Capacity Planning – How To Effectively Plan Your Workload

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Capacity Planning…If you ever feel like you have too much work to deliver and not enough time or resource, this episode will enable you to stop hating your life. Capacity Planning will allow you to identify;
1) If you have been given too much (or too little) work to do & give you data to present to your boss or
2) If the team you currently manage does (or doesn’t) have enough time to deliver the work you need to deliver.
Not only that, all of this capacity planning gives you advanced warning if you need to bring in extra resource OR if you have extra free time you can spend working ON your business. This capacity planning model was a game-changer for us.

Capacity Planning Timestamps

00:00 – 01:06 Intro
01:07 – 06:36 What is capacity planning?
06:37– 11:05 When Lloyd realized we needed to begin capacity planning.
11:06 – 20:12 What form can capacity planning take?
20:13 – 21:35 Tip 1: Stick to it (capacity planning).
21:36 – 24:20 Tip 2: Make sure you add ‘hidden time’ into your capacity planner.
21:21 – 25:32 Outro
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Capacity Planning Transcript

0:00 Pat

Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. In today’s episode Dan and Lloyd, talk about capacity planning and how to use them to maximise time efficiency, whether you’re a one-man band or a multimillion-pound corporate business.

00:13 Lloyd </p

So capacity planning allows you to actually work out the exact time you have in your business, traditionally it’s used for big businesses, I’ve found it crazily useful in our business that isn’t, doesn’t have 500 people.

00:25 Pat

And we’ll also hear about the structure of Lloyd’s own personal capacity tracker, and what it can do for you.


00:31 Lloyd

We do it, sounds old school when i say it, Excel spreadsheet, each person that you have to learn your business has a little square for every day, and that little square gets colour coded towards different projects or clients.

00:46 Pat
To set your learning brain to maximum capacity. And let’s get stuck in. This is episode 94 of the business anchors podcast.

01:07 Dan
What on earth is capacity planning? Lloyd it sounds really boring.

01:11 Lloyd
Well, you’re right, Dan, it is. That’s why I’m talking about it.

01:16 Dan
Why is it always you to talk about the boring episodes?

01:18 Lloyd
No, it’s not boring. It’s useful.

01:21 Dan
We were just saying actually before coming on air. I’ve always wanted to say that. That some of our more inverted commas boring episodes like this, where it’s more practical stuff. Have done well. Like we got half a million views on TikTok for our tax planning one obviously got 100,000 views on my Instagram about tax planning.

01:39 Lloyd
And big numbers like that really mean so much don’t they? Dan. It means that we are brilliant people. So…

01:46 Dan
Yeah, I mean, we’re reaching some of the more boring episodes. Yeah.

01:50 Lloyd
Got no money in the bank, unhappy. But half a million.

01:55 Dan
We’ve got an all right. Businesses.

01:57 Lloyd
Well, yeah. No, only joking. We’re happy and making money.

02:01 Dan
So yeah, to go to the question.

02:06 Lloyd
I’ll try to make it less boring by not talking about. I find this really interesting. So you want so it’s basically working out. If you have the resources, you need to do the work in your business. Oooo bloody hell. Calm down guys.

02:28 Dan
Give context. So, someone if they’re listening, they can think oh, I have a problem. And that will help with that.

02:33 Lloyd
Okay, two people. You’ve got Clive. Clive works on his own. And he makes grips for squash rackets. Okay. Clive is getting really busy. And he’s taken on all these getting all these people saying, can you do this by Friday? Clive, can you do this this month? And he’s going Yeah, I think so. But he doesn’t really know how if he’s got enough time to do all this work. So he’s letting people down. He doesn’t know if he needs to contact him to come and help him out next week. Because he has no idea if he has enough time, okay, so just one person.
And then and it can cause issues like you don’t have enough time to invest in your own business, because you don’t know how much time you’ve got, you can let down people not do as good a job. So capacity planning allows you to actually work out the exact time you have in your business. And if you have any spare time, or if you need to find people. Another thing, so outside of Clive could be a business like ours. So you might have a department with eight people in it. And you’re taking on new work, but you obviously need to know, you’ve got customers saying when can that work be done by you know, if we sign on the dotted line today and say, Yeah, we want to work with you.
Will that be done by the end of July? And you’ve got another department saying can you do this work internally for the business in the next two weeks? If you don’t know the capacity, you have in that department? You can’t make any of these decisions, or you can but normally you muck them all up.

04:08 Dan
I’m glad you shared that second example. Because I don’t know how many squash racket repair is listening to the podcast.

04:13 Lloyd
Other than Clive, you’re welcome.

04:15 Dan
But it could like, you know, all anchors listening any type of business, that delivers a product or service. Is it mainly service based business or?

04:24 Lloyd
No, both because you can have, you can have a factory of people making products and you need a capacity plan. So capacity planning traditionally is used in bigger businesses, where there’ll be people that have 500 people, you know, working for a big company manufacturing stuff, selling stuff, and they need to know if they have the capacity in their team or in their separate teams or if they need to move workload around. So traditionally, it’s used for big businesses. I’ve found it crazily useful in our business that doesn’t have 500 people.

04:54 Dan
Something I’ve realised over the years to do with this is that the smaller businesses that act like bigger businesses stand out from their competitors. And yes, we’ve only learned this because we never used to think like a big business. But now looking at some of our competitors, and the way they’re, that we’ve been working for long, we’ve been working longer than them. And we’ve learned this, I can see us standing apart from them, because we’re having these processes in these things in place.

05:53 Lloyd
I completely agree. And I think I had a moment where I realised that when our business was turning over something like 250,000 pounds a year, and our accountant said, oh, do you have anything like this, and they were trying to help us. And we had all of these things in place. And eventually, they said, you the way, the process you have in place around your finances and forecasting and stuff, are in line with the companies that are making in between sort of three and 10 million a year.

And that was one of the moments I realised, actually, the reason why we’re managing to improve our business so much and achieve what we’re achieving is because we’re, we are using things those bigger businesses use before we need them. And that’s how we’re stepping up. I think that’s a good point. So that’s why I’m saying if you are Clive, and obviously, that’s a random business. But if you are a freelancer, if you if you’re just working on your own, this is still useful.

Or if you’ve got a team that you’re managing of, it could be two people, it could be you and another or it could be a team of 20 people. Or it could be you’re managing, if you’re an operations director, and that kind of thing you probably know about this stuff, but it’s also for I’ve got 200 people. Right. Good stuff. Sorry Dan.

06:37 Dan
I was going to ask you second thing. When did you realise that we needed to do capacity planning? Because was there like an aha moment?

06:44 Lloyd
So I didn’t realise. And then dad said, What you need is a capacity planner. So I think it was when the business was still just you and I, and we’re having these sort of conversations, I think you being the sales side of the business was probably saying to me, I’ve got this new client that wants to sign up to do this thing. They say they really need it done by next month.

Can we do it? And in reality, most businesses have no way other than than just going, Oh, can I do it? To work out if they can, or they can’t commit. And then most are like, it’ll probably be alright. Or potentially, oh i don’t know, it was a bit worrying, just say no. Both of those are negative. And dad, having worked with bigger businesses and corporations, mainly in manufacturing, used this a lot, and introduced it to us. And at first, first of all, that’s quite cool.

Didn’t overly use it for the next couple of years. And then when we started building our team out, realised how useful it was. But when it was just me and new Dan starting up the business, a peak of activity, when it’s like, oh, God, do we have time to do this? I don’t know. And that’s when it became useful.

08:00 Dan
So this will be useful for pretty much anyone that runs a business that is looking to run it more effectively. And I guess it’s also better managing the expectations of your potential clients. Because when they are saying, when can you do this, you actually have an accurate way of telling them or looking at our capacity, we can do it that way. If you know how many how much resource you have left.

08:22 Lloyd
In any period of time, you know that either, I’m just on my own, I’ve got 30 days in this month. You might look at it and say, oh, I’ve got 10 days spare. So you know that you’ve got 10 days this month to take on new client work of up to 10 days to invest in your own business, or have a holiday or mixture of any of those things. Or the other way, you look at it and go, Oh my God, I’ve got 30 days in this month, and I’ve just mapped out the capacity, and I’ve got 42 days work. And then it highlights that you need to take action, because that’s not physically possible.

And I would say at that point, don’t just say. Oh, I’ll have to work hard, because that’s absolutely mental fitting 42 days in 30. It’s saying, Okay, right, I need to communicate with this client to say in advance to say, really sorry, we’re really working hard on this for you, but it’s going to be seven days late. Or right I need to get extra help, extra resource, outsource some stuff to do that. And I’m actually thinking further ahead. If I’ve got 40 days work in 30 days. Am I too cheap? And this is why loads of people want to work with me. Or actually am I just doing well and I need to hire someone else.

