leo: I'm on our solutions page right now. It's very strategy and package forward but we've also been throwing around the whole concept of like new clients come to us looking for for one specific project type and that's how they first interact with us. Okay. And I feel like right now our site's not really doing a lot of work to like surface, just general capabilities in a very simple like one click away type of way. That's just what I'm hearing in the room right now and kind of mapping to what I'm seeing on the site.
Lydia: The interesting thing that I will say is like even if we have, I want us to be careful of thinking that the website only serves for new clients that have know nothing about us or whatever. Because that's not necessarily the case because we have had few people who have come to us as a referral or however that comes through and they'll say I checked out your website. I mean we've had multiple people say to us, I love that you're putting like that you've put together packages and you got me thinking beyond that. So I just was like, sorry, like when you just said that, I'm like, wait a second. We have had people who are new clients but they didn't come through like Google SEO, but they still go to the website to be like, okay. Joe Schmo told Me, I should reach out to consume media. I'm gonna go check out consumed media and by presenting it as a sort of solution, forward. Hey, you have a goal. We have a strategy for you that very much mimics how B2B SaaS companies sell and where. I think that. I think that's important. Yeah.
Leo: So I think we're missing like a higher level. Just like the super simple thesis of these are the three offerings. Like, there are strategies, there are packages, there are projects. Like, what are you here for? Like that. Just one layer, I think is, again, I look at our site map, I do not think the way it's positioned is correct. I think the way it's positioned is how it's built, but I don't think it's correct. I don't have the right answer, but I have, like, again, I'll repeat myself just to further emphasize the reason why these packages in this column are built the way they are. Because they were developed most recently. That's it. That's the reason. So when I say packages, is it like iClaw, business owner come to you see the packages, and then when we hop on a call, you guys are offering a package to them that I saw on the website.
Lydia: Or is it so, like, so typically, like, let's say like, you came and you look at our packages and you're like, okay, what's this prospect conversion package? It just sort of, you'll go to the package details, there's some information, the objective for this package. And then basically the strategy is like, this is what the package includes. And we don't have like quantities and pricing, but it's like an animated explainer feature series. There's a little pitch, there's an example, and then there's more videos, customer testimonial, product demo, remarketing ads. And like, this is a client who, you know, customer testimonial, blah, blah, blah, Book a meeting. And so, so you may come and say, hey, yeah, I was looking at your website. I'm really interested in the profit conversion package. Like, these are the building blocks of that package. But we still. And like, we have sort of internally foundational, sort of like packages. But again, like, I pull up a creative brief, I'll put together and I'll customize it based off of the discovery that we have with you. If you're like, hey, I really like this. But like, we don't need a product demo. We already have one. Great, take it off. Right? Things like that. Yeah. Lando, when prospects are coming to you guys, how do they Usually speak. Do they say I'm interested in converting more prospects or we need more brand awareness or do they come to you saying we want a brand video or we want a testimonial? They talk about that. The single video first. We then through discovery will say, okay, you're telling, we're hearing that you want to customer testimonials. What is your goal with those videos? And typically they will say, oh, we want to provide authenticity and proof of concept and da da da. So that our pipeline converts. And we're like, okay, so you're wanting to convert. Like we kind of guide them into that type of language. That's what I, that's what I thought. And so while I do think it's great and important because it shows we have a strategy mindset to have this page exist on here, I do think it needs, I mean I understand that if you click on work you can see all the types of videos. But if I was looking on our website as a prospect, I would find the solutions, especially the a lot of the solutions page just kind of like not matching what I am looking for in my brain.
Leo: It's not like a shopping experience.
Lydia: Yeah. So I would end up, yeah. And so I would end up going to work the work page and being like, oh, here's what all they do. Okay, cool, I hear you. Yeah. And then because we do guide them based off of what they want, but that's not how they're coming.
Leo: Yeah. And like think of just like e commerce strategy in general. Like obviously we're not an impulse purchase, like we're not Apple. But like you think about the way they structure information on their sites. Like you go to the shop and it shows you the categories of things and then you dig in one more level. It's not like dropping you into the iPhones, it's dropping you into the shop.
Chris: What are all the things you want?
Lydia: Purchase this package. You get an iPhone, a case, an Apple watch.
Chris: Exactly.
Lydia: So it's like I just want AirPods.
Leo: Right. It's like I don't see these one higher level page that's just like three boxes that like I can shop by project type, I can shop by packages, slash strategies, whatever you want to call it. But it's just like one layer that I feel like is missing here.
