In this episode of the Engage Video Marketing podcast, I’m going to share with you one of the most successful strategies that I’ve used over many years to generate countless leads for my video strategy business and hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales so that you can use this strategy too.
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Transcript of the Interview: ** Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.
How are you generating leads as a video strategist? Well, in this episode, I’m going to share with you one of the most successful strategies that I’ve used over many years to generate countless leads for my video strategy business and hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales so that you can use this strategy too.
G’day and welcome back to the Engage Video Marketing Podcast. This is episode 286. And this episode, I’m kind of pulling from my personal toolkit as a video strategist. I’ll be peeling back the layers and revealing one of my most powerful lead generating tactics for my video strategy business. And that tactic is public speaking. Now, before you start picturing huge stages and auditoriums full of people, let me clarify that this can be from intimate workshops with a handful of people all the way up to, yeah, larger conferences. But the art of public speaking with purpose It’s really been a game changer for me. In fact, I’ve taken a look at some of our lead generation reports in my business prior to this recording this episode, and we’re talking nearly 100 qualified leads leading to easily $450,000 in sales plus over the last few years. So for all of my fellow video strategists and producers out there, whether you’re listening on the podcast or you’re watching here on YouTube, in this episode, I’m not going to be just sharing a story about what I’ve done, but also a bit of a framework, step-by-step. I’m going to break it down for you about how I approach public speaking with purpose to generate leads for my video business. I’ll also be sharing the strategies that I employed in the lessons that I’ve learned and probably a few cautionary tales to help you navigate this landscape even better than I did when I first got started in this way. So whether you’re a seasoned speaker or you’re just considering stepping onto the stage for the first time, then I reckon this episode is going to be a really good one for you. And this episode is one of the first episodes that I’m doing which is more about me sharing what I’m doing in my video strategy business. So as we go through this episode, I’d love to hear from you. Either leave me a comment below here on YouTube or if you’re listening to the podcast, email podcast at engagevideomarketing.com and let me know what you think of this sort of episode. It’s just a solo show today. It’s just me sharing what’s been working for me with public speaking to generate leads. All right, let’s dive in. So I’m going to share with you seven steps that I’ve kind of go through when I’m using this strategy to generate leads for my video business. And each one of these steps kind of is chronological. So as you go through this, you can take notes or you can go to the show notes page at engagevideomarketing.com slash 286 and we’ll have the steps broken down for you there. But really before you get started with this strategy for generating leads in your business, the first step is I want you to identify what your goals are. So, why you’re generating leads in the first place. So, for me it came down to I knew that I needed to reach more of our local business market. So, we’re talking when I first started using this strategy probably six or seven years ago. I knew that I needed to increase the exposure of our business and me as an expert in video marketing and video strategy with that local business target audience that we had. And I also recognized that the barrier or the problem that those local businesses had is, number one, they didn’t necessarily know about us. So, speaking was designed to improve that. And number two, is they weren’t really thinking about the potential for video strategy for their business. There was often some misconceptions around what video marketing was and what it took to be successful with video marketing for a business. So I knew that I needed to get in front of those business audiences and open their eyes to the opportunity in using video to promote their business. So that’s why I started speaking as a lead generation tool. So my first step and what I want to kind of. share with you is that your first step needs to be to really get clear on what your goals are. Why are you generating leads in the first place? So be clear on what is your product or service that you’re generating leads for? And once you’re clear on that, then who is the ideal audience that you need to get in front of? You don’t want to be speaking to the wrong people. Is that ideal audience small local business owners or is it certain industry types that you want to get in front of or is it certain roles within an organisation like marketing managers or CMOs or do you want to get in front of the social media managers or agencies? So, identify what is the ideal audience that you need to get in front of and then the last part here is also be super clear on what the problem is that they have that your product or service solves. So, if you can find the right audience that has the problem that your product or service solves, then we can move on to the next step of figuring out how to get in front of them for these speaking opportunities. So from there, the second step is you need to find those opportunities to speak. Now when I started out here, I was fortunate that my business was based within a kind of a co-working collaborative space. So there were already businesses there around who were our ideal target audience for what we did in my video business. So that’s where I started. It was obviously a lower impact kind of an experience for me as well because I was speaking to people who I kind of knew personally just from being around that co-working space. So my first speaking opportunity for lead generation, again taking back like seven or eight years ago, was to people who I already knew but they didn’t know what really what we did. So, you know, it was a small group but I identified that that was an easy place to start. From there I went to local chambers of commerce, I went to BNI and networking groups and breakfast networking groups and I started to expand the sizes of the audience that I was seeking to get in front of and expanding outside of my initial kind of network as well. But for you to find opportunities, you need to be