09:41 Dan
I feel like this has been a game changer for our business. This isn’t something I’ve managed. This is what you management from an outsider’s perspective. It’s been amazing to see how we can plan more effectively in advance. Like you just mentioned, knowing that if we’ve got extra time available, how could we allocate that to use it as effectively as possible? We’ll help grow our business. And also times when when we’ve had meetings like, Crap were literally like, a month of extra time we need and we haven’t got enough resource, let’s hire people or lets you know exactly.

10:11 Lloyd
And again, in the last couple of episodes, we’ve spoken about planning ahead and forecasting things. So you know, if you need to hire people and that kind of thing. But with this capacity planning, we managed to in the beginning of April, or maybe the end of March, we managed to see that in June, we would definitely need an extra video editor.

So if you think mental was a great tool, that’s what two, two and a half months in advance, we saw a problem at two and a half months out there, and knew we needed to hire someone and gave us two and a half months to do that. So we’ve got that we’ve hired that person before June, they’re already within the business they’re being trained up before we need them. And that’s exactly what this is for basically highlighting either issues or opportunities, where you can use your time or you haven’t got enough time.

11:06 Dan
And before we dive into the practical sort of steps and tips for how people can implement this, can you explain what kind of form this comes in? Because people think a capacity planner, what is that? Is it something on a bit of paper? Yeah, is it a board? What is it?

11:20 Lloyd
So there may be far better ways of doing this. But I can tell you, honestly, the way I’m always open to learning. So I’d be interested to hear perhaps bigger corporations that do have the 500 people have software that does this really well. But we’ve got the way that we do it. And we’ve got the way that I’ve seen some other businesses do it. So we do it. Sounds old school when i say it, Excel spreadsheet. But it could be a Google Sheet, if you want to sound a bit cooler. But quite simply, each person that you have within your business has a little square for every day.

And that little square gets colour coded towards different projects or clients. And you can work out, are there any sounds really like simple? Are there any empty squares? Do they need more to do or? are there too many squares? We’ve got to sort this out, they need less to do that it sounds so simple, obviously.

So I have this for about 12 people. And so, I find this really fun, oh, this person’s got too many squares, let’s move on, you know, and then you go, Oh, that project actually, that person can work on that and well, as well, and they’ve got five squares available. And the way you should look at it, first thing I put in is holidays. So each person might have annual leave or bank holidays, fill those squares up. Because if you don’t think about that, you’re not gonna have enough time in the month.

12:57 Dan
What colour are those squares, Lloyd.

12:58 Lloyd
For me, they’re black. Then you have a different colour for each client, or each project, depending on the sort of work you’re doing, have that colour code somewhere that you can see. And, and then very importantly, if all of your squares are filled up with client work, your shit, now you’re not, you know, shit. But I would see that as a big problem unless you unless that person is in a very specific role.

Nearly everyone needs time, sort of admin time. So there’s things that don’t come under a particular project, or client, and people need time to do so we have yellow squares for admin. And everyone will need at least one day a month. But depending on your business, or what you do, they might need one day a week to do that kind of in-house stuff that needs doing that isn’t attributed to a certain client. But also our green squares are very important my green squares. So 25% of the capacity in our business as a maximum, but we usually quite close to 25%, our green squares, and that is the effort that we put in the days that our team put in to our own business and our own marketing.

14:10 Dan
And each month we have a monthly management meeting where I come up with a plan for how we can best allocate that up to 25% time of our team’s time towards marketing and then present that to Lloyd and say, this is the plan. This is what we’re gonna do.

14:23 Lloyd
Do you know what I think will be crazily helpful for listeners? So many people, whether you’ve got a small business or you’re working a bigger business and managing a department or something like that. People are like, Oh, we got so much client work, we never get around to doing this good stuff we want to do to improve our business or improve what we’re doing. If you put those green squares in ,in advance. Say we’re working on our own business.

We’re marketing our own business. You then highlight that you haven’t got enough time and then you do something about it, rather than every month getting to the end of the month. We haven’t had time to do it again. And I think that will be so useful blocking out that time saying, No, we definitely are using that time for our own business, we’re not taking on more work.

So you may have a manager or the owner of the business or saying you need to take on this client work that gives you what you need the information, you need to go back to them and say, Actually, Timmy, we can’t take that on. Look, we’ve got these projects on, we’ve got this time allocated to improve our business or market our own business, which is really important. So we can’t take that answer and other department needs to take it on or we need to delay that project or we need to hire someone new. I think that is really a really useful tool for people to make sure you’re improving your own business.

15:40 Dan
So Sandra, the freelance Social Media Manager who is looking to implement some kind of capacity planning model? Yeah, to do all this great stuff that we’ve spoken about? What was the process you should go through? What tips have you got for Sandra, or Clive?

16:00 Lloyd
So Sandra, Clive Timmy, whoever you are, and to be honest, even if you’ve got any other name, that’s fine. Firstly, there was another example of how to do it. So either you’ll be setting up that spreadsheet, and it can be really simple names at the top, whether it’s one name, or 20 and 30 squares for the month, or some businesses that are much more, you know, this can’t be if you’re working from home or anything, but in a location, they’ll actually have a big like whiteboard where they’ll have coloured magnets that go on it, and you can move them around.

And that sort of thing, if you want a more physical thing people can see in a physical location. So either way, you need to set up the people and the amount of squares. So that’s step one, do some squares.

16:50 Dan
I guess also, Lloyd just to give a bit more help. I’m sure there must be templates and models online.

16:56 Lloyd
That’s why I’m saying there’s definitely a template online. But this you can hopefully picture simply in your head how this works by me saying this. And once you do that, you want to put you want to colour code, absolutely everything, anything you or your team are spending time on, make sure it has a colour and put the next three months work that you know that you have to do in there. And don’t sort of go oh no God, that’s not going to fit up but not put that admin time in that defeats the whole point of this, put everything in and don’t worry about if it’s saying you need 60 days in a month. That’s what we want this to do to highlight where you need more time.

So put all of that in, see where you are at the moment. And this will either highlight to you why we we’ve only got 12 days of work, and we’re taking a month to do it. This is our normal sort of workload like what’s and that then shows you that the opportunity. Hang on, we’re clearly not working as efficiently as we can, we could probably make double the amount of money we are in our business, if people had 24 days to do 30 days work rather than 12.

18:11 Dan
This, again, is highlighting a massive mistake we made early on when when we were much more naive and inexperienced. We used to get a project and not track how much time it took us to deliver it, we would just do it until it was done. And then that’s not an effective way of growing a business.

Now, we plan a certain amount of days and resource allocation to a project. We do it and track how long it actually took and then learn from that and figure out oh, maybe we under or over egged that, and then make changes accordingly. And we can we also in our weekly meeting, we keep them accountable to say, Oh, why is this taken an extra day or three days?

Yeah now we have even more processes in place, like you’re saying every single week we’re tracking if we’ve taken those extra days, or we’ve got days free, and we can adapt over time. So you can improve on this setting out to one thing, this will be improving throughout the time that you’re working. So you’ll either see that you’ve got those days, that’s opportunity there, your business could be making more money or you could be working less basically. Win Win.

19:10 Lloyd
Win win. Or the other side, which you’ll see we’ve got too much going on. And you can kind of this is a great tool, if you’ve got a manager or someone higher up that you believe is giving you or your team too much work to do. And it’s not physically possible. It might be hard to approach that if you have this and you say, I’m really worried about this workload. And now that I’ve used the capacity planner, I can see we’ve got 20% more work than our our team can physically do in the time that we pay for them to work here. That’s that’s the other way this could go and again, really useful for you to see.

19:45 Dan
I’ve just realised this could be really useful for an employee of a company like you were just sort of saying or hinting to that if you’re a marketer, what marketer works for a brand that feels like you’re burning out and you’ve got too much on, you could literally look at your work for the next month, set it out in the days and see like, Oh, I’ve got, you know, 20 days of work I’m supposed to do and this is 40 days workload. And you can present that to your manager and say this clearly is too much for me to deliver.

20:11 Lloyd
And because you’re showing the actual information, it’s not your opinion. You’re not saying I believe this is too much for me to do, you’re saying, you’ve given me work that takes this amount of time? I don’t, I don’t have 40 days in a month. And yeah, I can help the whole business improve, hopefully. But yeah, so you do your little squares, stick everything colour coded. Then next point is, you really need to stick to it, or track any extra days or the days you didn’t spend on things.