Lydia: Let me offer another option. What if the kind of goal based approach lived under a subset of about, Because I think about is multiple things. About is, you know, the current about page where it's us, our team. But then there's also kind of an about section that could live there. That's more like. We're not just video. We also give you this creative strategy and like here's how we approach that so that that information still lives on our website but it's in a different way. That way. I don't know if it would. I hear what you're saying. Okay, I was gonna say I hear what you're saying. I don't know, putting it under the. I don't know if I was coming to his website. I would know to go to about or hover over about to see that information. When I think of about, I think of like our story, our team, press releases, like like that kind of stuff. That's fine. Yeah, no, like awards, things like that. I hear you but I like the idea because again like I'm trying to find like there's a. Some times there are B2B Saskams. I'm trying to find a website that I'll look for one where the top like your top navigation kind of gives you those options like do you want to search by industry? Like are you in B2B SaaS? And you want to click this and we're going to take you on this experience or do you want to shop by project type or do you want to shop by solutions? I know, I know.
Leo: I think we should aim for simplicity.
Lydia: So I'm not saying that it has to necessarily be that way. But my point is.
Leo: What do you have a menu monster?
Chris: I don't. Is that a thing? Oh, you know when you see it like this. Oh, I've heard mini monsters like.
Lydia: Like you open up a menu and you're like what the.
Chris: I think it's like oh one 101 menu.
Lydia: So then, then that's another menu. Like we do not want to develop into that.
Chris: So those are technically called mega menus and I loathe them with all of my being. Unless you are an enterprise level where you actually have. Which. Yeah, exactly.
Leo: Yes. So I feel like I'm not have.
Lydia: To be like that. But my point is like choose your own adventure. Like how do you want to shop?
Leo: I really like Michael's line of thinking where I want there to be all of these things. Packages, video types should live and one spot that you can go on your own journey. I agree. I think we could get our navigation to the point where there is no drop down menu.
Chris: And that's exactly where I like to start.
Leo: Are we all right?
Chris: Yeah. So the meeting that I had got canceled in between that was part of the Reason why we broke it up is because I had a meeting at 11:30 or something. But yes, we are on time. We have a 45 minute break and I was planning on getting Chick Fil A, but. Great, those times. I want to percolate a little bit on what the actual navigation items are going to be. I think we're all kind of in one accord in terms of every service needs to have its own page, its own unique call to action. It needs to be very simple to where the primary things that you're selling are right there on the navigation bar. Which of those are going to live there and how that's going to live. I just want to chat about that for a little bit together. But at minimum, if we decide to do dropdowns, it'll be very similar to what you have now in terms of just a single dropdown of like two or three items and that's it. So do you have any other site mapping thoughts and questions or do you feel like we have enough for right now?
Leo: Oh, I'm just ready to brainstorm and think through it. Yeah. Are we doing that together privately or.
Chris: Well, if you want to go, we'll go grab Chick Fil A and we'll do that. We can talk a little bit more about that, though. The last thing before 11, which is when our scheduled stop time is. I wanted to kind of walk through wireframes with you guys. So that'll leave kind of design inspiration for the second half. So before I open these up, what I did is wireframes are like storyboards. It's how I wanted to kind of walk through the five core pages of. In general, how do we want to tell the story? Going down the page now, you're going to see little building blocks and stuff.
Leo: Sorry. There are some ideas on the table that may change those core pages. Yes. So I wonder if we should hold off on that until we talk through what the core pages should be.
Chris: Well, do we want to go ahead and break now then for a few. And we just start. Are you all able to start a little bit earlier? I think we have like 12:30 on the calendar. Y' all are open. Okay, well, why don't we go ahead and break now?
Lydia: Yeah, we actually had this going to 10:45 and then the next one starting at 11:30.
Chris: Oh, perfect. Okay, cool. Then my mental math was all completely.
Lydia: Wrong, but again, I'm good.
Chris: You're good?
Leo: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, sweet. Let's go ahead and do this. Let's go ahead and I'm just going to pass around my phone for Chick Fil A. We won't actually go get it right now, but let's go ahead and piece your. Yay.
Lydia: Start pickup order.
Leo: Carry on. Do y' all want it to feel like a shopping experience? I just, I think it needs to be.
Chris: Approachable and I think define approachable.
Leo: It starts high level and then it gets into the weeds. I think we jump straight into the weeds a little bit on some of this. Like this page is useful, the solutions page. But like, is that the first layer people should see when they come in or should it be? Again, I'm thinking more of a shopping experience. You know, there's like, what's the new product? We're talking about innovation in our business, wanting to have new product offerings. Like having like something at the top page that's like a featured product and it's like, oh, we have interactive now. And it's like something that feels like it's alive, like a store, but then having something just like very easy to digest of like, oh, they do all these kinds of videos but they also do these bundles and these strategies. Like I think right now it's just like straight into the strategies. A lot of text on the page. It's a lot to consume and promise process.