looking in those sorts of spaces around you and your business. So, Chambers of Commerce are a great opportunity. Networking groups, like I said, like BNI, maybe you’re a member or maybe you can speak as a special guest in those sorts of networking groups. Also, industry groups, if you’re specifically focused on a particular industry, often they have certain industry groups and sometimes there’s even some you know, continuing professional development or CPD requirements that they have, so they want people to come and, you know, speak and educate their people. I’ve also found success with making connections with business coaches or business advisors or accountants. Really, it’s about seeking those businesses whose job it is to support the growth of other businesses. And obviously, there’s an alignment there with video marketing and video strategy that you can connect with. So when we have identified some of these opportunities to speak, you can also then kind of think about, is it the right audience for you? So try and do some research into who are the kinds of people that are showing up at these events and who’s likely to be the bums on the seats in front of you when you land that speaking opportunity. Make sure that that audience is aligned as closely as you can to your ideal audience that you want to serve in your business. So audience alignment is the first thing. The second thing then is purpose alignment. So what that comes down to is making sure that the business or the organization that you’re trying to get an opportunity to speak in front of, that they’re aligned with the purpose that you have of educating or growing businesses. Because good video strategy or video marketing, the goal of that is to grow a business. So that’s why I think things like Business coaches and accountants are a really good alignment because their goal is to help their businesses, their business clients thrive, right? So they see alignment in the purpose here. They’re like, okay, we get the value of having you come and speak to our client base or our audiences. So, make sure that purpose is aligned there and also make sure that the type of event aligns to the sort of training that you want to
deliver in your speaking opportunity. So, that means it’s probably not ideal for like a, you know, canapé style with drinks networking kind of an event, you know, that’s probably not the right event to be pitching your you’re speaking to. However, something that is more, you know, corporate focused or something where there is other elements of education within the event, that could be ideal. When you’re thinking about events as well that you’re finding opportunities to speak at, don’t forget to consider virtual stages as well. So by virtual stages, I mean it doesn’t need to be in person all the time. In fact, it may be guesting on a podcast. Think of that as a stage that you’re speaking on. Same approach applies when you’re doing that or virtual summits or even pre-recording video trainings and supplying that to some of these businesses that you’re aligning with. So, you might not need to do it live. You might just be able to support their members or their clients in other ways through more virtual training as well. Once you’ve identified those opportunities to speak at, then you need to actually approach the event organisers. You need to get them to say yes, come and speak to our people. Now, What I’m referring to here when it comes to lead generation, obviously you’re not, usually you’re not able to and you’re not likely to charge a speaking fee to present for these organizers. So the value that you get is really the opportunity to position your business in front of the ideal target audience that they have in that room, right? So if you do this right, you don’t need a speaking fee to make it worth your while. The goal here when you approach the event organisers is really approach it from a leading with value kind of a mentality, right? So if you lead the conversation through a view of seeking to add value to their audience or to their members or to their network, and you know the value that you have, that you can share around video marketing and video strategy, and you also know, and you can reflect this back to the event organiser, you can say to them that you know that their audience is wanting this information that you’re able to share, because people are confused about video, or they’re excited about video, or they’re not taking action on video because they don’t have the information that you’re going to share with them, right? So, approach it through a view of seeking to add value. But then also be really clear that you’re not going to be pitching your services at this opportunity, you know, when you’re speaking to their audience. Nobody wants to bring people in to just pitch their services at an audience. So, what I want you to do is to position it as that you’re not only going to add value during the presentation, but you’re also going to offer more value to the audience for free afterwards as well. I’m going to talk you through this strategy in a moment. But when you approach the event organizer and say, look, I want to come and speak in front of your people, I want to add a lot of value around video strategy, I’m not going to pitch, I’m not going to be, you know, spruiking our services, but I am going to ask for the opportunity to add more value for free to those people in the audience. Does that sound okay to you? And of course they’re going to say yes, because they’re going to look like the good guys, the organizers of the event, and you’re going to look like you’re adding a lot of value there as well, because of course you are adding value. So when you’ve approached the event organisers, let’s assume they’ve said yes here, then you need to go on and plan your talk. Now for me, I planned a 30-ish minute presentation with slides and so on, originally back in like 2016 or 17 that I realistically rolled out a variation of that same workshop for easily four or five years without making significant changes to it. So when you’re planning your talk, think about not just planning a talk and slides for one particular event, but think about creating your signature talk, something that you can roll out many times without putting additional effort into creating your presentation or preparing your slides or creating your talk. So obviously you know what you want to be doing is not just again pitching your services in your talk but really educate, add value to the audience about video strategy or about you know how to get started with DIYing video. The mindset here is to think about what are the first roadblocks that that audience has to