Episode 24 · 36:20
Our marketing strategies
After twenty-four weeks of publishing, Dan and Tom review the marketing experiments behind the podcast, Welsh projects and their individual work. They look at thumbnails, recurring jokes, collaborations and the difference between activity and a strategy that can be measured.
The useful question is not ‘are we marketing?’ but ‘what do we now understand about who returns, what they remember and why they share?’
The useful bits
What to take with you
- Review a marketing experiment against one clear behaviour you wanted to change.
- Recurring formats and in-jokes can create belonging when new viewers are still given a way in.
- Packaging earns the click; the content must fulfil the same promise.
- Consistency creates enough evidence to distinguish a pattern from a lucky spike.
Watch the conversation
The original episode.
Full conversation
Transcript
Transcript generated from YouTube captions. Dan/Tom speaker attribution is AI-assisted and may occasionally be incorrect.
[Music] don't believe [Music] you know I realized when it comes to that so it counts you down five seconds I'm not looking at my screen I was hoping that it'd have some like or like some sort of beep or something when you start but it doesn't so um that's one thing that we'll have to adjust for later welcome to don't be a dust up thanks so much for joining as always and giving us um 40 minutes of your time uh.
We really really appreciate it if this is your first video Welcome we've got a catalog of we've got a library of in-jokes and insights for you to enjoy so we've now come up to episode 22. is that right well we're now on episode 22. and um today we're just going to give you a bit of an overview of what we've been doing in the background with some of our like efforts I guess across board and um I was just telling Tom one um one podcast.
I saw they have like these Cubes at the bottom of their microphones and they have the the logo of the actual brand on the bottom of a cube which stands at the bottom of the mic so then you can um it says looking at all the cables and also looking at the brand of the mic because you could utilize that as a space because chances are it's going to be in the shot at some point anyway because I.
Was thinking can you brand too is it the muffler or whatever but I can imagine that being away yeah this is a yeah but even if you go like color schemed it because I'm not sure you know the um Elgato people they've started to do like pink equipment um so you have like pink microphones and stuff so if you could have it like color tinted then it would then it'd make sense to have that and then you know.
Even if you sprayed uh because it's just like sponge right you'd have to be careful the way that you do it but yeah sprayed a little logo onto it in the in the part that you're not chatting into then that would work fine so why don't we um why don't we update uh did I just do the Subscribe thing yeah if if this is your first video you've got a library of stuff to enjoy if this is your second video and.
You've not subscribed or if this is more than your second video one we really appreciate that you keep coming back and watching um and two if you've not subscribed please do uh we really appreciate it so subscribing on YouTube or favoriting or liking or following on on Spotify really appreciate it and we'd love to get your rating so I think in Spotify if you happen to be listening or watching as in Spotify then you can give us a five star.
Rating and if it's any less then we'll be bringing the hammer that Tom has in the back of his shot over to a a nearby uh nearby uh location of our choice yeah apple Budget on set design right here um budget yeah zero pounds the the laborer the put up the Shelf has accidentally left the hammer there coincidentally coincidentally for us hanging quite nice I'm half expecting it to fall down at any moment just to frighten me but that might that might be.
Uh entertainment nonetheless this is where we find out that the person that used the hammer to put it put it up the Shelf has not hammered it um like enough to keep it in the wall something slightly heavier than a usual you know plant or whatever it is as well so plus I don't know if you've noticed I'm actually standing up I've got my standing desk on because I thought oh my thought process is it has to be.
Entertaining enough for me to stay on my feet when my when I want to sit down then we should probably close the podcast all right and if you're slowly lowering slowly going down that it totally means we should cut it because we need to be full of entertainment whatever the regards plus I've got more space to do gestures yeah gesticulating yeah I'm actually sat in a grandad chair so um it's really really comfortable so for me if I start falling asleep it'll be a.
Sign that we probably need to cut the podcast because I'm not looking at you directly so it's one of those things but anyway let's let's talk about let's recap so let's recap the whole thing we started this podcast because we basically were frustrated with the fact that we hadn't um shared some of the things that were kind of like irritating as I'm also say it for myself right I wanted to share some stuff and wanted to get some.
Information now when basically nobody's inviting you to the table so we built our own table AKA this podcast which is don't be a door stop which is all about purpose is about mindset it's about business and um everything else in between and as you've noticed Tom and I have been iterating the whole entire time so sometimes we get good good quality Equipment and we forget to use the good quality Equipment because we don't choose our sound settings but generally.