Lydia: I also think that what you're saying matches better the way the customer is thinking.
Leo: That's what I'm trying to think about. What is the customer who's coming to our site for the first time? What do they want to see? What do we want them to do?
Lydia: And I agree because I think what I was saying too, like if someone's been referred to us by someone and they are then they are going to click around. They will find like they will get to the solutions page because maybe they're know they're a B2B SaaS person and they're going to be like $50,000 marketing.
Chris: Budget, we need to spend.
Lydia: And so when they see that strategy part they're like, it still accomplishes the same thing. But I think to Leo's point, the way it's built right now in the hierarchy is literally a recency bias. Like goal based strategy is the top one. Because that's the first thing we did at the beginning of last year, I think. And then next gen thought leadership was next and then interactive video is next and organic social connect. And so that's how we just did it. We weren't thinking about the actual like high level zoom in. It was. And so I agree. And Lando, you're so right. Like when you talked about, like, if I'm just showing up and I'm like, I want, I want to see this company could do a testimonial. Like if I go to Solutions and I'm like, huh? Like I'm going to go to gold based strategies. Okay. I have to scroll quite a bit and read quite a bit to even see the word testimonial or click another thing or I've got to go to work and like, there you'll see testimonials. Okay? They can do testimonials and maybe people are doing. That's probably what they're doing now because they have to.
Chris: Based on what you've said, what you all said in the past is that people are coming to you in general with the idea of what type of video they want. So we need to get them to that page quickly and then also show them other things that, that could dovetail off of that.
Lydia: Yeah, it's very rare that they're showing up being like, we have 100k tell us what to buy.
Chris: Yeah, nobody, everybody wants that, but nobody. That's the truth. But those are also referral clients. Those are people via email, more than likely.
Leo: One other thing that we've only mentioned once and it may or may not have a home on our website, but it does help, at least everyone, help everyone in our room understand part of our story, which is that we like, yes. We have in the presentation I showed you, there was a video marketing synergy, right? There was the attract, engage, delight, which is one way that we think about video. And there was authentic cinematic and animated. Right. And I think both of those levels are important in some way. Whether, like, because I'm just like, I'm.
Chris: Just like, I totally didn't show him that video, which is 100% my fault.
Leo: Let me finish. I like your idea. You like it. Okay, So it's like, all right, what's the first text you read on our video skills? There's video skills and then there's marketing brains. Yeah, I like this. Like those are the two things. Video skills leads into project types. Like we can do it any. We can do anything. We. One of our uniques is we're full service video marketing agents. We have the experts do any video, video skills, marketing brains, we have packages, strategies, all that stuff.
Chris: Stuff flywheel.
Leo: Like that is. That is what we're trying to get at here.
Chris: That's actually.
Leo: Exciting, right?
Chris: Like, that's actually not a bad sentence. I say that that way because.
Lydia: What's this sentence?
Chris: Yeah, that's the Video skills, power of marketing brains. Because so many people. Please don't back. Yeah, Michael. Michael. Most people have like page headline text that's like videos that convert will convert what Videos that will improve your sales team's roi. I mean, is it true at its like, could it be true? Yes, but the ROI is dependent on them utilizing your thing in a good way.
Lydia: Yeah. And our services at the time stop at distribute. Like we don't help with paid media buys or things like that. So we can't actually. We can give you a great piece of content but. And then if you just put it buried on a page on your website, like. Yeah, we can't control that.
Chris: So. Which is why I like the sentence. It's video skills powered by marketing brains. It covers the video element and it covers the strategic element. So you know exactly what you do. But the thing is right now that's below, you have to scroll to see that. So one of the design changes that we're going to be making is that in your like hero sections there will be fixed especially on the homepage so that you know what it is you're getting into ahead of time with. With an actual cta. I was going to go somewhere else with that.
Leo: We. Our previous version of the homepage had that and then I forget what was the. Who did the full audit? Jeff. John.
Chris: John, the guy that has his own custom built cms. Yeah, he worked on your.
Leo: He gave us feedback on our homepage.
Lydia: On our original homepage. Before we did this. Before we did this.
Leo: One of his notes is like, get the text off.
Lydia: Because we had. So originally we had a video that was playing and it had the video skills powered by marketing brains thing. And he was like, no, like it should just be the video.
Chris: I understand the heart behind it, but I. Because your company name does not say anything about video. It says consume media. Yeah, but media is.
Leo: I think his whole thing was like.