So there’s no point doing this, and then be like, oh, yeah, that client projects are supposed to spend five days on did 15. But you know, that’s the way things go. I think if that happens, you need to track it, and then say, well, I’m never going to sell that sort of project to a client for five days, if it’s going to take 15. The next month, when I sell it, I need to be put in 15 days in there. Be realistic, don’t just kid yourself and be like, well, I did put five days, but it’s taking 15 because then you’ll never be improving basically.

21:17 Dan
Also another thing I’ve sort of seen from afar, when things change is important to change, swap things out as well in the current month. So if a project gets delayed, move another project forward, it’s supposed to be started, it’s really quick to see how that can work, how you can use the time and resources as efficiently as possible.

21:36 Lloyd
And please, if you need time off, put it in there. If you’re either like a businessperson working on your own or with a small team and God never had any time off, put it in there. And it will happen if you follow all of this. Because you’re then go, oh, well, if I want my week off, I need to to find someone to do this, these five days of work. And then you can actually do it rather than them get there and think that oh no, what’s going on?

Yeah, and that’s as simple as it is, really, it’s putting the stuff in understanding if you have a problem that you need to either you have a problem or an opportunity and how you do that. So you could be moving squares to someone else. Or you could be outsourcing so that you have a new column for freelancer. And the squares go into their days. Or like we said the opportunity you start filling that opportunity with new client projects, or investing in your own business, marketing your own business.

22:38 Dan
And we can’t emphasise enough how powerful this process and it is just we’ve learned from not doing it well to now doing it. You know, we’ve still got things to learn. But it’s made a huge difference to our business isn’t just one of those things that we’re saying, yeah, do this extra random thing that’s not useful. This has been incredibly useful for us to help us grow.

22:56 Lloyd
A massive benefit for your people and your business, I think is you can get to a point where you know that you’re not, hopefully if you’ve got everything, right, you’re not overstretching people. Because if I see that someone has 40 days work to fit into this, the next month, we’re going to be firstly talking with that person and saying, looks like you’re gonna be really busy. So we need to do something about this. But I think over time, if you’re taking those actions to make sure I know there’s peaks and troughs, so everyone has busy weeks busy months, where it’s like, cool.

Our whole team has been busy. This has been hectic, isn’t it, but not to an extent where you’re overloading people consistently over a long period of time. Because that will make people leave that will make people stressed that will make people not want to work for you. So I think that’s something that I think is really important that I can see. Oh, no, Taylor is really busy this month, so we need to take some of that workload off him somehow. Otherwise, if we give him two months of work to do every month, at some point, he’s going to go oh, this is shit. And I don’t want to do this anymore. Please never do that. Taylor.

24:09 Dan
Wow, that was interesting.


24:12 Lloyd
Good. I hope the listeners think it was. You can tell I find interesting, but because I’m boring. Sometimes that’s not a good judge.

24:21 Dan
That is really good. And yeah, I mean, next week’s episode, we’ve got something a bit more fun looking at some of the lies you’ve been told in marketing, so it’s probably less sort of Lloyd boring and more fun.

24:34 Lloyd
So if you’re here for boring lied, skip next week. If you’re here for fun Dan, listen to next week’s episode.

24:42 Dan
But honestly, if you do enjoy these episodes, we speak about this quite a lot. We’ve noticed an increase recently and people messaging us ,posting about the podcast and sharing links to the episodes and we really do appreciate that so yeah, if you really enjoy this, please do share it and post about it and tell other people and yeah, it helps more people listen to it. Yeah, hopefully.

25:06 Lloyd
We really want to grow this help as many people as we can. And we want to have more people listen to the podcast that’s good for us as well. Win, win, win. So yeah, we’ll see you in your ears next week.

25:17 Dan
Bye.

Hopefully this has been useful and helped you to understand how you can implement capacity planning to ensure you have enough resource & time to deliver your work! If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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10 Marketing Lies You’ve Been Told

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Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify
 

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You’ve been lied to by some very influential Marketers and today is the day you discover the truth.
Ok now you’re hooked with that over-dramatic first line, this is actually a really interesting podcast for anyone in the Marketing/Business world. We unpack some of the biggest BS we’ve heard and give reasons for why we think it’s BS (from our experience).
Plus, we have some pretty insightful conversations about how we look at the Marketing & Business world. Enjoy!

Timestamps

00:00 – 01:07 Intro
01:08 – 02:10 How an episode about marketing lies will help you.
02:11 – 05:19 Lie No.1: Only analyse local competitors.
05:20– 06:53 Lie No.2: Build it and they will come.
06:54 – 10:32 Lie No.3 Anyone can be successful in marketing a business.
10:33 – 13:25 Lie No.4 Just increase your prices to get more customers.
24:52 – 26:04 Lie No.7: 10 X your goals to improve.
26:05 – 26:55 Outro
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10 Marketing Lies You’ve Been Told

