If you’re using video marketing to grow your business, that’s great. But how exactly do you do it? Today we’ve got a special guest, Cyan “Cy” Cooper, who’s going to help you crush it on YouTube with his top five steps. Step 1? Find your audience, the ideal person who you want to sell to.
SPECIAL GUEST: Cyan “Cy” Cooper – 100c
HOSTS: The Video Marketing Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden –Â VidAction.tv
– Shelly Saves The Day – Shelly.video
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
If you’re using video marketing to grow your business, that’s great. But how exactly do you do it? Today we’ve got someone who’s going to help you crush it on YouTube with his top five steps.
We’ve got Cy Cooper who runs a full service agency “100c.” Cy, what is your first step to crushing it on YouTube for business?
Cyan Cooper:
Dane, thank you very much for having me on. The, yeah, the five steps. I like to think that I’ve boiled it down to five steps, and the first one, is the importance of finding your audience. Figuring out who you are selling to, who you want to sell to, because that will determine what content you make.
Dane Golden:
Finding your audience. So I’m going to go to Shelly Saves The Day for the first question about finding your audience, Shelly.
Shelly Saves The Day:
So we hear this one a lot, especially when we’re trying to, not just brands and businesses, but get regular creators and individuals started in kind of finding their niche, finding the people that they’re talking to. So it’s always really important to have this as step number one. And if you had some advice for people to actually figure out, how do you figure out who you’re actually talking to?
Because a lot of the time people have forgotten, like there’s, psychographics and then there’s demographics, and how do they meet?
And like they think they’re talking to a specific person and they’re not. So do you have any tips for people on how they can actually really solidify who it is that they’re talking to?
Cyan Cooper:
Yeah, probably the biggest thing, I mean, if you’re not clear on what problems your target audience primarily has, then you probably have deeper issues in your business. So, you know, if you’re, we work primarily with lawyers and it, so, you know, one of our, one of our clients is an immigration lawyer, for example.
And if you go on YouTube and you look at, and you do a simple search for immigration related topics, you can very quickly see what type of topics people are kind of focused on.
And just by being kind of logical about analyzing that content you should be able to figure out if those type of people are also the type of people who are going to buy from you.
You know, what type of problems do your, does your clients, the people who buy from you, what kind of issues do they have, and are you seeing that reflected in content? If so, chances are good. If you make that same type of content, you’re probably going to attract that type of target audience who could potentially buy from you.
Dane Golden:
And before we get to step number two, Cy Cooper, tell us the, again, the name of your business and your URL.
Cyan Cooper:
So the name of the business is a 100c, 100c, and the URL is 100c.io for our website, if you want to check us out.
Dane Golden:
And Shelly Saves The Day, who are you and how can people find you?
Shelly Saves The Day:
I’m Shelly. I go by Shelly Saves the Day online, and I’m a YouTube strategist and I teach about YouTube and video editing. I also run a company called Content Minis, which takes long-form video content and chops it up into shorts or, short vertical videos for other platforms.
Dane Golden:
And I’m Dane Golden from VidAction. You can, do some consulting with me at TalkToDane.Today. So Cy Cooper, also a YouTube consultant runs an agency, full service YouTube agency, what is the second most important thing we need to do to grow and crush it on YouTube for business?
Cyan Cooper:
Well actually I would, I would, well, yeah, let’s jump ahead to the second one.
Dane Golden:
Did I introduce you wrong? I…
Cyan Cooper:
No I was there. There, there’s, number one is actually nuanced. There’s different strategies that you can kind of take when it comes to identifying who your audience is and how you want to approach them, but that’s okay.
I think in most cases, most business owners who are considering doing YouTube, are not going to get that creative in the way they make content. They’re busy, they don’t have experience with content, so chances are they’re probably just going to make the most straightforward type of content possible, which is to talk about what they know.
And, there are other strategies that you can do and other audiences that you can target. But I don’t, I think in most cases, especially people just getting started, they should keep it simple, talk about what they know and just focus on those problems that they know their target audience has, and make that type of content.
