Amber:  Hi I’m Amber Ambrose and this is The BusinessMakers Show.  Today my guest is Howard Hale of Hale Syndicate and he is all about the marketing.  So welcome to the show Howard.

Howard:  Thank you so much.

Amber: Thanks for joining us.  Okay, so tell me a little bit – just a snapshot of Hale Syndicate; what do you do and how do you do it?

Howard:  We are a boutique marketing agency here in the Seattle area and our sole focus is BusDev.  We help our clients move the needle and grow their business; if you go to our website it says inspiring growth.  So we’re all about helping our clients grow their business, increase sales and create happy customers.

Amber:  Sounds good, so how do you do that?

Howard:  Well that’s an excellent question and one of the things that clients often ask me is they say what kind of tactic can we get started with?  And frequently it’s either they want to start with social or they want to start with a paper click ad campaign and we often have to educate them on thinking for more of a 100,000 foot view.

Amber:  So the long term thing, not just a short term.

Howard:  Long term and a broader perspective.  So when you look at it from a larger perspective you realize that tactic is just one piece of your overall marketing strategy and in and of itself it can’t sustain lead generation or help you move the needle.

Amber:  Especially if you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.

Howard:  Exactly, so it’s more about what are the client’s needs, who are they trying to appeal to their website or their social sites; what’s their demographic? How do they tell their story?  And so we use a lot of different tactics in that strategy to help formulate the overall perspective.

Amber:  So it sounds like a lot of your tactics or strategies involve mostly internet marketing.

Howard:  Yeah, yeah I would say that.  It’s so fragmented now; there’s so many choices.  There’s a million different marketing tactics out there that you can use and knowing which ones are the right ones for your client can be challenging.  So we start off with some of the basics that we know that work and the hot ticket right now is video marketing.  So I wrote a book called Video Marketing Works if you Work It and it’s all about leveraging video for small business.

Amber:  Speaking of, I know you’ve written some other books about vidoes but maybe some tips that people could use themselves using their smartphone.  I would love to know some more things because I think people are intimidated by video.

Howard:  Absolutely.

Amber:  And so we have this magical device these days that comes and it’s handheld and there’s just so much possibility.  I would love to hear your take on that.

Howard:  That’s interesting because it’s such a powerful little tool and you know a lot of phones now shoot 4K which is some pretty high resolution.  If you’ve got great lighting and a lavaliere microphone you can produce professional quality videos with your smart phone.  I think the reason people don’t do it is fear and/or they just don’t have the experience.  I mean there’s plenty of YouTube videos out there, I’ve made hundreds of them on how to create great videos.  So why that’s important and why you want to do both is twofold; one, it gives you experience on camera so you get all those nervous bugs out when you do a professional shot shooting with an iPhone or an Android device.  Two, is more frequency; you can create videos on a more frequent basis, upload it to your social sites, put them on your website and I guess actually three, they’re more authentic.

Amber:  Yeah, that’s true because it’s literally just sort of on the fly.

Howard:  Yeah, absolutely, and especially like if you need a customer testimonial and your customer is in your store or your location, you want to take advantage of that.  And you can literally shoot, edit and upload in about 10 minutes and that’s less time than it takes you to write a blog.  So that’s why vlogging has become so popular.

Amber:  So why do you think video is sort of the new route that people are going for marketing, especially online?

Howard:  Well it’s kind of the next thing that people haven’t figured out and so I try to work my way up the food chain as far as marketing tactics go and so I think the big challenge is just education and how to leverage it and where is the best us of it?  If you can get a video to rank of the first page of Google for have a 47% higher click through ratio than you do with a regular hyperlink because you’ve got that thumb nail that shows up right there.  So it’s really an advantage for people.  We produced a hundred videos for a local plumbing company and we got some of those to rank for certain search terms and it’s a long term play.  So pay per click you pay and you pay and the price continues to go up whereas with video or any other type of long term search strategy you’re going to have that longevity and your cost for acquisition is going to go down.

Amber:  That makes sense.  And then you’re also – you have content that you can leverage on all kinds of different channels.  Because if you have it on YouTube you could also upload it to Facebook or you can share it on Twitter and you can and it’s – there’s just so much you can get out of that one video I imagine.

Howard:  Yeah, repurposing that content is – it can go miles and just taking little vignettes and cutting them into pieces.  So maybe like an interview like we’re doing, you ask a question, you chop it into a 60 second piece and now you have another piece of content that you can repurpose.

Amber:  Right, like totally separate from the interview.

Howard:  Exactly.

Amber:  I am curious if you have any sort of baseline for some of the major things that you look for in a video or tell your clients to aim for.  Do you have some guidelines?

Howard:  Excellent question.  Yeah, so You Tube right now they’re saying 2 minutes is the optimal timeline but if you’re a vlogger and you have tons of followers they’re going up to 10 minutes.  So it depends on how deep they are into the website; on the front page you want 2 – 3 minutes max.  As you dig down into the website and you’re educating your consumer you can go up to 10 minutes.  But it’s always better if you can break it down into pieces and so that they can find the content that they want to watch.  You also have tools that you can see where they drop off and how long they actually watched the video which is really, really important.

Amber:  It’s crazy how short our attention spans are isn’t it?

Howard:  Yeah, people aren’t reading, they’re just watching videos now.  Between – the demographic between 18 and 30 year old males they primarily watch more YouTube videos than they do network television.

Amber:  That’s a fascinating statistic.  So what are some parting words of advice that you would have for people that are saying okay, this has peeked my interest, I think I might try my iPhone or my Android and take a few videos?

Howard:  Just try it.  Get a lavaliere because audio is 30% of it and they’re on Amazon, they’re like $30; they’re super inexpensive.  You plug it into your iPhone, get an inexpensive tripod and just start practicing and uploading.  If you’re on the IOS device you can use iMovie to edit with and any app will record the video.  And you just watch yourself, let about 24 hours lapse and then watch again because you’ll have a different perspective.

Amber:  That’s a great tip because when you first watch it you might be like oh my gosh I cant’ believe I did this but after the dust settles.

Howard:  Yeah, and then you want to evolve your videos over time, you’ll learn more every video you do and produce and upload; you’ll learn.  And then you’ll feel comfortable enough to post it on your social sites and then at some point you’ll want to make a connection with a professional video service company, get them to help you with either a trailer or an intro or an outro and then you can produce content and put it in the middle and put those outros and intros on the video and you’re going to have a professional looking video.

Amber:  And bring it to the next level.

Howard:  That’s right, that’s right.

Amber:  Thank you so much Howard, those were some good tips that people can actually use.  And just to finish off here just remember guys, Howard says if you’re going to do video just start.

Howard:  Just go for it and don’t forget, subscribe to this channel, okay?

Amber:  And you can take a nap on the pillow.  Once again I am Amber Ambrose, this is Howard Hale and this is The BusinessMakers; thanks for joining us.