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. Have you ever fallen into the trap of flashy Instagram business gurus selling overpriced lies and empty promises? Well, in today’s episode, Dan and Lloyd discuss the 10 marketing lies you’ve been told.
00:15 Dan
I think, alarm bells always go for me when someone because I’ve been speaking at events before and other speakers and stuff have said, it should be a three and a half minute video that’s posted at 2 pm on a Tuesday on Instagram stories with three and a half hashtags. And it’s like, what, that doesn’t make any sense.
0:033 Pat
You’ll also hear Lloyd give his spin on some popular marketing phrases.
00:37 Lloyd </p
Build it? And no one will know you’ve built it, build it and shout about it. And people might come. Sounds rubbish. But that’s what they should say.
Pat 0:47
Right? Let’s get stuck in lie detectors at the ready. This is episode 95 of the business anchors podcast.
01:08 Lloyd
How is an episode about marketing lies going to help our audience, Dan?
01:12 Dan
Well, it does sound like a bit of a weird one. But for any marketer listening, we’re going to be shining the light on some of the things that lots of people talk about in the marketing world that we don’t believe is true. And I think understanding why these things aren’t true will help you improve your marketing. So hopefully, it’s going to be an interesting discussion.
01:33 Lloyd
It will, so we’re going to be talking about lies that are often told in the mark, that sound quite that people lying to people.
01:42 Dan
Also, this is subjective as well. So this is our opinion. So again, anything you hear take with a pinch of salt.
01:49 Lloyd
But our opinions are better than anyone else’s opinions. So that kind of balances it out.
01:55 Dan
So we’ve each kind of thought about some different things that we’ve heard in the marketing world that we don’t believe are true, and we’re going to start some discussions around those different points. So Lloyd, yeah, tell us one of your marketing lies. What have you heard in the marketing world that you don’t think is true?
02:11 Lloyd
Okay. Tell you what you should do. You should analyze your local competition. Okay, I can tell you why I think that’s not good. Because I think you should be aiming higher than that. So, often businesses are told to write what they need to do and analyse what their local competitors are, which, to an extent, I don’t think is bad. Competitor research is helpful. But I think people are limiting themselves in this new online, new online age, not new sound like an absolute boomer there, we got the interweb to use. I don’t think people should be comparing themselves to the business down the road that does the same. And well, I suppose I don’t want them only to compare themselves to that.
And how can we be? So we’re Locksmiths? We’re Mr Lucky locksmith? Yeah. And you’re going oh, this is Mr. padlock locksmith down there. We just need to make sure we’re better than them. I think to look at the biggest locksmith in the USA, look at the biggest locksmith in Sussex, look at the biggest locksmith in Essex, what the best businesses are doing and compare yourself to that and take inspiration from that. Rather than saying, I’m gonna compare myself to the one that’s closest to me, and just trying to be a bit better than that.
03:35 Dan
And we’ve even got a lot of value from looking at other businesses completely outside our industry. So that can be useful as well. Like, we get some of our biggest inspiration for our marketing from campaigns that are being run in other countries for completely different businesses, for our kind of content.
03:32 Lloyd
In our scripts, get you, we get our inspiration from massive global or British comedies and sitcoms and the comedy in that rather than. Can anyone think of a funny advert they’ve seen, you know, like you’re saying outside of your industry looking for that inspiration, looking for the best of the best and aiming for that rather than? Can we just be a bit better than this company? It can be the same for big brands as well.
You know, if you are a drinks brand, right, um, Corona that took me a while. Yeah. And that’s a big brand that probably will be looking at other competition but looking outside of their industry for competition, like who’s, who’s marketing their product in the best way not which beer is marketing their product in the best way? Who out of all the businesses in the world is doing something that we can take inspiration from and improve our own business?
04:50 Dan
So competitive research is still good.
04:53 Lloyd
Yeah.
04:53 Dan
But just doing it now. I believe what you’re saying is just don’t do it. Just a local level. Do it on a global level on look at the real big players, because you can learn a lot from that.
05:02 Lloyd
Even small businesses, we’ve got the internet now you can look at businesses like yours in South Africa that smashing it and take inspiration from them. You have access to every business in the world now, so take advantage of that. That’ll be mine. So, do you want to go headlong yours, Dan?
05:20 Dan
Yes. Have you ever heard build it and they will come?
05:24 Lloyd
Do you know what Dan? I have. And it was actually on my list. You stole it.
05:30 Dan
I just think this is absolute rubbish. Imagine, like, if this was true, our jobs where we wouldn’t have jobs would be because we’re marketers that help get attention.
05:40 Lloyd
I think the true thing is, to build it and probably will. No, no, no, no, you’ve built it. Yeah. That should be the saying. Yeah.
05:49 Dan
I mean, sounds like crap saying though doesn’t it Yeah, yeah. So there are so many things, trying to fight for our attention, that it’s important as a business that we need to work hard to go out there and be one of the things that are captivating our customer’s attention, rather than just being part of the noise.
06:05 Lloyd
I think it’s a little bit vain, actually, they’ll build it and they will kind of you’re basically, you’re saying, If I build a business or do something, that’s good enough, people will find me. And the reality is like saying there’s so much competition for attention, they won’t like someone can just put, do a pay per click ad for the name of your business. And they will probably get the attention before it gets to you.
06:29 Dan
And I think we’ve experienced this growing our business like we especially in the early days, when no one’s heard of you, like everyone who’s started a business knows that in the early days no one knows you. And we had to fight so hard to get our name out there go to every networking event we possibly could to build our social channels to create content to get to, for people to know us, it’s, it just takes a lot of time to get people to know.
06:54 Lloyd
Yeah. So build it, and now know you’ve built it. Build it, and shout about it. And people might come. And what’s your next one? Lloyd. So my next one is anyone can build a business and market a business that’s gonna make you millions. Because from personal experience, I think even though I’m good at a lot of business stuff, without you, I couldn’t have had a business as successful as this.
So I think the thing online of people saying like it’s really easy to build and market a new business, they don’t say it’s easy, but they say you just need to buy this $5,000 course. And then anyone can do it. I just think it isn’t true.
07:36 Dan
There’s so much more to think about than you think when starting. We talked about this a lot how we’ve got completely different sets of skills, and it works well. And at the start, if I would have known how many different things you need to know to run a successful business I probably wouldn’t have started one.
07:54 Lloyd
Yeah definitely. And I, I don’t know, I think for lots of people, they would be far better, far happier, far more successful, make more money, like maybe managing a department in a business or being a brilliant Freelancer at they do, than trying to build a business that’s going to make them millions, because I think this is specific sets of skills that not everyone does have or would be suited too.
08:22 Dan
I guess you don’t know until you start, like how did we know that we would enjoy this? we didn’t do?
08:30 Lloyd
I think it’s fine for people to try and run businesses and I don’t think it’s good that people say anyone can do this. Because you should try if that’s what you want to do. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t try new things. But don’t then if it doesn’t work, don’t think well, there must be something wrong with me because they said anyone can do it.
Because the truth is building a business and marketing a new business or brand or product or service is difficult. So sometimes, it’s your skills might not be suited to that. But I’m not saying don’t try just I don’t like it when people these gurus say anyone can build a seven-figure business.
09:10 Dan
I think this is one of the key themes for all of these types of people. They’re always oversimplifying everything. The honest thing about running a successful business is that from our experience, it takes years of working hard, making mistakes and figuring things out. You can’t just do something in three simple steps. From a marketer’s perspective, I understand that to make something hooky and catchy you know, we do it with our podcasts and stuff like here’s three ways you can do this thing.
09:41 Lloyd
Probably with this podcast.
09:42 Dan
Yeah. But I imagine if you did a podcast like here are 10,000 things you can do across seven years to maybe run an OK business. No one going to listen to a good episode. Yeah, yeah. So I think yeah, a lot of these things are kind of oversimplified to make it sound catchy, but You need to understand the truth that 99% of successful businesses take years of doing 1000s of different things and making mistakes to be somewhat successful.
That’s, that’s the truth, isn’t it? Yeah, I think something that isn’t good is that a lot of light is shone on this kind of unicorns like, you know, texts, like Facebook. And companies like that. And like in our industry think company like a social chain that is like one day, they’re one employee, then they’re 10,000 the next day.
10:34 Lloyd
They don’t talk about the 500 social agencies in the last three years that I’ve set up, and then they fail. And they don’t exist anymore. So yeah, I think that’s a good point. So Dan, do you have another one?
10:47 Dan
Yes, I do. So another lie, a lie. Something that I don’t agree with is you should just increase your prices?
10:56 Lloyd
Do you know that’s so good? It’s also on my list? Yeah, completely agree.
11:00 Dan
But yeah, I think I’ve heard several kinds of people saying this, and I just don’t agree with it. Because I think for young, naive sort of business owners starting, they just again, it’s oversimplifying, it’s another thing of, oh, I’m not earning enough money, I don’t have enough clients.
So I’ll just increase my prices. That’s not a good idea. Because one, you’re gonna increase your prices, but your the quality of what you’re doing probably isn’t in line with that. So you’re going to lose customers, and you’re gonna put other people off? And it’s just not.
11:33 Lloyd
I think there’s, there’s, it’s a bit of a trend over the last year or so for that to be business advice, like, you’re not making enough money double your prices. And the reality is, that’s probably bad advice.
11:39 Dan
Like, it can be good advice. It can be good advice, in a way thinking of our previous episode about capacity planning, if you’ve always got too much work, and you have to let customers down and say, no, that could be a time when it’s like, oh, you know, in terms of supply and demand, there’s more demand than there is supply. So let’s increase the price.
12:08 Lloyd
But a lot of the time the advice is given to the businesses or the people that haven’t got enough work, like, I haven’t got any customers, double your prices, it’s the opposite of that. Oh, so then you’ll have half as many opportunities to get business and they still won’t work with you. So yeah, I completely agree with this one.
12:28 Dan
What I would say is, so instead of doubling your prices, I’d focus on double the amounts of your energy and getting better at what do because of how good you are at what you do because then that will lead to being able to double your prices. After all, the demand for your service will increase.
12:46 Lloyd
Double how good your service or product is, and you’ll have double the amount of people that want it. And then you can double your prices. Again, sounds rubbish. But that’s what they should say.
12:58 Dan
I think so many people are going to be put off from like starting businesses and listening to this episode because we’re just saying, do things for years. And it might work.
13:09 Lloyd
I think it’s far better to be realistic than or, you know, don’t forget anyone listen to this, you could ignore this advice and have this unicorn business that ends up being the next Tesla, but you probably won’t so.
12:23 Dan
Anything else. What other lies have you heard Lloyd?
13:26 Lloyd
So very marketing, one, you need to be on this platform. Otherwise, you know, everyone’s gonna be on this, you’ll fail if you don’t. There’s no social media platform or certain website you need to be on to have success. So some are there are very successful businesses, massive businesses that aren’t on Twitter. There are massive businesses that aren’t on Facebook. There are massive businesses that aren’t on this website that this local guy and networking meeting says you have to be on. And you have to pay him 20 pounds a month to be on it.