taking action with using video marketing for their business. Many times it could be a lack of understanding about video marketing, so they just don’t know what they don’t know, so you can seek to educate them about video marketing. Or it could be that they’re scared of wasting time and money, so you can focus more of your presentation around how to ensure that your video marketing is going to get a return on investment, for example. So that’s going to help them overcome those initial roadblocks. Or maybe they’ve been trying to do things themselves unsuccessfully trying to do things in video marketing. So if you identify that then perhaps that makes sense to kind of add some element of DIY video training into your workshop as well. So you know how to shoot better content on your smartphone is a great example of a free workshop you can add that adds value to the audience but positions you as the expert that can lead to further value down the track. So when you’re planning out your talk, I recommend that you plan a talk that can be somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes, maybe longer, but usually that’s the sweet spot that most of these organizations are going to want you to speak for. So I recommend planning a talk that is the ideal duration, about 30 minutes long, but it can be cut down and condensed into a 15 minute if you’ve only got a 15 minute time slot. But make sure to allow at least five minutes, ideally around about 10 minutes within your presentation to really position your offer of further value. And I’m going to explain that in a moment as well. So you need to add value during your presentation, but make sure that you don’t forget and you don’t rush it at the end, this offer to add further value, because that’s where the lead generation aspect really hits home with this sort of strategy as well. So, when you’re planning out your talk, the structure really is four stages in that presentation. So, make sure that you open with something that’s really clarifying the problem that those business owners are facing when it comes to video marketing or video strategy. So, start with the problem. So, if you can start with the problem, the audience is going to sit up and pay attention and say to themselves, gosh, I need to pay attention to what this guy is saying over the next few minutes because I have that problem. So then obviously you’ve established the problem, the next stage of your structure of your presentation is around the solution that you want to talk about. And that solution is probably how video marketing is the answer to their problem, right? But give them some real value. So the third stage is actually educate. Teach them something. Provide a framework. Give them some kind of an understanding. They can take some notes on and take away, even if they don’t go any further with your business, that they’ve got real value from this presentation that you’ve shared today. And if you kind of ask yourself, what value am I sharing in this presentation? And you’re unsure yourself, then you need to rework your presentation and get some real value in there. And then finally, the fourth stage of your structure for your talk is that offer. So you need to put some real thought into how to position the offer of further value that you’re going to give to that audience as well. Because if you get that wrong, then potentially you miss out on the lead generation opportunity of this speaking opportunity that you’ve landed yourself in. Okay, moving along now, we’re up to step five here. Step five is when you’re going to be really mapping out and getting clear on what is your offer funnel when it comes to speaking op
portunities. So it starts with, your offer funnel starts with this values-based presentation. So make sure that the first point of contact for that audience member is that you get, you deliver masses of value to them in that presentation. Start there, that’s critical. then the next stage of that funnel should be some sort of offer of additional value. So for me, when I started this process, I offered an additional one-on-one 60-minute video strategy discovery session for anyone who wanted to just go deeper into some of the ideas that I shared during the workshop. There was no obligation to buy at that strategy session and there was no cost to that strategy session. So by offering additional value, you’re not pitching your services, but you’re moving that prospect closer towards buying from you by moving them down the funnel. So a few other ways that you could offer more value at the end of your presentation could be if you don’t want to do, say, one-on-one time, if that doesn’t make sense for you, or your funnel here, then maybe it’s a lead magnet. Maybe you can offer a page, they can scan a QR code from your slides and take them to a landing page where they can enter their email address and they download some sort of a PDF or a lead magnet. So that could be a great offer of more value at the end of your presentation. Again, you’re not pitching. The pitching then, or the next steps to your funnel, come in, say, the email follow-up that happens now that you’ve got that email address. So, another thing that you could consider is maybe doing a video marketing or a marketing audit. Businesses love the idea of having someone, an expert from the outside, look at what they’re doing and to add value in that way. So, an audit is a great way to offer more value at the end of your presentation as well. So, whatever that is that you’re going to add more value or how you’re going to add more value, then make sure that you really nail that offer in a way that is a no-brainer for the people sitting in the audience to take you up on that offer. And then from there, you need to have a further clarity on what the funnel is. So, just getting them to that additional value offer isn’t enough. So, I recommend that you actually have some kind of pre-qualifying process between them accepting that additional value offer and you actually spending the time delivering that offer to them. Because the problem that I’ve come across with speaking opportunities is sometimes you can get the wrong people in the audience or a percentage of the audience aren’t the ideal fit for your business. And that can just be time wasters for you, to be honest. And it’s happened to me far too many times. After making that mistake enough times and spending too much time doing one-on-one video strategy sessions with businesses that were never going to buy from us anyway, we deliberately introduced a pre-qualifying process before that added value one-to-one session. So, what that looked like for us is we gave them a few extra hoops to jump