Speaking you've seen um we've predominantly started with documenting um and then we've gone into some creation modes where we've specifically created some but as you have you seen we've basically now collated 22 weeks worth of content um whereas somebody might be listening to this and watching this and be like I wish I had started or I wish I had done it because if you just do one a week you now have 21 episodes you have 22 Episodes that's like a full series now.
Of course there's downsides there's like down times there's up times there's moments where you don't feel inspired um to do it but I'm super proud that we've done it for like 21 weeks solidly with the iterations of figuring out one the execution of looking to a camera and speaking to a camera without seeing each other and getting the mic levels right and all sorts of stuff and getting better quality video um as well as the the content and the.
Way that I've noticed as I'm speaking to someone I basically am trying to visualize who you guys are and visualize one particular individual um that needs that kind of like five percent extra especially if you're sitting on the toilet room podcast we've caught you especially if you're watching it as well you're taking a dump we're watching you right now yeah feel guilty feel guilty um I love it so hopefully we've encouraged me five years time when someone listens to this and someone sat.
On the toilet they're like they're speaking to me that's why you should always drop in a random scenario each week for someone to be clocked in the future it's sort of like leaving a cat yeah or unlike burying it in sand and letting someone find in the future that's why it is a library of in-jokes and a library of like encounters funny Encounters of of some sorts as well while you're driving along in your car and you in traffic right now or you're.
Driving along in your hoverboard in your spaceship right now but the futuristic views of our podcast as well and yeah Tom wanted to share a little bit about like what he's been doing on the marketing side um because obviously as you saw as well at the very beginning we were just focusing on just doing it in the sense of just getting one episode every week we didn't really focus on um splitting it and um clipping it into short spots so it'd be cool for Tom you.
To share your side and and maybe your perspective of what you've seen happen over the weeks that we've done our part yeah I'll go ahead so at the start we were just recording um roughly 30 minutes long posting it on Wednesdays but then as time went on we were thinking actually it'd be really good because we hear a lot about social media clipping it and what I mean by clipping it is basically taking out sections that are 30 seconds a minute.
Maybe up to three minutes I think Tick Tock can do um and posting it on Tick Tock uh YouTube shorts Instagram reels and then we've started doing LinkedIn and Twitter also so it's any way of communicating this podcast that might be useful for anyone that is out there taking small Snippets that people might like come across stumble into get to know the content get to know us and then if they want to listen great they could come and check out other content if it's.
Just that one tweet that's encouraged them to go and create a book or get frustrated or maybe even buy a hammer to hang up as decoration then it's that small element of encouragement um putting it out there in small Snippets so what we've done is gone from doing no shorts which I think we were doing twice a week we were doing Tuesday Thursday and then doing the main podcast on Wednesday and but then we increased it to four times a week so not four to.
Slash five so we'll tend to do it Monday to Friday um depending on we may or may not do it on Wednesday and then we're looking to potentially because it's what do you say well week 23 or 24 episodes yeah just on the shorts alone I've only reached episode two I'm still finishing off episode two because there's so much content that you can take into small Snippets of minute Longs that's my sort of Target and these are and these are almost just sentences or.
Ideas encapsulated ideas isn't it do you want to say about the app that you tried with that would automatically split I would talk about that I can't remember what it's called so there is an app wasn't good enough basically um it doesn't work with my brain but it will work better for people that don't care about marketing as much but just need to do something so it's an AI driven cutting and incorporating captions so you'd put your main video in and then it would.
Basically do all the hard work for you the frustrating thing I found it was very limited with what um templates you can do I don't know if there's like a A plus version that you can pay more money that maybe you could add your own branding to but it was very strict in a certain way and it wouldn't tell you where it's cropped it from so if you don't have any time to do shorts it is perfect because you could just do.
A very basic one crop it from your main content and then just focus on your main content but I know I've got and that was free right yes that was very free to run the first yeah that was free um but because I'm going through sort of with a toothpick going clipping out as much as I can to distribute more more stuff out there so people will come across it they might like it and then go to our longer form videos I held off.