I think everyone has their expertise and pushes what they know and what they’re good at. But your business doesn’t necessarily need it. So don’t listen to someone if they’re like, you’ve got to be on TikTok at the moment for a lot of businesses, I would say probably a good idea to explore tick tock, you don’t need to be on it. I don’t know. What do you think?
14:25 Dan
Yeah, I think like you say some businesses are hugely successful just through email marketing, but a lot of people now would say that that’s not gonna work. I think this is a trend especially with marketers though because there are so many new platforms coming out.
After all, things change so all the time. marketers want to be the first to adopt everything because I think that kind of first mover strategy of if I’m the first person to join this new platform, and it blows up, then I’ll be like, influential on there. Yeah, but because there are so many platforms like when clubhouse came around. Yeah. Some people invested crazy amounts of time because of the way the platform was built, you had to be on it live, having a chat for it to get exposure. So people just spent so much time.
15:12 Lloyd
Marketers who were then experts in the clubhouse were telling all of their clients and their audience that they need to be in the clubhouse because that’s beneficial to them. They’re not saying you have to be in the clubhouse because your business has to be in the clubhouse.
So like you said, we analyse the club clubhouse and realised it wasn’t worth us investing the time, or we didn’t think so at that point, in three years, the clubhouse may adapt and change. And we might think it’s worth it. But I just think, I think to be aware of marketers that push, you have to do this, you have to be on this because that’s usually in their best interest, or it’s just what they know the most about. So they’re saying, you have to do this.
15:48 Dan
I think this has been a shift in the way we communicate over the years. Because early on, I was one of the people that said, You got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be on Facebook, do Facebook ads, because that was working for us. I was like, oh, it’s gonna work for everyone.
16:05 Lloyd
It’s what we felt most comfortable with. We knew we can deliver value to clients on that because we were good at it.
16:10 Dan
And now I’m way more like, whenever we talk about and all these podcast episodes, we kind of let give context that listens to this because this is what’s worked for us.
But it may not be for you, there may be something better for you like your skills may be matched with a different platform with a tip different type of marketing, your audience may not be on any of the platforms we’re talking about. So definitely take every piece of advice from marketers you hear with a pinch of salt, especially us because we’re just sharing, this is what this podcast is all about sharing our experience.
16:38 Lloyd
I think I’ve realised the big marketing lie as well. And that’s that the title of this, I think, is 10 marketing lies. And I haven’t kept track of how many there are. But I think we’ve doubled up I don’t think there’s 10 So just another example of how marketers lie to you. Yeah, okay. 10 sounded good. So we put it in the title.
16:56 Dan
I mean, before you said that, we could have just changed your title to the number it was. Yeah, that we said, Yeah, that would have been fine, too.
17:02 Lloyd
Yeah. But I want to lie to him. This is just a show you, that even people you trust can lie to your face. Yeah. You’ve got any more Dan?
17:13 Dan
Yeah, I’ve got another one.
17:14 Lloyd
Cool, who knows how many? not 10.
17:15 Dan
I’ve got up to 10. All of our attention spans are shrinking. Yeah. So and I’ve again as I fall into the trap of saying this as well. I think previously, everyone’s attention spans are shrinking. I don’t believe that. What I believe is our options are widening. If you think about it, our options for where our attention is widening, because I mentioned this earlier, because of the internet, we now have so much information accessible to us on so many different platforms that we have to divvy up that time accordingly.
So it’s making it more difficult for brands and marketers to get in front of someone and hold their attention. Because especially when you think of like TikTok, so TikTok is blown up through snackable. Short, like 10/22 endless videos. How can you compete with that? It’s very difficult to compete with when this algorithm is literally like manipulating you just stay on this platform for hours swiping, swiping it’s difficult to get people’s attention.
18:25 Lloyd
It’s interesting, because yeah, so so like you’re saying our option, we’ve got options of what we want to give our attention to. But like YouTube and Netflix, people watch for hours. And we don’t say, Oh, we got you got to make YouTube videos that are 30 seconds long, or on Netflix, we need to change our programmes to make it three minutes long. Because the content is good enough for that audience where people will watch it for hours.
And people say, Oh, no one watches TV for six hours each evening anymore with our ads. You know, no one can concentrate like they’re concentrating on their favorite YouTuber for four hours in the same evening. So I think it’s a very good excuse for people who don’t have the knowledge and how to get people’s attention or can’t create content good enough to go. Yeah, it will have to be five seconds long, because anything longer now and watches it.
19:13 Dan
And I think being open, realising this was a game changer for our business. And this is why we’ve shaped our whole business around creating marketing content marketing campaigns that serve the end customer first, rather than help the brands we want to work with first, because if we just focused on this product brand coming to us and pushing their product, by this product by this product, that may work in the short term, but eventually people are gonna get turned off. And that’s not what they want to see.
Like we said before, they want to be educated, entertained, and inspired by the content they’re consuming. So this is why we try and focus on and I think all marketers should focus on What content you do your customers want to listen to, like take this podcast, for example. In this podcast, how often do we say to you, buy Knowlton services and become a customer, we’ll help you with your marketing? We don’t we rarely say that.
Because we know that you won’t like that listeners and viewers like you’re not interested in that what we think maybe we’re wrong you’re interested in is learning from our experiences of marketing, what’s working for us what we think about the industry so that you can gain value from that first. And yes, we do have a strategy behind this podcast, we do mention campaigns, we run like the cool campaign we did with a top 10 Netflix show recently and a global brand to kind of show you that we’re good at what we do. And if you do ever want to work with us you can, but most of it is focused on actually trying to provide value for you.
20:31 Lloyd
That’s the funny thing. So you guys listen to us for like half an hour at a time. And we’ve got loyal listeners that listen to almost every episode. So thank you, everyone. But we could have done this podcast differently, just like selling our business. We’d look at the graphs, and they only listen for three minutes, and then they go off and then we’d be going, your podcasts have got to be three minutes long.
Because no one wants to listen for longer than three minutes. So no, actually, if you create a shit podcast people don’t want to listen to, then it has to be three minutes long because they’ll give up after that. But you know, Joe Rogan, and some of the big podcasters they’ve had at some of the podcasts I listen to, there’s been ones that are almost two hours long. And I put and I even like, I don’t have time to listen to them in one go.
So I divvy up, and I go back to them. Because I have such a, I have a long attention span for those things, because it’s so good. And people always come to us. So how long this should this video be? And my they want a quite often when we have like kickoff calls or clients, they want us to go on Instagram, it should be one minute 36. That’s an awesome time. The real answer is, that it should be as long as it is interesting.
So if we haven’t got much interesting stuff to say, and we’ve got a really low budget to put into this, and we can only make a brilliant video, that’s 12 seconds long, it should be 12 seconds. If we have a big budget, and we have great stuff to say and to show people, it should be seven minutes.
22: Dan
I think alarm bells always go for me when someone because I’ve been speaking at events before and other speakers and stuff I’ve said it should be a three and a half minute video that’s posted at 2 pm on a Tuesday on Instagram stories with three and a half hashtags. And it’s like, wow, that doesn’t make any sense.
22:24 Lloyd
Some of those details can make a very small difference. But if you’re forgetting the sort of stuff we’re talking about the fundamental stuff is going to be like so the time of day you post could have an impact, it could be like 10%, it might improve or, or make it worse because the audience isn’t online. But what we’re doing, we’re making content that’s good enough for people to want to watch, we’ll make the 1,000% increase.
22:50 Dan
And I think to kind of not contradict what we’re saying. But I think that should be your first focus, focus on the core thing of actually producing content and marketing campaigns that people enjoy. Once you’ve got that, as the foundations there, then it’s about making the incremental improvements of posting time or day or like how you’re promoting, like, for example, this podcast, we’ve we can’t see looking on how to improve and get more people to listen and watch this.
We’ve recently realised that our TikTok clips are performing like the nine by 16, and phone screen sizes are performing much better than our YouTube size 16 by nine, so we’re gonna try and push that more. So now we’ve got the foundations, hopefully writing of like, an interesting podcast to listen to about business and marketing. That’s value adding. Now we’re like, right, what are those small changes we can make to move the needle? Yeah, that is a really good point.
And it is like it’s like a butterfly effect. So those small changes we’re making can completely change the trajectory of the success of lists and our business, like knowing now that those TikTok videos perform 1% better. So we’re going to push those more and focus more on that. Imagine the graph of like doing that too, just sticking with the average stuff that wasn’t working. And even though I know we need to get better at this still, we need to get better at constantly testing and trying new things and testing new ways of doing things that will improve how things are performing.
But I think there’s an action if you’re listening to this and you haven’t tried or tested something new or analysed how what you’re currently doing is performing you should look at that. That’s it. That’s a really important point.
24:29 Lloyd
And if someone says your video has to be one minute 30 seconds long, say to them, I don’t listen to you anymore. Good advice. I think that was good is have we got anything more to say that is as good as that. Have you got more?
24:45 Dan
I’ve got one more. Okay, one more. Yeah, it’s probably not as good as that. But it’s one.
24:50 Lloyd
Bonus Porky pie marketers are telling you.
24:52 Dan
Okay, ready? 10 exit. So there’s a well-known marketer. That’s got a book called 10x or something like that. And his whole mantra is 10x everything. So you’ve got goals to achieve this year, you want to do better 10x them. You want to improve at something 10 exit. And I think, again, this is this, this advice is damaging, because one, it’s doing that thing of oversimplifying everything. Just 10x In your goals isn’t going to help you improve.
There’s a whole load of other work like that it could help you improve to be more ambitious, yes. But once you 10x your goals, you then actually need a whole plan for how you’re going to achieve those 10x results. So that’s another one that I hear thrown around a lot.
24:58 Lloyd
I did it on my fitness pal with my calorie count 10X it. But I’ve been putting on weight.
25:54 Dan
I don’t get that.
25:55 Lloyd
Yeah, I don’t know. I changed my goal to 20,000 calories a day. But I haven’t been losing weight.
26:03 Dan
If anyone can help Lloyd then please do.
26:05 Lloyd
So I don’t think that’s good advice. Okay. Cool, really good advice, Dan. I don’t know if there are 10. I think there were about eight. Possibly, but we lied to you.
26:17 Dan
But this episode is about lying.
26:19 Lloyd
Yeah, we meant to do that.
26:20 Dan
We’ll keep it as 10. But yeah, you know, yeah, there’s a handful for you.
26:24 Lloyd
Yes. A handful. wouldn’t have been as good in the title of it just said a handful. Maybe we’ll call it that. Maybe we have lived throughout this episode. Maybe it’s called that. Okay. Should we see the next one?
26:35 Dan
Yeah, we’ll see you in your ears next week.
26:37 Lloyd
Or maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ve lied. We’re marketers.
Hopefully this has been useful and helped you to understand some of the Marketing lies you’ve been told. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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Video Marketing Strategy That Generated £70K of Opportunities