Chris: If you just see the video, you know that's true. But you don't rely. You can't rely on imagery to prove your point. Imagery is always secondary to words.
Lydia: Hey. Hey. We were lying to prove points or anything. What was your agency that we saw that was like that we kind of.
Leo: I don't know, there are a few sites. So I just want to say two more things kind of on the note that I was on before.
Chris: Yeah, we have.
Leo: Right now. No, right now. Again, I don't know if this is important to me, if this is important in the sales or if this is valuable on the marketing. On the website is that we don't say anything about the authentic cinematic animated anywhere on the website. This leads me in two different directions. Either A, well, I'll tell you the thing that makes more sense to me is like once you go to a project, you land on a testimonial, you can see see more authentic videos and see more prospect conversion pieces of content, depending on what you're looking at could make sense. Alternatively, are there pages that explain what authentic cinematic and animated is similar? And I know we'll change it to like how we have these pages for prospect conversion, brand awareness, yada yada yada.
Lydia: Can I ask you what the purpose of that would be to explain authentic content? What would that do?
Leo: So in sales, aside from aligning with your sales like Burbage, in our presentations, it helps. Usually when people think about video, they often come to you thinking about one type of video. Like they're thinking about video, they're thinking about testimonials, or they're thinking about a commercial, or they're thinking about an anime. Right. What that allows you to do is A, show them the breadth of your offering, but B, show you what is possible within each line of video.
Lydia: So let me ask a question to you guys, the website experts. Is that important to explain that to them at a website level, or is it okay to more have that be something that's explained in sales? Because for me, the authentic video is a term that we've kind of created. And so I think it makes a lot of sense in our sales presentations. But if I'm looking at a website for video, like, I don't know what that means because it means nothing to me. And I get that you can have a webpage that explains that, but what does that do more than having a video type section that shows you all the video types?
Chris: So I'm going to give you an outlandish example and then pull it back into something that's a little more realistic. We had a client one time where we only did development for. It was a parent company. Oh, I'm actually learning their thing. And they had three products. One was called Unique, spelled Y O U, Neek. The other was called Denominee. The last letters are M, E, E. And then the other was called Pivot, P, I, V, V, O, T. And to this day, I still spelled Pivot with two V's. And my phone thinks it's correct and it's bothersome. What does that company do?
Leo: You have to guess Unique, Pivot and Denominate. They do consulting.
Chris: Yeah, consulting. Okay. They. So they do consulting and they consult with churches, denominations and individual people. So individual people helping them figure out their whys. Pivot is at the church level, Denominate is at the like massive, like denominational level. And shocker. Every time we didn't help on sales, but we talked to people who did sales, they were all frustrated because they had to explain what these freaking products were. Nobody in their menu of services, it said pivot, denominate and unique rather than self study, church study, denominational study, whatever it is. Anyway, so that is obviously different than what we're talking about here. These are a lot more clear than that. But so at the end of the day, to answer your question is, I want to make sure that the links and the headlines on your site clearly say what it is that you do. The other layer, what Leo, what you're talking about is kind of that stylization, kind of that like the angle that you take, whether you go authentic, whether you animated. I don't think you need to showcase these like two circles that are interchanged, like not interchange but concentric circles and then do a deep dive explanation on why you do all this. That and the other. I think that it is when you're doing a test, when you're on the testimonials page, how do these three styles interact with it? How do we showcase authenticity? How do we showcase animation? How do we showcase cinematic? Obviously with testimonials going to be more on the authentic side than the other two. But the other products that you have could utilize aspects of each of those. And I think you subtly showcase those of like here's some different fields for how we can go about doing it and you can use those words, but I don't necessarily think showing the concentric circles to a new time buyer. Who knows. I want a testimonial video matters to showcase the wheel. I think it's showcasing them, the thoughts that they're having.
Leo: All right, here's my takeaway. You get it? Cool. Great.
Chris: I do use a lot of words to explain the things that I.
Lydia: Does this feel like what you were saying, Michael? We have one video solutions page and then we have some kind of sections, maybe at the top one is video types. And per our country, we just have. I don't think it should be like that. I think it should be more like this. And then we have the goal based strategies, which is where we have these, the brand awareness, prospect, etc. And then new product offerings and then we list them. I don't know. I don't know if we should have sections for each of those or just. But overall, do you guys feel like this is right?
Leo: I think the new product offerings is up for discussion in my opinion. I agree. I think next gen, we call it this now. That's how we market it. At the end of the day, we're going to replace our legacy. We're replacing our legacy thought leadership offering with next gen thought leadership. This was a repositioning to new and existing clients. Right. OSAs, obviously we've talked about like what's the future of that and how we market it. That's a question mark. Interactive is the one that is most unique.