So then step two, would be to meet them where they’re at. So once you kind of know what sort of problems your target audience has, I’ve found that this is true on YouTube and on other platforms that most of your, and anybody with marketing experience, understands how this works. That most of your audience has a conversation going on in their head where they think that their problem looks a certain way, and there’s certain keywords and certain questions that they’ve sort of latched onto that are primarily important to them. And that’s where you want to start your content. I. You want to figure out what are the, where are the places mentally, where my audience is, and what, how can I reach them there with content and start making that type of content, because that’s what’s going to get traction the most quickly and get you results the most quickly and establish, authority within that niche on YouTube the most quickly.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, so there’s this thing that I have, which is answer the beginner questions. As we know for as YouTube specialists, one of the first people things people ask about YouTube is, how do you get more views? How do you get more subscribers? And as professionals we might say, well, that’s an interesting question, but is that the right question?
That’s it. That’s one question, but maybe that’s the sixth most important question. First question is, who do you want to watch? Will they become customers? You know, that type of thing. And in every business, I think that there’s a beginner question that we as beginners, when we’re trying to find out something about that, how to do that, whatever that service is, we ask.
You might call it a dumb question, you might call it a beginner question. So even though those are beginner questions, I think we should search those out and answer those. One of the things I find in my industry that people.
Always are Googling is YouTube SEO. Again, we know wrong question, but it’s a beginner question, right?
Cyan Cooper:
Exactly, so you want to show up for it?
I, actually had a, I had a point I wanted to add to it, which is, This can actually be really challenging, to deliver content around these types of questions that a novice audience has on your top, on your industry or in your niche. Because people who, you know, like again, going back to our, like the people we primarily work with, which is lawyers, we found that a lot of them will have trouble.
Understanding the mindset that their audience is in because they’ve been steeped in it for so long that they’re miles ahead of them. And so coming back to meet them exactly where they’re at and to cover all the talking points that a beginner has, we found, has actually been really challenging sometimes for some of our clients.
And so that’s why part of a lot of times when it comes to writing scripts, we’ll actually do it for them because as we’re beginners ourselves learning their industry, We can then do a bit of research as a beginner, see what people are focused on, and then write an interesting script that speaks to those beginners at their level a lot better than if the lawyer was to step in and just start talking on the topic.
Shelly Saves The Day:
I think that’s a really great point because like you said, they’re so involved in it day in and day out. They don’t know. What the beginner questions are anymore. They just know when certain people have come to them and maybe ask a question, they’re not even technically beginners ’cause they already Googled the right thing to get them to that office, to get them in front of the right person to ask a question.
So even those people are farther ahead. And so I had come across this when I used to make editing tutorials and someone would be like, I don’t even know what you’re saying. Like what button? Like you have to physically show me what button and you have to tell me what does this mean? And then I would be like, Do I?
And then I’m like, okay, yes. If you’re coming here to learn about that, then yeah. And it does make you go through a completely different lens. And I think sometimes it’s almost a benefit and not, a detriment if you come to a company who knows nothing about your industry or your business, because they will ask those questions as someone who’s maybe not in immigration law all the time, you have questions like, What does this mean?
What is a 221G? What does this mean when it goes to this process? How long does this take? And then all of a sudden they have a complete new perspective to either write those scripts or come at it from a different angle. So I think not only talk to people where they are, but where they began.
Dane Golden:
Can I add my formula for scripts? Writing scripts for busy executives. If you want to offer this service to your clients or want to perform this for your busy executive, if you’re on the team at some company somewhere and the only, the executive can do that, but you’re, you need to sort of extract that from them.
You guys want to hear my tip?
Cyan Cooper:
Yeah, please.
Dane Golden:
Okay, here it is. You interview them on audio, you can record a phone call.
They can be driving. You can just sit with them, take out your phone and record them. And they’re saying I’m blocked. I can’t read. I don’t have time to, I don’t have time to write this script or whatever.
The thing is, you just ask ’em the question. You say, what’s the topic? I. That people need to know. And they’re like, well, they should know how to do this, so why don’t people know how to do this? What’s the problem? What’s the big problem here? Why don’t people know it? And then they say, well, the thing is that da… And you say, okay, what’s the first thing that people, and you just walk them through it like an interview, and you take that, put it in some, you know, audio transcriber, like the script or some other thing, and then you just edit it from there. And you find, hey, they’re like, wow, you came up with a script for me.