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Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify
 

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Looking to implement a video marketing strategy that generates new business opportunities?
In this podcast, we break down the video marketing strategy we implemented that generated £70K of opportunities last week!
There’s a combination of big-picture ways of thinking about video marketing strategy and more granular tactics, tips and tricks. Enjoy!

Video Marketing Strategy Timestamps

00:00 – 01:06 Intro
01:07 – 01:43 How to produce a video that drives £70K of opportunities in one week.
01:44 – 06:08 How to know you\’ve made a \’successful video\’.
06:09– 13:54 What was the video that drove £70K of opportunities?
13:55 – 15:13 Step 1: Get peoples attention.
15:14 – 18:50 Step 2: Hold the attention with quality.
18:51 – 21:09 Step 3: Find opportunities to show how good you are.
21:10 – 26:16 Step 4: Create an ecosystem that makes it a no-brainer for people to work with you.
26:17 – 27:18 How to map out your customer journey.
27:19 – 28:10 Outro
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fUI2vIIa-6w

Video Marketing Strategy That Generated £70K of Opportunities

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat, the podcast editor here. What\’s the secret to creating content that will generate opportunities for your business? Well, hot of the back of a recent video has proven to be a resounding success, download, explain how you can produce content that generates tangible opportunities for your company.
0:18  Dan
First of all, it\’s generated over 70,000 pounds of new business opportunities for us, we had 13 leads coming in off the back of it all kind of mentioning, I saw this video and we want to work with you.
 0:28 Pat
you\’ll hear the four key steps to help you create work that will engage, entertain, and put you in front of all of the right people.
 0:36 Dan 
It\’s building all of these pieces of content that gives that potential customer what they want along the way to demonstrate that you\’re the best solution to their problem.
0:43 Pat 
And if you want to see the video in question, head to Dan Knowlton on LinkedIn to check out service is selling. Right, let\’s get stuck in. This is episode 96 of the business anchors podcast.
1:07 Dan
How do you produce a video that drives 70,000 pounds of opportunities in only one week, Lloyd?
1:14 Lloyd
Well, I have a feeling we might be discussing that in this episode Dan.
1:18 Dan
What do you think?
1:19 Lloyd 
Well, it\’s just a consistent way. We\’ve started episodes for the last sort of 50 episodes. So the question and then going into why or how we do that.
1:26 Dan
Yeah, it gives us a clue away, doesn\’t isn\’t it?
1:28  Lloyd
Yeah. But I mean, if you actually want some information? Well, actually, not answering that exactly. But a bit of a subject around that. I think a big part of this is actually creating an ecosystem around the video that makes people actually get in touch with you and interested in working with you. So we are going to be talking about the video and how we\’ve done that and how that lead to 70,000-pound opportunities in one week from one video.
That\’s pretty good. But yeah, the ecosystem of your website and your social content and things so that when people move away from that video, it\’s not a completely different experience. And they think, oh, that video was great. But oh, now they look rubbish. And I can\’t really see that they do a good job for their customers or their client. So that\’s yeah, that\’s another really big thing.
I\’ll talk a bit more about it later. But outside of the video, I think that\’s a really important thing as well.
1:44 Dan
Do you know how I know when we\’ve made a video that is really valuable for our business?
2:32 Lloyd 
People contact you and say, Can I work with you?
2:35 Dan 
Yeah, that\’s the obvious one. But when I go to anything in person, and everyone, not everyone, but like lots of people coming up to me saying, Oh, my God, your latest video, I love it. Because of that I recently went to the business bar crawl event in Folkstone, sleeping giant media. And immediately as I stepped into the room, this guy, the really nice guy came up to me as like, I\’ve got to speak to you your latest video, I\’ve shown it to all my colleagues.
And I was like, Oh my God. And historically, there\’s been a number of, there\’s a few key videos we\’ve made where that has happened. That definitely doesn\’t happen for every video. Yeah. But that alongside it generates the opportunities. Those kinds of signs are when you know, like, this has actually resonated with lots of people.
3:20 Lloyd
When the online world actually blended into the offline world. And you start getting people coming up to you saying how good it is. Was that a nice feeling?
3:28 Dan
It was quite up to you that
3:30 Lloyd
Oh, my God so good.
3:31 Dan
It was good. Just to give some hard data to the listeners. So we were going to give you a backstory of what the video is and stuff in a second. But we produced this.
3:42 Lloyd
It\’s hard data. That sounds boring. Surely, I should be saying it.
3:45 Dan
You should but you haven\’t prepped this. This video is, first of all, it\’s generated over 70,000 pounds of new business opportunities for us. We had 13 leads come in off the back of it all kind of mentioning, I saw this video and we want to work with you. Not only that, it\’s I looked at some of those. So it\’s been played for a total of 15,470 minutes, which is 10.7 days. And it\’s got over 1000 comments, reactions and shares.
I haven\’t told you this, but it\’s got us speaking opportunities. So I\’m speaking at this one webinar, because someone saw it and said, I want you to talk about that on this webinar in a few weeks. And yeah, it\’s done really well. And this podcast is all about sharing what we\’ve learned from it and hopefully teaching others how they can go about creating something like this that will bring in lots of business.
4:43 Lloyd
Yeah, because this video has done particularly well. But obviously, we\’ve been putting out video content for years now with our own business. And we, I suppose this, this one where we\’ve got 70,000 pounds of opportunities in one week that we keep saying, it isn\’t a one-off thing. It\’s something we\’ve recreated multiple times and a way that we know if we need more business, we need to do this sort of thing.
So, you know, for a lot of businesses, you might be thinking, Oh, next month in my business is a bit quiet, or I haven\’t sold as much in the last couple of weeks as I need to, you know if you can replicate this in any sort of way of having this in your arsenal to be like okay right, going to do this. And I know that I\’m going to have a load more opportunities, I can do that over the next couple of days, weeks, months, yeah, hopefully, that\’ll be really useful.
5:30 Dan
And also to give context, and to sort of touch on what you said earlier. This isn\’t like a silver bullet. We\’re not saying you\’re going to create one video, and not do anything else. And suddenly, you get loads of business law, you made a really good point, Lloyd, about the ecosystem of you, need to be doing other things in other places to make sure once someone\’s watched the video, you\’re demonstrating your credibility and that you\’re good at what you do.
And you\’re making it clear and easy for them to get in touch with you. So there are lots of different things you need to do around this. But this video is key to bringing those opportunities.
6:02 Lloyd 
You can gradually improve that side of things over time to really, really increase the results you\’re getting and the income you get from this thing.
6:09 Dan
Okay, so Lloyd, just for the listeners, what was the video? Because you were the mastermind behind this video. So what was it?
6:18  Lloyd
So the video was based on a viral video that is called Well, I call it services is selling or selling is service. And it was a viral video, it went viral sort of all over the world and for lots of different people. But it\’s really popular in the kind of marketing and sales offices and stuff because it\’s to do with selling and service and that kind of thing. So it\’s this team of people in a weird shop, sing it made up this song and dance about service is selling, selling is service. And it wasn\’t made as a comedy video, but it\’s is very funny and weird.
And what we did is we knew that in our industry, that was a viral video years ago, people would recognise it. So we kind of piggybacked on that. That reputation that has already and that recognizability. And we shot a video pretending that we were behind the scenes. So we were actually shooting that video. And we wrote a comedic script about what was going on behind the scenes and put clips of the video in between, and it\’s gone down really well as we hoped it would.
7:32  Dan
And if you want to watch it, probably the easiest place to go is my LinkedIn. It\’s pinned on my profile at the top. So just search Dan Knowlton. And one of the videos in the featured section, it\’s there. I think it\’s the second one along Yeah. So why I guess before we dive into how others can recreate this, Lloyd, why do you think this works? So well? Have you got like, what do you think?
7:55 Lloyd
I think there\’s a number of reasons I think, it\’s done really well, we\’ve managed to get the attention from our target market, which is a huge thing. And we\’ve created a video good enough to hold the attention for long enough and create something people actually want to watch and they\’re engaging with. And, yeah, there are lots of small tactics that go into it. I\’ll go through maybe in a minute, but why do you think it worked so well done?
Dan 8:25
So I think a few reasons, okay. First of all, it doesn\’t look like an advert. It doesn\’t look like marketing. This is you know, if you\’ve been here for a while, you will know that at Knowlton, our kind of mantra is to create marketing, content and marketing campaigns that aren\’t disruptive and annoying. It\’s actually enjoyable to consume.
And this was exactly that. It wasn\’t us going to become a customer of Knowlton. It was something interesting and entertaining, that didn\’t look like an advert for our business. So that\’s the first thing. Secondly, I think it was a new style of content that we haven\’t created before. So there are two grill groups of people that see our content, people that have seen our content before and are like in our ecosystem. And there are different levels of those people, some who are always commenting on our stuff and love it some who just passively consume it.