Lydia: So my and Leito, I like how you have this. The only thing that I would say also is like when does a new product no longer be a new product? Because yeah, like we've been calling it that sections.
Chris: Let me back up one second.
Lydia: Yes.
Chris: Nobody cares whether a product is new or old. So we're not going to have a section that says new product offerings.
Lydia: And so I think it helps like in sales when we can go to someone and say, hey, we have a new product 100% boom. But on the website it doesn't matter.
Chris: Even if on that page you wanted to highlight like once they got to thought leadership, this is new.
Lydia: I had a little new banner like.
Chris: That wouldn't be the end of the world, but nobody is going to like, I reproductize all the stuff. I mean on the homepage you saw the three packages and stuff like that. That's new, but it's the same.
Lydia: Ooh, that's interesting. Michael Video Skill Marketing brain.
Leo: Our solutions page is some sort of place where you can advertise something that's interactive video like you can pay for a little bit. There's three things. We can click through it and see each of these things, but I don't think they have their. I think they belong in a bucket.
Lydia: Yeah. Because those are technically video types.
Chris: Okay.
Lydia: That includes. But I, I. So we think it should be video solutions and then it's got these two sections.
Chris: I'm curious something, something akin to that. I'm not going to say yay or nay to that exactly. But in general the division of here's the services, like the actual product products we have. And here's our more strategic side having a division there. Yes. How that portrays inside the navigation. Not going to say yes or no.
Lydia: Yeah, absolutely. I think we, I think people. Absolutely. I'm curious what, what you sort of land on what you think, but I like the Because I always thought about it too. I was thinking about this too. Like we have this great sentence, right? This video skills powered by marketing brains. And like that has been like one of our taglines since the beginning maybe or for a very long time. So what I, what I love is the potential. I'm not saying that it's the only thing of that following that theme, following through a little bit like, hey, we told you that we're video skills powered by marketing brains. Here are video skills. Here are marketing brains. And maybe like that's the extent of it. You don't want to belabor the, you don't want it to like get too much where you're like, okay, we fucking get it. But like, you know, you say it one time and then you never see those words ever again. Video skills, marketing brains. I feel like there's something cool there. That's what Michael.
Leo: I also like video skills that marketing brings. But the problem is that out of our four solutions, only one of them directly correlates with marketing. Brand awareness. Prospect, abortion is marketing and sales. Customer success is success. Onboarding and employer branding is talent.
Lydia: Videos still powered by strategic brains.
Leo: The reason why we have video skills marketing brains because the industry is called video marketing. I've kind of done this whole soul searching internally which I haven't launched to the world. But like it's, it's less about video. I think the term video marketing is outdated. I think the term I've come up with is video connection because then you're connecting with people whether they're prospects or people in your pipeline or customers or people you are recruiting. Right. How does that translate? I don't know. But that's why it's video skills marketing brain because that's the name of the industry which I believe is outdated. I've always thought of the marketing brains element of being about us, thinking about strategies, not so much thinking about packages are marketing packages.
Chris: So my, my gut says that your video types are all different products that you have. Marketing brains is more just a, possibly a page that's just talking about how you think strategically and how do you combine these things together rather than having product offerings underneath that. That's my, that's my initial gut reaction. Not holding onto that with a fist, but.
Lydia: Interesting because it's like our marketing from our marketing brains birthed the gold based, the goal based strategies. Like because we were like thinking beyond a single video to just create and put on your about us page on your website. We wanted to. So I, we've had this conversation Like, I hear you, and I agree with you too, but I think that's a whole nother, like, re messaging of the. Of the company, which is fine, and we should do it at some point, I'm sure. But what's. What's necessary for now to get this website stood up?
Chris: We have all time out here.
Lydia: Yeah.
Chris: Do you feel like we have enough information from this right now? Okay. All right, so I went ahead and placed the Chick Fil A order. We'll go ahead and go grab that now, bring it back, and we'll probably jam together, he and I, for another, like, 15, 20 minutes after we get back.
Lydia: For what it's worth, I found a screen grab of our. What our website for a little while looked like, which was a video playing in the background, and then this on top. And then we had buttons to, like, play the video that you're watching, then play, like, a different reel. And that's what we were. This is from, like, 2024. This is what I found. I was like. I was like, I know we have somewhere what it was. And then we received feedback that it should be just the video and that this should go down. But I also hear what you're saying, too, and we're not showing. Yeah, but just. I know we're pal drinking, but I want to show that.
Chris: Nope, that's perfect. All right.