Doing that because it wouldn't tell me if it was minute one or ten so then I'd have to scour it through and know um have I already posted it or not and the change in the sort of The Branding side and I think that's probably my background of a the analness in me that likes to be very process driven but also I think the marketing brain in me of having two separate sort of uh languages is probably the best way.
Of putting it going across to different people that I want people just to dance at the blue and then dance at our faces and recognize what what it's about so if we want to do anything in the future we might change a color call it something different and then you might associate it with a certain what we're doing um in that environment or or topic so yeah so that's what we've been doing and then we've been exploring by creating.
Um pushing I think just the the BIOS the linking up each account the descriptions the covers and just exploring of what is working and what isn't and what gets cropped and what doesn't particularly with the covers and looking at what is engaging and what isn't so it's fascinating just by being consistent early doors you'd have low figures low figures and then you just get a rocket up so then you try and work out is it just by random or is it consistent and.
Then I noticed on one time that we added quite a lot of branding and barrier um borders and stuff like that and it actually the vid the the the short didn't do as well as a lot of the others that didn't have a border so I was like this could be a one-off but there's no point gambling doing it if it's going to be constantly bad there's no point doing that I might as well just lean towards the one that is.
Working well with the algorithm because at the end of the day it's sort of like there's two tatango it's you and the algorithm working it out if you're doing a a bad step in that rhythm of a dance you're not gonna keep doing it to see is it that like can I do it or not you're like well why don't I just do the other thing that is working um because at the end of the day yeah you've scored more points but yeah and.
It is really interesting just seeing I think we've had on all our content just on YouTube alone we've had about 5 000 views on things so we've talked up I think a mental space of 56 hours in people's brains which is cool and actually 97 of it is actually from shorts so actually even though you're just doing one minute it's that one minute reaches let's say 300 views and they're watching that say all of it that's 300 minutes but you could create.
A one video 30 minutes but only one person watched the whole thing or let's say only one person watch it that's 30 minutes you miss out on those 300 minutes that has taken up people's affecting people's lives hopefully for the positive through encouragements and stuff like that and actually if you're wanting to start podcast but you don't know where to begin or how to do it maybe you could just focus your podcast on creating just short form content of podcasts for a.
Minute long or three minutes I think you could go up to with Tick Tock that you can literally have a conversation with someone or talking to the camera for 30 seconds and actually that might be enough for you for your your itch the thing that's scratching away in your brain or in your heart that you want to get across to people actually 30 seconds might be perfect and then if it the point is just getting your content out.
There obviously being viral or not should be secondary but for some people it might be their main aim and that's okay but actually if you've got a story that's worth sharing or something powerful that will Empower people and encourage people especially with like the living crisis and stuff going on and wars and things like this that's constantly on people's brains because um sort of old four media of news and stuff like that actually it's worth just getting out.
There because that 30 seconds let's say it goes viral to 1 million people I'm not even going to bother doing the math of how many hours or minutes that is comment down here it was like I I came across a tick tock and a guy basically said he deliberately did maths incorrectly just basically for everyone to comment what is the correct thing it was like oh yeah um two times ten is um 22 and he basically left it like that so.
It basically have so much comments going no that's 20. no that's 20. you're an idiot that's 20 and he's like who's the idiot you're the one commenting and viewing it so it's like it's all about engagement right very funny even um it's um it's funny because typically when you do a video if two people agree it's not necessarily going to get the same views as if um we disagreed with each other and taking like the opposite side or being a.
Bit more not harsh but like a bit more like no I don't believe that it's completely the other way and it's this is this and I I think people like people like controversy people like a little bit of the two-size disagreement because then you're figuring out do you agree with Tom or do you agree with Dan and then the whole um we've referred to this before you know when you see ads for computer games and um it's typically.
Mobile games and they're doing it incorrectly or they're trying to trace a pattern and they trace it incorrectly I think there's an there's a kind of something inside of us that makes us want to be right to accept and correct people and be better than other people so can you cultivate something like that inside of your videos all in the name of game playing and engagement which I think is very very clever so yeah saying something like an incorrect.
Um maths question or or a a disagreement of some sorts is a clever way of of doing it and this is where you say I disagree uh what I was daydreaming about because I don't have the screen on so I'm just like just listening to you and staring at a camera um is even if you wanted to create a book with spelling errors at the end of the day if you're helping people recognize spelling errors you're teaching them to review their own.