So there\’s that group. And then there\’s the kind of new people who have never seen our content before. And I think for the people who knew us already in our ecosystem, because this was a new style of content we hadn\’t created, it was something new and interesting that kind of would grab their attention because they sort of would think, Oh, I haven\’t seen anything like this from Knowlton before.
9:35 Lloyd
And testing new things in our marketing is a major part of our strategy. So although we found things like you know, video in general, and this type of video that works, we\’re testing different styles of video and we\’re testing different things constantly and some of them don\’t work. Some of them work, you know, in an amount that\’s below average compared to the other stuff we do and some of them work really well.
I definitely encourage other businesses to test different styles. If you\’ve got, say you put out a weekly video in a certain style and it\’s doing well, I would say, really try maybe even once a month just to put something out that\’s different to that. Because over time,  you will uncover something that you\’re that will perform even better than what you\’re currently doing. Definitely.
10:22 Dan
And also another reason I think it works really well. It had a really witty comical script, written by obviously, Lloyd.
10:29 Lloyd 
Written by a really witty comical person.
10:33 Dan
Yes, questionable. So, that was another thing that really made it work. It also, as you mentioned earlier, Lloyd, we piggybacked off the success of another piece of content. So we know that this piece of content has already been seen by lots of people. And we showed clips of that in this video. So it would close people in who have seen these other viral videos, it was like that extra reach an extra relatability, rather than just us making our own video.
11:00 Lloyd 
We\’ve put this on other social platforms and just piggybacked on that recognizability and people looking back and thinking, Oh, I\’ve watched that. But actually, if your video content going on YouTube, there\’s an added bonus if you do this kind of thing, and, and make a video that\’s linked to the content of another video. And that\’s that sometimes if your video is doing well enough, it can get suggested after people watch that already popular video, and can increase your YouTube views.
So if YouTube is a big thing for you, piggybacking on another video that\’s been really popular in the past and making something with a similar title. And obviously make don\’t just do it, give it the same title or make a rubbish video, making sure it\’s good enough. That\’s another benefit if you are using YouTube.
11:42 Dan 
Yeah. And one, I guess one final thing, and the reason I think this works really well is nostalgia. So this the services selling video went viral in 2007. And this is bringing back those memories. Like even I remember one of my old colleagues from my old job messaged me saying, Oh, I remember when we started working here, and you showed me that video and this was like, eight years ago. So it\’s that nostalgia coming back from people who\’ve seen it, that many years ago.
12:09 Lloyd 
Also, what\’s great with that is if it\’s if there\’s a video or piece of content that\’s really popular in your industry, or linked to your industry, people that might have seen it 10 years ago, and likely to be in more senior positions now making decisions and able to, to make those decisions or work with new businesses like yours. So that\’s another bonus of that nostalgia thing.
You know, people that might have been starting out in whatever industry you\’re in might now be in a higher up position making those decisions. And they could be your customer, a random thing.
12:41 Dan
Have you seen that guy on Tik Tok? This reminds me of his style of content, he gets viral videos on Tiktok. And then he green screens it and acts as if he\’s in the video, please tell me you\’ve seen him?
12:51 Lloyd 
I have this morning.
12:52 Dan 
Yeah. And he literally does exactly this kind of concept so I mean, it is like anyone could do this, you could think about a viral video that your target audience would have seen in the past. And then you can green screen it and act as if you\’re part of it. It\’s not that difficult. It just needs some creativity and some thought.
13:11 Lloyd 
But also there\’s you know, you might not be into video, you might not be into this entertaining style of content, it might not match your business. But you can do this with any style of content. There\’s might be something in popular culture 10 years ago, that if your thing is blogging that you can write a blog about and people go, Oh, yeah, I remember that.
10 years ago, everyone was talking about that. So it\’s not just video, this can be used in a lot of different areas of marketing, depending on what you\’re thinking and what you\’re good at and what\’s a good fit for your business.
13:41 Dan
So for the listeners who are thinking, I want to create something that generates 70,000 pounds worth of business and that kind of thing, what tips or what steps can you share that will help someone emulate the success of this video that we have created.
13:55 Lloyd 
So there are four steps, it\’s quite simple. The first one is getting people\’s attention. So we did this, as we\’ve said, with a clip from a viral video we knew was recognisable for our target market in marketing. But you can do this in a number of different ways. So you need to get people\’s attention on social, you can use a visual hook.
So in the first couple of seconds of the video, something that people are going to see that\’s visually intriguing or interesting. Or you can do what I would call a scripted hook, which is asking the audience a question or saying something in the first few seconds that is going to at least get their attention and do the job of making them keep on watching for a few more seconds.
14:37 Dan
This is another massive thing on TikTok, when you watch TikTok videos, lots of the viral videos have a hook. Like do you want to learn how to do this really good thing in three seconds, and then it like draws you in and gives you like, I want to learn how to do that really good thing in three seconds and then you watch the rest of the video so.
14:52 Lloyd 
Exactly, that\’s vital. So people are obviously you\’re scrolling through and something has got to give you that bit and your brain is like Oh, this might interest me, I\’ll be watching for another two seconds. So that\’s one thing, we did it, as I said, by using that viral video clip. But there are lots of ways that you can do that depending on what business you have and what industry you\’re in.
The next thing is to hold the attention with quality. So I said this a couple of episodes ago, but your video needs to be as long as it is good. So by holding attention to quality, I mean the video after you\’ve got their attention, it can\’t then just be you going. So Lloyd\’s cleaning services are Hoover\’s are the number one Hoover\’s in the southeast area, except that one of the competitors, because then you\’ve got their attention at the start and you\’ve wasted it. Anything that is not interesting, intriguing, or entertaining, for your audience needs to go.
So if you\’re new to video, and you\’re thinking I\’m not very good at this, your video might be nine seconds long. Because you might just think of something where you\’re saying, Oh, do you want to learn how to do this? And then you\’ve got your Hoover because you\’re in cleaning and you do this hack and go click click click. Oh, is that now you Hoover\’s two times as powerful? I\’m, Dave, get in touch.
And that\’s okay. I think a lot of people feel like they have to make long videos because like, well, I don\’t really know what to do. So if I just do more, maybe that\’s better.
16:28 Dan
I think something you\’re really good at Lloyd on this point is having a critical eye on everything. And even when we\’re looking at scripts and plans for videos asking, like, why is that bit in there? And it\’s I it\’s kind of rubbed off on me because when I\’m ever watching our own content or our client\’s videos, I\’m always thinking like, is that bit they\’re adding anything, even if we\’ve planned for it?
Like, is it actually adding anything or should take it all taking it out, and keep the viewer engaged for longer. So all listeners, please do have that critical eye over your content to cut any bits out that aren\’t actually adding anything.
17:00 Lloyd 
And we\’ve created social ads for businesses that are over five minutes long as an advert trying to sell stuff. And that\’s because we\’ve had the budget and we\’ve got the creative team to make that whole five minutes. Interesting for the target market entertaining, and they\’re gonna keep watching but obviously not all of our video content, let alone your video content is going to be you know, we\’ll have that budget and you\’ll be able to put that much work in so.
17:27 Dan
So you think everyone should make a five-minute video? 
17:28 Lloyd 
No, no, I\’m not Dan. Only if you\’ve if it\’s going to be brilliant for five minutes. Okay. And also maybe just ask someone else if it is brilliant. Because sometimes you can be really proud of something but then you might need a critical eye.
17:31 Dan
It\’s difficult though if you are really proud of something.
17:40 Lloyd   
I think you want to show it to someone that can be honest with you and be prepared to take the criticism and kind of prepare yourself because it doesn\’t feel nice all the time. But you got a two-minute video, show it to someone and kind of say, is there any part in this video that you think isn\’t as good as the rest that might not add much and cut it out.
17:40 Dan
Also, watch their reaction watching it as well. This is something you do with me to see which bits are funny in our content and stuff. So watch their reaction. If it looks like they\’re nodding off after a minute, then you\’d be prompt that it probably isn\’t engaging enough.
18:17 Lloyd
You can watch their genuine reaction. Also, I\’ve noticed when I know a piece of video content isn\’t good enough. I find myself when they\’re watching it go, oh, there\’s a bit in a minute as good. Yeah, just wait just after this bit, there\’s a good bit. If you\’re finding yourself doing that to justify to someone they\’ve got to keep watching, you\’re not going to be behind the person watching your video content.
