The combination of smartphone video and social media – especially YouTube – has created amazing branding and marketing opportunities for firms and individuals alike.
But if video marketing is so powerful, why is it that so few businesses and business professionals are taking advantage of it to build their brands and accelerate their revenue growth?
In search of the answer, I asked Justin Brown, co-founder of Primal Video, a video training and resources firm located in Brisbane, Australia, to join me for a conversation on Radio Free Enterprise.
Justin and his brother (and co-founder) Mike have produced 328 videos to date, that have attracted over 700,000 subscribers and millions of views. They also run an online training program called Primal Video Accelerator that not only explains why video is such a powerful marketing tool but also teaches you how to leverage it most effectively.
As a graduate of the course myself, I can tell you that it is the real deal. In this conversation, I will ask Justin to share some tips on how you can start building your brand – business or personal – right away.
Learn more about Primal Video and their Accelerator Training Program. https://bit.ly/3e6bopW
What follows is a computer-generated transcription. Please excuse any typos.
My guest today is Justin Brown. Justin is the co-founder of Primal Video, which is a video education and resources located in Brisbane, Australia.
Justin, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much for having me.
I had the opportunity to study under you for several months. I mentioned you had appeared on a previous appearance here on Radio Free Enterprise, and I learned a lot from you and it’s little wonder because you are a genuine video guru.
I got to read some statistics here. When it comes to video production and YouTube, you have almost 700,000 subscribers currently. 328 videos posted of which I’ve noticed several have over 1,000,000 views each and over 60,000,000 total video views on YouTube.
That’s pretty impressive, and you clearly know what you’re talking about when it comes to both video production and distribution. Your company’s motto is.
Grow your brand and scale your revenue with video. That’s exactly what I want to talk about. Today is how people can do that. Now you have your primal video accelerator program that helps people do exactly what your model states. Can you tell us a little bit about?
I guess on a general level what people learn who enroll in the accelerator program.
Yeah, perfect and again thanks for having me on so our accelerated program is kind of the next step from our YouTube content so we put out one free video on YouTube every week talking around video creation around growing on YouTube and also on a random monetization. Or the revenue side of this as well. So inside of accelerator is kind of the deep dive into those. It is our playbook on how we run Primal Video. It’s our process. Is our systems out checklists?
The tools and things that we used to run primal Video and that we, you know, help and share with our clients as well. So that’s everything from our entire keyword research process.
How we come up with topic ideas that we know people are searching for right through to? How do we optimize our videos and what we’re saying inside of our videos to help our viewers stick around in the video, but also to help you to place our content in front of the right people and then obviously through to the monetization stuff where we dive into affiliate revenue and revenue streams that you can add into your business?
Even if you’re just starting out on things like YouTube right through to email strategy and how we grow our email list off the back of YouTube so it really is the playbook of how we run our business.
And as having had the opportunity to study under yuan for several months, I’ve learned so much my objective going in was to up my game and as being a video shooter, an editor and using edit edited video to market my services and I found that just virtually any company could and should be using video to market their services?
Can you give me an idea? This is kind of a curveball question for you, but why do you think more companies don’t use video?
I think it’s not as easy as some of the other avenues that people have to get content out there to show up online. I’d say one of the easiest ways is just to run an ad or booster post on things like Facebook or excuse me or Google ad, But the problem is that with their kind of pay to play, they’re going to drop off after you stop throwing money at them, whereas we like You Tube, we’d like to look at YouTube as the long game.
So you might be creating videos, but not seeing that initial traction for your business or for your brand that you might like, but you’ve got to stick with it. YouTube Rewards consistency and it also rewards you if you’re doing research and things upfront in creating the videos that your ideal audience, your ideal target customers are looking for. And I mean if it is kind of almost The thing is like.
People are going to be searching for stuff. How do you make sure that you show up as a as the solution or as the person that can help with a company that they need to go to instead of your competitors?