Takes a bit of effort for the person who’s not the executive, but it is a doable thing. That’s one way to extract that content from them.
Cyan Cooper:
Yeah, it’s a good strategy. Absolutely.
Dane Golden:
I’ve used it. Okay. Moving on to Cy Cooper’s tip number three for crushing it on YouTube.
Cyan Cooper:
Let’s go. Tip number three would be, actually learning how to package, and packaging on YouTube. You guys know what it means, but for those who don’t…
Dane Golden:
I don’t.
Cyan Cooper:
Packaging on YouTube, it is a concept that’s become a little bit more prevalent only recently. But it’s the idea of taking your thumbnail and your title and turning them into a neat package that clearly communicates a single idea. And a lot of times, you know, especially beginners when they get into this, they will, you know, they might make a video that covers a wide variety of topics, and then when their title and thumbnail are confusing or they have, they’re trying to fit like a lot of ideas into it, or they don’t know how to encapsulate it in a way that is easily digestible to the audience or they don’t know how to make it really compelling.
So that it has a high click-through rate, which is really important if you want your videos to do well. So, I would say that it, and it’s really important that it comes before you write your script or whatever process you use for making your content, is that you have a clear idea of the singular concept that all of that content is going to fit within because you’re going to communicate that concept and you’re going to draw people in with that concept.
Through your thumbnail and your title. And so everything else kind of needs to echo that, otherwise you’ll lose people as they’re watching your video. Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but, go ahead. If you guys have any questions.
Shelly Saves The Day:
No, it’s actually interesting that you consider packaging in that way because, when you’re like, I’m sure you guys already know, my mind went completely to how to package, For brands and sponsors as in let’s do not just this, but three videos and a TikTok and a Instagram reel and a and I was like, well, we’re making packages for brands and businesses.
So getting to learn new terminology or usage for it is an interesting way too. When you’re talking about. Packaging though.
How does that then, are you thinking like into the content buckets of some sort to try and keep them like the same and themed or are you talking about just the package of the video and the thumbnail entitled together for on an individual type of basis?
Or is it pieces of the Tetris.
Cyan Cooper:
Yeah. So yeah, buckets is a little advanced, especially for people who are, especially for busy business owners. They don’t need to, I wouldn’t say they need to worry about buckets too much, that, but, so in this case, package, by packaging, I mean, just for any given video, taking the idea that you have for that video.
And figuring out a way for the thumbnail and the title to communicate that idea as, as clearly and as com as compelling as possible. So maybe an, an example would be if I was an agency owner and I wanted to make videos explaining how to get leads for your business, my, i, my mind, my first as a beginner, my go to how to get more leads for your business.
Like that’s going to be the title of the video. But, and that’s good in terms of clarity, but it’s not necessarily very compelling. And what would be more compelling would be the secret to getting more leads that nobody tells you that’s a lot more compelling is going to drive a lot more clicks, but it also then will dictate the content of the video.
Because now the content of the video, you need to deliver something that sounds like a secret, and that doesn’t sound like conventional wisdom. And that sounds highly impactful. And so you kind of have to put, you don’t want to put the cart before the horse. You want to make sure that you’re doing that packaging first so that you know how you want to draw people in.
And then once you have that and you’re confident in your ability to deliver on it, then go ahead and do the research for the video. And write out the video. You know, if you script it or, you know, plan it out depending on how you get that information.
Dane Golden:
And where are you getting? These great titles and concepts. And how do you know to change you? You said, one, you could do it this way, but you really should do it this way. How do you know Cy Cooper? Which ones are better?
Cyan Cooper:
I know because I’ve been doing it for so long. All I do is YouTube all day, every day. And I just look at title after title, and I see, you know, I look at videos that are performing really well and I start to notice patterns across them. Like, why, you know, why are these performing really well? So an easy one is the secret.