So that\’s, that\’s something that communicates it might need adapting as well. So holding the attention with quality, so as long as you can make it good, but no longer.
And then really important to find opportunities to show how good you are. So I said about the cleaning, I just pitched my moustache in a really strange way.
19:04 Dan
All the viewers you were lucky enough to see that.
19:08  Lloyd 
Find opportunities to show how good you are. So if you are that cleaning, say you own a cleaning company. You\’ve already found an interesting way to hook the people in you\’re doing something interesting. See, like, do you want to know how hoovered up a pea from 10 metres away? And then you got them in and then they think even me not being in cleaning.
I\’d be like oh yeah, I want to see that. And then you show you got this Oh, and then when you\’ve got the attention finding a way to communicate why this makes your business good, why they should maybe consider working with you. And because a lot of people can make some interesting video of doing that. And then like, oh, what\’s the point of that for my business?
Really? Yeah, that\’s interest to someone but they\’re never gonna get in touch. Yeah, but then just dropping in something. While once you\’ve got their attention say something like, oh, this makes our cleaning teams two times more efficient. So we\’re half the price of our competitors. And just a line like that. And then suddenly, it\’s that light bulb moment of someone that\’s down the road that needs some new cleans for their offices, like, oh, well, okay, it\’s half the price that could save us some money.
20:16 Dan
I do think you\’re onto something here. I think some people see the success of like, entertaining content and just think that\’s it. Just make a stupid video. Oh, did stupid stuff. And then someone watches it, as their target market watches it and sort of like, Oh, that was funny.
20:32 Lloyd
It\’s easier to get attention and views than it is to get real business leads of Interest and money, and income, real money that you can have in your business. So although it\’s fun, and it\’s nice to see your metrics go, we got 10,000 views on a video, and we got 100,000 views, it is genuinely easier to get those views than it is to actually do something with them.
And this is the hard bit. So this step finding those opportunities to communicate and show why your business is good at what it does and how you\’re going to solve that person\’s or that business\’s problems. That\’s the real skill.
And then finally, which is another step that needs to happen, which I mentioned at the start creating an ecosystem that basically makes it a no brainer for people to get in touch with you. So around that video. If they watch you thinking, wow, we hoovered that pea up from 10 metres away, and they\’re still watching.
And then they hear you and you say you\’re half the price of your competitors. And they go, Oh my God, that could actually save some money, and they click or they Google your business name. If the next thing they see doesn\’t impress them as much as what they\’ve just been impressed by, you\’re probably never going to hear from them.
21:49 Dan
That\’s a really good point. I think trying to understand the customer journey and what when they\’ve seen you hoover that pea up from their metres or hey, what\’s their journey their lives.
For example, if you\’ve had a TikTok video of hoovering up a pickup from 10 metres away that draws them in, they\’re thinking oh, and they\’re half the price, they might go to your TikTok page, look at some other videos, do they look like you\’re good and know what you\’re doing, then click on your website, they might look around and look at your about page and background and look at if you\’ve got case studies or testimonials, and it\’s building all of these pieces of content that give gives that potential customer what they want along the way to demonstrate that you\’re the best solution to their problem.
There\’s a lot of work that goes into it.
22:22 Lloyd
Yeah, and I don\’t know if you\’ve seen these but I\’ve seen it\’s usually kind of crafty arty people on Tik Tok, that have got like 3 million views showing how they make their product.
And then they put out TikTok saying, like, here are my views, like 3 million views, and here are my orders and they got like four orders. And you think like, I would think if 3 million people watched a piece of my content, I would, maybe I\’d get 150 orders minimum, or you know, maybe I\’d get even 100 orders and it would be great for my business.
But I think that really shows you can get attention. But if you don\’t, if the product or service isn\’t good enough, or the way you communicate your product, and service isn\’t good enough, once they move from that video, it\’s not actually going to do anything to help you.
23:07 Dan
A really good activity to do to ensure you\’re giving the potential customer all the answers and information they want is to either speak to your sales team, if you have a sales team or if it is literally just you think back to all of the kind of either question you\’ve got from potential customers or queries or objections you\’ve had from potential customers because they\’re the things that are stopping that potential customer buying your product or service.
And think about how you can create content that answers that kind of questions or queries or overcomes those objections. So for example, one of the questions you might get, you might commonly get is, I\’m not sure if this is worth the money, but it seems quite expensive. I\’m not sure it\’s worth the money. How could you overcome that?
On the product page of your website, you could have a symbol showing all of the things that demonstrate value, like it\’s got a 30-day money-back guarantee. It\’s got a 50-day warranty. It\’s got free returns. It\’s made from this special material that lasts like double as long as your competitors, it\’s good material, think of all the things and there\’s a really good example.
So I remember if you go on like Jim sharks website, they\’ve got a look on their product pages. And this is a tip for any industry actually look at the industry leaders in your industry, look at their pages on their website, and product pages and see what they\’re doing. Because yeah, they\’re probably investing millions in optimising that page. And you can steal those ideas for your page.
24:41 Lloyd 
Yes, to create video content that can have success like ours where we got 70,000 pounds of opportunities within a week. We need to get their attention. We need to hold their attention by only making videos as long as they are good. And then we need to find up to opportunities to show how good our businesses, our products or services is a product or service is learn how to speak.
And then we need to create the ecosystem around that video. So when they move away from that, that video, wherever it is on the internet, that they\’re really impressed, and it matches the quality and they become a customer or they become a lead whatever works for your business.
25:26 Dan
I like that my favourite part is the ecosystem part, I must say.
25:30 Lloyd
I think it\’s massive because people put massive effort into trying video to bring in new customers and lead video and social. And then I think people give up because they think, Oh, I didn\’t get any customers. And it\’s, it\’s not actually because of the video, they\’ve done well with that they\’re doing well with their content.
It\’s what people experience after, I think we\’re helping, or I\’m helping our local squash club because we really love the squash club and love playing squash. And they\’re kind of wondering why they\’re not getting new members. And the squash club is really great. The people are great. But when people get in touch, they usually wait a couple of weeks before they get a reply.
Simple things like that were like, oh, that didn\’t match the experience I thought I would get. So yeah, it\’s something to think about that ecosystem around your content.
26:17 Dan
Something you could do if you\’re thinking maybe something\’s happening along the way, my process is actually mapping out the customer journey and thinking, right, what\’s the first touch point, they see us or they search on Google? What\’s the second they go on our website, and they contact us via this form or call us and actually map that process out and ask each of those steps what could be happening that makes it rubbish.
26:37 Lloyd
That could highlight where you\’re missing out on customers that actually want to buy from you. It may be that if they Google My Business Name, we actually come from the second page of Google. So then it\’s like, okay, that\’s something we need to work on. Because that\’s where we\’re losing people when they\’re trying to get to us.
Or it might be when you click on our website, we\’ve still got that old case study that doesn\’t really reflect the quality of what they\’ve seen in the video. And that\’s the first thing that comes up, then that\’s what you need to work on. Or oh, we only, we only do 30-day delivery. And now people expect to get it within a day or two.
That\’s something you need to work on. I think like saying mapping out that journey, making sure it all matches the quality of the brilliant content you\’ve put out is really important.
27:19 Dan
I just want to finish by saying thank you to your anchors, because I\’ve noticed and I\’ve been sending you stuff, Lloyd. A lot more of you are just posting and screenshotting the podcasts and sharing them online and saying that you\’re enjoying them. So to everyone that is doing that. Thank you because it does help us reach more people and get more listeners to this pod. So thank you.
27:39 Lloyd 
Thank you, guys. Yeah, really, we enjoy doing it. And so please do that more. So we can do this more.
27:45 Dan
I don\’t enjoy it that much.
27:46  Lloyd
It\’s good for me because I get to talk to Dan also he has to talk to me. Yeah, not as good. But I\’ve really enjoyed this one. I hope you\’ve enjoyed us in your ears. And we\’ll see you your ears and your ears next wee
Hopefully, this has been useful and helped you to understand how you can implement a video marketing strategy that generates new business opportunities. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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