So that’s the stuff that we teach. How do you get your stuff to show up?
And people are looking for that information. I mean, that’s the thing that I think a lot of companies miss. Particularly smaller companies is that their clients their prospects are searching every day on Google on YouTube.
Looking for the answers to problems like my basement has a leak in it or my roof has a leak in it or there’s you know my dog has fleas. God only knows there’s so many.
Things, millions of topics and questions that people are asking every day and people providers who are out there with videos that answer those questions are winning the day.
Can you give us any examples either of students of yours or companies that you’re aware of that have had great success following your program and seen it generate sales increases for them?
Yeah, so we’ve had everything from people teaching online like Excel courses, so they’re teaching to businesses primarily.
And putting out a lot of the stuff that they teach and selling their courses as those are the fishing lines in the ocean. So to say, putting him out there onto YouTube and Google so that people can find them. Because what do people do? They look for someone to Doctor Google first to self-diagnose or see if they can figure stuff out for themselves long before they might be ready to invest in a product or a course or they want to compare two products side by side.
So now what your review video? So this really can apply to anything. We also have said Excel right through to personal trainers and people in the.
Fitness space which you would imagine is a really highly saturated market with lots of people. Just posting workout videos and those kinds of things. But following the strategies that we teach, we’ve got a lot of successful people that are jump straight to the top of YouTube and Google and so much so that we have people that have stopped even doing their personal training stuff just to focus online. Now because the revenue streams.
Once they’ve built the audience and the engagement all the way through there, now able to build the business that they want. Just sharing and talking about the stuff that they’re interested in.
That’s great and they’ve totally D coupled hours from dollars that by putting in this consistent effort that you teach eventually it’s like a flywheel that spins faster and faster. Although once you don’t have to push it any much, you know maybe once or twice a week and it’s just going to keep rolling and generating money.
Now, one thing you and I both of you know worked with video for years and years and in the last 10 years or so since the advent of the iPhone, particularly, the fact that there is this incredibly high quality digital widescreen high definition camera right in your pocket every minute.
Is nothing short of amazing. Well, at least to somebody like me and probably to you as well. We get used to it overtime, but.
With that in mind, here we have this tool. This powerful tool that not only can capture the video, but can distribute it worldwide. Why do you think more people, particularly businesspeople?
Aren’t using that tool now. You mentioned it’s not as easy as you think, but you think there’s a particular rub. There’s a particular limiting step like.
Editing, that’s really people are really getting hung up on.
Well, I think it’s almost good to convince people first that their phone is good enough. I mean, they already know that it’s good enough to make their family videos and those little maybe Instagram posts. And those sorts of things. But the biggest fear that people have with any sort of video creation is how they’re going to be. The fear of judgment. You know how they’re going to be perceived, how they’re going to look, how they’re going to sound, and no one wants to put out something where they’re not in.
The best light.
So that comes down to a lot of things. It comes down to your camera and your lighting. What you’re saying right through to the audio and editing and everything, but so we like to call the you know your iPhones and your Android devices. These are your excuse Busters, because you’re what you’re carrying in your pocket as you’ve said, is is more than good enough quality. We have a video on our channel that is.
Be almost five years old now. It was shot on the front facing camera on an iPhone 5 which is from 2012, so that video is still getting hundreds of views per day and people still blown away with the quality. And it’s not even the good camera. The one on the back and it’s a phone from 2012, so I’m here to remove your excuses any day of the week. You’ve already got everything that you need to get started.
But go into it with the plan and look at the content that you’re creating and look at what your viewers actually want from you and start to create those view.
Videos, the biggest mistake that I see people make, especially for looking to bring using this as a business tool to bring in leads and customers and those sorts of things is that they want to speak specifically about their product or service. But the problem is that’s the solution where people are looking for is the problem, so it’s not just about creating videos around the solution.
People don’t know what that is, so they find it hard to search for it. Talk to the problem how to overcome this. Best way to do this?