Content especially when it comes to if you go to university and do dissertations or assignments it doesn't have to be perfect because actually you might build on a different type of skill and use work yeah these answers can still be at the back couldn't they yeah because because then you turn things into a game we all we all recognize that any sort of gamification or quizifying as in creating something into a quiz always makes the engagement higher especially when it comes to personality.
Tests or something like that and I think I heard somewhere that if you have a quiz um and it has you know numbers of questions like rounds of questions if people have gone past number three you've basically got them for however long the quizzes so if they've let's say you had 20 questions the people that have answered three questions the there's a very high percentage that loads of those people now that have got to the third question will finish the.
Quiz no matter how long the quiz is now of course you're going to get drop off after question one yeah you're gonna get drop off after question two you're gonna get drop off after question three but the large proportion of people that are with you at question three will end up finishing it because there's the Intrigue and the um the wanting to figure out what's going to come through yeah they do this with like personality tests so what celebrity do you look like.
Or um what personality um characteristics do you have that kind of will mean that you're an animal or a dog or a or a fish or a whatever whatever um which I think is a clever way of doing things as well yeah it's really interesting because I was just thinking about actually when I do the quiz a lot of the time if it's got a bar along the top and a percentage rather than steps I might do the one.
The first and second quest to see how long it's jumped across If the percentage jumped like 20 to reverse then I might continue if it's like one percent then I'm like this is going to be a long journey I'm not going to bother with this yeah so it's really interesting you know they're trying to hide how many steps you do actually people could figure it out from percentages of going actually this seems way too long just tell me if it's 20.
Stats yeah because then I know is it a minute per question then I can figure it out that way or 30 seconds or whatever and jumping on to some of the tech that we're using so we're still using um Riverside FM to do all this recording yeah we paid 20 quid a month so we could get rid of the The Branding that they had but if you had zero money at all you could do um either not in Riverside and do it.
Just manually or you could use Riverside for free and just have the logo on top of it and then the other thing that we use is something called kapwing I keep on calling it cap Wing this is k-a-p-w-i-n-g.com uh that's just like an online video editing tool there's another one called in sharp which you can use any editing tools the reason why we use kapwing is um because there's automatic caption generation and it's quite uh clever when it comes to cropping for.
Different platforms because it has templates to show you where are the icons and stuff that are going to be so you can make sure you cop you kind of crop or you move your animations and your captions out of the way the things are typically going to Overlay and very good as again you've probably seen yeah hundred percent as you've seen you've probably not really seen us do much captions initially but over time we're wanting to increase the accessibility of.
It to have captions baked into the videos as well as a lot of people watch videos muted right um so they kind of like read it and if they want to hear it they'll engage with it and click into it and because a lot of the time you're just going through your feed and as it is so if you're able to get something that automatically does it and cappling does or coupling does um that's we've used that and I think those.
Are the only two real like Staples that are in our Arsenal really except obviously the equipment but I would even say the equipment is a nice to have yeah because um again typically audio quality is far more the kind of the higher priority over video quality and so if you have a really good audio and a cruddy camera that's a better combination than a great camera but credit audio and actually we're starting if you have both of them that's great.
Too headphones Apple headphones were okay as well and I know we're on Macs and stuff but even if you're on a PC you've probably got a mobile phone that's probably better than you would yeah and um one thing that's been really cool shout out to Dave Logan so Dave if you're watching us um we really really love watching your Vlogs that you're doing about your photography journey and he's just recording on his phone just short Snippets of like literally what is.
Happening or what has happened this week so you don't necessarily need to come up with a topic and have a bit of a discussion and two sides and storytelling on all that stuff from a Grandeur perspective it can be just storytelling of the week gone by so keep up the good work Dave we see what you're doing and um you'll also have a catalog of um in jokes and bands and stories um in no time as well because it's just the.
Conviction of doing it every week two weeks every month or something like that really yeah and I think one other thing is is finding out what your technical technology can do and seeing how well you can push it because I noticed I think in the last um Apple update I recognize that you can link up your I phone with your Mac which basically means that you're using an iPhone's camera instead of your max camera so the Mac camera is 720 but the iPhones can.
Get up to 4K so it's recognizing actually you might have technology you just need to learn about the software and how much you can push it because there might be things out there that saves you buying a really high-end camera or a better webcam actually that webcam will be in your pocket so it's looking to explore the things around you and how can you push forward yeah the best getting the most and another thing as well is we don't.