through, to be honest. before they would get that one-on-one time with me. So by putting some hoops or some roadblocks in the way, it means that the people you actually eventually sit down with and spend that additional time with, they’re interested, they’re qualified, they’re the right people and they know why they’re spending that time with you. So what we did is we introduced a survey. They had to fill out a survey before they got that additional time. So we emailed out a Google form survey. And if they didn’t complete that survey, then we weren’t able to schedule that time. And then also they had to watch a video. And this video was about 12 minutes long. So that video that we called it the pre-qualifying video, that video actually did some of the selling for us. It kind of told the prospect who we are and what we do and our our focus on video strategy in our video business, so that when they actually did get to that one-to-one time with me, they were much more likely to convert into a sale, because they had already kind of pre-qualified themselves and they’d learnt a bit about how we operate as a business. So by putting those couple of roadblocks in the pre-qualifying process, before we offered that additional one-to-one value in this funnel, it meant that when we did get someone sitting down for that additional value call, you know, that meeting or that strategy session or that discovery process, they were much more likely to convert. It made a huge difference in our conversion rates in this strategy. take that advice and hopefully take that on. So then you deliver obviously to the people that get through that pre-qualifying process, you deliver your added value and Again, you’ve got to make sure that that’s not just a sales conversation. You’ve got to actually add value. Listen more than you talk in that additional one-to-one time that you offer those people. And then you can, towards the end, if it’s right, if the client’s right, then you can transition to making the sale and offering whatever it is that you do in your video business and seeing if they will buy from you. So by really mapping out that funnel from giving masses of value from the presentation, offering additional value, pre-qualifying, and then adding more personalized value in that one-to-one session, then it becomes easy to transition to the sale without feeling salesy. That’s the beauty of this sort of a process. Okay, moving along to step six here, and this is, you know, now that you’ve assumed you’ve made some sales with this sort of speaking lead gen strategy, then I really want to stress the importance of tracking the metrics as you start implementing and executing this strategy. So, you need to be paying attention to and noting down somewhere in a spreadsheet or something similar, all of the data around this strategy to make it clear whether or not this is something that is making sense, whether there’s opportunities for improvement of this strategy to better improve your lead generation approach when it comes to speaking. So, you want to be tracking how many events do you speak at over a given period? Write that down. How many people actually attended those events? So, how many have the opportunity to hear from you? And then how many accepted the value-added offer at the end? and then how many actually attended the value-added offer at the end. Write that number down. So, obviously, as you know, the number’s going to get smaller as we go further down the funnel. Not everyone who shows up to your event is going to take you up on the offer. Not everyone who takes you up on the offer is going to actually end up sitting down and spending that time with you. But also make a note of how many people were actually pitched something at the end, because you might go into that one-to-one session and not actually, you know, identify that this person isn’t right for your service anyway, so they might not even get to hear the pitch that you have. keep track of how many actually received the pitch and then of course, keep track of how many people converted and what the dollar value of that conversion was in your business. Because from there you can start to reverse engineer. If you want to make more money from this lead generation strategy with speaking, you can go back up the numbers and you can think, first of all, is there any room for improvement of those numbers? But finally, how many events and how many people do you need to speak in front of in order to reach your sales or revenue goal based on this strategy? So, track the metrics. Very important. And then finally, the final step here is set a goal for yourself for executing this strategy. So if you’ve heard me speaking about this here today and you’re thinking, okay, this is a strategy I want to start executing in my business. Well, set yourself a goal for the number of events that you want to do each quarter or each period or each year. Set yourself a goal and that gives you something to aim towards, right? So you can know, well, how many people do I need to reach out to to try and get in front of their audiences? And then, you
know, maybe it’s an event number goal or maybe it’s a number of people that you need to speak to in order to reach your goals here. And then from there, identify opportunities and connect with those event organisers. LinkedIn’s a great way to connect or personal referrals if you can or attend the events yourself, see if they’re a good fit for you and then maybe speak to the event organiser after the event once you’ve kind of qualified that this is the kind of event that you want to speak at. And of course, let me know how you go. There’s been a lot of information in this one, this personalized episode here today. Let me just reiterate, this has been a strategy that’s worked really well for me over the last number of years and continues to work well. There was a period there during COVID where events weren’t happening, but events are coming back. At least they are here in Australia. And definitely, this is a strategy. So long as you get in front of the right audiences, the right people are on the seats in front of you, you have the right no-brainer offer to offer them at the end, it can be a really powerful strategy to generate more leads and sales in your video business. So let me know what you think. Let me know if you take action on this stuff. I’d love to hear from you and let me know what you think of this style of episode as well. Thanks again for joining me for this episode. I’m Ben Amos from Engage Video Marketing and it’s my goal to build confident video strategists. So I’m so glad you’re here. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode.