Top options for solving this problem and then introduce your those viewers to your solution to you know that one of the best ways I found is with this product and hey, you can pick it up over here or this is a review of that product to solve that problem. So they’re talking, you need to talk to this. Talk to the problem, not the solution. That’s the biggest.
Place that we see people get stuck.
That’s funny that you say that ’cause if they knew the solution, they wouldn’t have to search for it.
So we started an exam.
At the same place I mean the first videos that we were putting out on our channel. I was like this is an amazing tip for video editing and it’s going to if people learn these keyboard shortcuts. That’s going to change the game for them, but no one could find those videos because they didn’t know what to search for it to find it. And we didn’t know what to title it based on what you know it was all wrong and this is where we see a lot of people start.
As well, even though this is the stuff that you know is going to change the game for your people, they need to know. Take a step back and said, but what would you search for to find out what would they search for?
What does this solve? That’s really how you can get well ahead of most people that are uploading content on YouTube these days.
And your video accelerator program does such a great job of explaining that in further detail than you, and I have time for today and then going through step by step or here’s how you figure it out. Here is where you find the keywords.
Here’s how you test. Here’s how you improve overtime. One of the great things I I learned was that you guys just go ahead and put something out there. It’s more important.
To put it out there an. Let’s face it, you learn a lot more when you fail then when you succeed and then learn from that and then do a better job the next time. And so I just cannot recommend your program too highly because it starts from the ground floor and then goes all the way up to whatever you’d like and.
I think I also people can go to the Primal video YouTube channel and see a lot of the things that you talk about in practice. Look at the titles, look at the.
And you also teach how to structure the what you’re going to say in a way that it’s going to bring people in. And anyway, I just think it’s a great program and I wish more people would engage with it because then they can let go of those excuses. I like that excuse Buster expression. Now what?
Coming into it, what just give us a general overview of how the accelerator program is structured and how you walk people through.
From absolute beginner to YouTube hero.
OK, so where we’ve been in a lot, of course is an we invest in a lot of courses continuously. It’s all about in those courses. You’ll probably find that is one or two little gems or Nuggets of gold. You know. You know what that one thing has just changed the game for me and was worth every cent of the course. So we want to try and make it easy for our people in our program to find those Nuggets of gold.
As quickly as they can, we don’t want to go through hours and hours of con.
Sentence you know. Starting in module one, working all the way through to find these things, we just want to say here they are. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Because these are the things like the whole 8020 principle. This is the stuff we want you to have results with this stuff fast, so we really do call it like this is the fast track to seeing success with video in your business. And that’s.
It really is about overcoming those excuses. As you said, starting there’s a lot of people that go into courses and they learn they consume the knowledge, but they don’t actually put.
Things into play, and that’s really when you’re going to learn. Know that your first videos you’re going to produce are probably going to be your worst videos. You’re going to produce, but look at that 1% improvement overtime and that’s what we help you with all the way through. Where to improve, where to start, but also where to improve and wait to monitor weather, track and grow from there so we haven’t designed it as a startup module 1.
Work all the way through. This is a choose your own adventure, so we make it really easy for you to find the areas where you’re stuck right now. Whether it’s thumbnails weather.
Actually want to say in your videos or shooting your videos, get unstuck with that and then you can backfill around with the rest. When you’ve got time.
That’s great, and I think that’s an excellent approach in this topic area.
Now I’d like to say that virtually any professional could benefit from an succeed at video marketing. What’s your take on that statement?
I, I agree 100%. This is something that we’ve I’ve never seen, a nature, an industry, or someone that couldn’t benefit from this. It really is.
And if you’re questioning that said, that’s alright for you. I want to get people in the door in my actual business where it doesn’t. I can’t see how it fits for me. Take a step back and say. Are there any things that your potential clients or customers would be searching for online or anything that they could go to Google for to YouTube for something that they need to figure out or want to know? Then you could be the one that shows up.