Edit anything so we press record we play the whole thing through and then that is it so we just um kind of top up Tom Thompson Tails it um but we're not overly editing what we're saying yeah we predominantly because it's just to prove to people just yeah and also then people are like my headphones broken my internet's dead or something as well so yeah we don't cut it out which again makes it much much easier now there's a.
Balance with all this stuff as you know we've kind of done it as like a self-focused journey um and it might be that other people might be mindful of like oh they didn't cut out their arms or their pauses and stuff which is not customer focusing right it's not um I wouldn't even say customer not like um follower or subscriber focused but in the first instance it's always going to be rough and ready and and quality can be iterated in.
Um and ultimately quality only matters if you couldn't even bother to be doing a a weekly video to begin with yeah um it reminds me of all the famous as YouTubers if you look back to their old videos they're a bit rough around the edges and that becomes a part of the journey a part of the story remember back when we were talking about um Bart Simpson the rough drawing of the first version of Bart Simpson is probably considered quite embarrassing.
Now um but we need that rough version to get to the Posh iterated rounded kind of like perfect or not even perfect but like just a better version of it as well um and it and it dips in amongst all of that as well um so I'd be like yeah if you've not started a podcast and you have something to say and you're not being invited to say it like even if you did it anonymously yeah with um with like um.
What they call memojis so apples like animated talking head even if you just created a talking head that it was like a cow or a dragon or something and started recording little little shorts under an anonymous um YouTube tag under an anonymous um Instagram handle or Anonymous Tick Tock and could be a place that you could start exploring and playing out something and all in the name of getting yourself out of the comfort zone and as you'll know that.
Tom and I are kind of in real time getting better hopefully especially with speaking yeah especially with public speaking the Dynamics between me and Tom the fact that we're not in the same room and all that stuff uh which is yeah just always encouraging to see so even if you look at the first one to now there's probably going to be something that you can say oh it's better and has improved um let alone the things that we're.
Consciously doing as well I think the final bit would be cool to chat about is just the chat ECP tag on with some of our descriptions and stuff do you want to show that sure we'll be sharing that in Welsh to keep the Pod short interesting part because we we haven't figured out how to do dual captions for the second part so maybe we'll just say it in English for this so what we would like to explore moving forward is using.
The power of AI I Know Dan has access to chat G TP um I do notion.ai that's the the stuff that I tend to use and it's looking to see if we can copy and paste the captions of a short and ask it to summarize them or maybe ask it to summarize it and then add a from a certain perspective so then hopefully yeah caption game will massively increase especially with me having this lecture I get quite nervous putting.
Captions and getting it incorrect um that's just something but that I've always sort of had along the way so I've tried to keep it as simple that I could just copy and paste a lot of the time save me having thinking power um and getting stuck at that hurdle every time so now we're sort of gonna explore what does it look like which actually CP and see what that how that affects the analytics of the shorts moving forward.
And I definitely think it's going to improve it because we've not really um improved the SEO of any of our videos so for example the titles of our videos are not burn heavily keyword focused and um well as in I'm saying um from a hardcore because we've not written out full descriptions with a bunch of keywords in that are matching the title keywords right um so we've gone pretty light on the keyword heavy approach so yeah having our titles um with the right keywords in.
And then matching it up with the description that have the keywords in um is all kind of rounding out as well as the posts that we post as well in whatever platform so we can design the prompt to say hey here's a summary of the like the one minute video summarize it for LinkedIn and then it gives a more business angle to it or summarize it um drawing out the uh the importance of you know um giving yourself a reward yeah as part.
Of your process you know so it always then gives an angle and I think chat GTP is something that is going to help just the refinement of of effort and um output because we're doing it anyway it's just refining and getting it just a little bit more polished so it's not as if we're you know writing Long blog articles with it yet um so yeah we're just using it in the smaller social areas um to help us out with some of the.
Production output yeah perfect time for us time for our sponsor Ed Bob deaths now with jobin dots across um stops um foreign then um um um Grenada have where the Cal pop Ethan padvice uh tree I'll just get through Beth edang life Florida and um vowel and a social media and a and a an uh editing little also so my Paw Patrol and Edge I I'll Summit a pod LED pod Legend a pod um dipping back of line.
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