Off the back of those, you could be the one that first second, third spot on Google and YouTube for those pains or problems or issues that your potential client.
And customers are solving, and that’s kind of our approach. From there, let’s find those topics and let’s get you to the top in those results.
Yeah, you could be that person an you should be that person because at least as of now, the vast majority of your competitors are not doing this and you could be that person, particularly if your business is locally oriented like a home service provider and air conditioning company floor replacement roofer.
What have you people?
A lot of questions about those things and these are big investments in their home, which is a very important property for them. If you can be the educator and advocate for their success with whatever their problem is, they’re going to do business with you. There’s just it makes you the easy choice, and it’s just difficult for me.
I guess to see why people don’t do it. I guess that from a cost benefit analysis it appears as though there’s going to be a lot more pain learning how to use video then benefit coming from it.
Do you have a by chance this is you didn’t see this coming, but like a breakthrough experience that one of your students had where they thought this will never work and then boom, it works.
Great, we have a lot of the time people come in there like you know, for the $37 a month I’ll give it ago, but I might pick up one to one thing or two things.
And then those are the people that start to see results really, really quickly by just implementing the simple stuff like making sure that the YouTube channel is actually set up right. Like simple things is.
Not something that people normally showed you. You just go through and create an account, but it’s lots of little things that you can set up in there to again help you to understand your content so that it could put it out in front of the right there in front of the right people. So it really is about helping your viewers and helping YouTube really understand your content in a way that it’s going to show up in front of the right people so we have a lot of people that come in kind of justice.
I’m going to give it a go and then the ones that take action. They’re the ones that see the results were the same as any business.
It really is about, you know, done is better than perfect. I want to see you go through. I want to see you create your first video, but also likewise, if you’re someone who’s further along the journey, there’s so many little things that you could now test and optimize because you’ve got that traffic coming through. So we help you with that as well.
So how can somebody engage with primal video and your accelerator program? What’s the best thing for them to do?
So I mean the normally how we run it with having in take off the back of our off the back of some.
Free training and I can give you a link to our next free training workshop. Great which case we’ll take would talk through some of the blueprints and strategies and how the whole thing works and how everything fits together. And then there’s an invitation to join off the back of it. Now we keep the doors closed to accelerator so that we can focus on working with our members on the inside and we have set intake periods throughout.
Throughout the year, so best bet will be there will be a link. Maybe I’ll give you a link behind the to put below this video around this video and at least you can join the wait list there to be notified.
Great, I appreciate that and I will put it. This video is going to appear all over the place so I’ll make sure that that link follows it wherever it goes.
We’re just about out of time, Justin. I wanted to ask you on the way out. Is there like one big thing? One big piece of advice that you would share with a business owner? Either you know, here’s why you really got to do it, or here’s what you’re going to be surprised to find out or.
I don’t know, just give 1 one last thing you’d like to leave him with.
OK so I say one big thing is that the power of YouTube and one of the biggest reasons that we love it is ’cause you invest the time to create the content and your content sticks around. You’ve got places like LinkedIn places like Instagram, Facebook, whatever right you post on there and your post could stay a couple of days.
Couple of hours. In some cases a couple of minutes before it’s gone from people’s newsfeeds. Or, you know, from their vision from you not able to get it back in front of them, whereas we like YouTube. YouTube is a search engine and we get a lot of traffic even through Google. ’cause Google owns YouTube so people are searching for things maybe not even a video, but our videos show up and they show up above the paid ads on Google.
Which is really interesting, so it’s really easy to get your content to the top of both Google and YouTube, but also the lifetime of your content. It’s literally measured in years.
Not days or weeks or in some cases minutes on some of these platforms, so that’s why we love it, and that’s why we’re a big advocate for it.
Justin Brown, thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you very much for having me on.
Thanks again to Justin and thank you for joining us until next time I’m Frank Felker, saying I’ll see you on the radio.