You know, you say the secret to this, the secret to that. Another big one is the truth. Like the, like, I’m going to tell you the truth about this. And then people see it and they go, well, I want to know the truth. Like, have I been lied to this whole time? They click on it, you know? But. If you, if somebody, who doesn’t have this intuition, hasn’t yet developed it, I highly recommend spending time looking at titles.
It’s just going to it just takes time. You have to have exposure to it. And also model after people who are already doing it well, that might be in similar, areas to you. One guy who’s an expert at this, and the actually has a great product for it is Jake Thomas and Jake has created a database, he’s called the YouTube title guy, and he’s created a database.
Called, creator Hooks Pro, I believe, where it’s just a list of titles that have performed really well for the channels that they’re on. And you can just go through, you can subscribe to this database and just go through all these titles and try to find something that you think would maybe be similar, to your format on your channel that you want to do.
Dane Golden:
And what is the fourth tip for crushing it on YouTube?
Cyan Cooper:
Fourth tip would be to, now that you have it packaged well, now you need to make the video and, you, you need to make it in a way that’s going to keep people’s attention. And so the fourth tip would be to structure your content effectively. And, a lot of this is like basic common sense, or at least p.
People who have been doing it for a while may, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but, you know, don’t have long-winded intros. Don’t, go on tangents, you know, don’t, ramble for long periods of time. Make sure that your content is delivering on the value that you promised in your title and thumbnail.
And it is staying within that value proposition the entire time. And it’s as concise as it possibly can, and if you can deliver it as quickly as you can, because they found that fast talkers tend to have better retention on YouTube than people who speak slowly. But, typically what we’ll do in a video to, to give you a sneak peek into how we script things, is first, the first thing that we’ll have someone say is meeting the expectations that were created by the title and thumbnail.
So if I have a title that says The Secret to getting more leads that nobody tells You. The first thing I might say is like, I’m about to tell you the secret to getting more leads that nobody else in the business community is telling you. And that way, you know, you’re in the right place. And so you’re like, okay, I click, I clicked for this and it looks like this is what I’m going to get.
Great check. That’s like a check for keeping people watching. And then after that, we’ll then want to hook them. So you want to, you can do this in a wide variety of ways. You can create what’s called an open loop where you, start to talk about like the answer, but then you say like, you know, we’ll get to that in just a moment.
You can raise stakes where you’re like, if you don’t know this secret, you’re going to struggle with leads forever so that people have like an emotional investment into it. So, like I said, there’s a lot of different ways you can do it, but you want to hook people. After you’ve met those expectations, and then you want to get into it as quickly as possible.
Once you have them hooked, you know that they know they’re in the right place. Don’t waste their time too much with that intro and get right into the meat of it and make sure that you’re being efficient in how you deliver it. Aft and then at some point, after you’ve given them some value, have a call to action.
So that they know how to contact you and they know who you are and what you do and that, why they should reach out to you. And, then at the end of your video, promote another video of yours so that they go onto a binge watching session, which is really important if you want your YouTube channel to grow significant.
Dane Golden:
And, one of the things that you can tell if you go to that audience retention graph, In any given video, you can tell I always feel that first 30 seconds is not really necessarily is how good the video is. It’s how well you di created a connection between what you promised in your title and thumbnail and what you’re delivering on in that first part of the video.
So if there’s a sudden drop in audience retention, the viewer feels you’re not delivering on the promise. The rest of the video, hopefully you’ve retained people for that period. The rest of the video is, you know, continuing to make a good video. But the first part is delivering on the promise. And the way you said that, you sort of repeated the title and, well there’s a title thumbnail combination, but you sort of repeated and emphasized right at the beginning.
So people say, well, he promised me the secrets and he’s not starting to sell me life insurance. Instead of the, you know, the secrets to whatever it is he’s actually giving me exactly what he promised, Shelly. What do you think about that? You know how to do those intros and delivering on the promise.
Shelly Saves The Day:
I think that sounds right about inline. I used to work for a big YouTube person and we had a very specific outline structure and it was very similar. You know, sometimes it was like that hook and outcome and testimonial, or sometimes it was, I really like how you came back later and your call to action was really just to get them to watch another video and you didn’t waste it and use it on you know, subscribe.
Because we all know, like if they interact. If they’re going to get served more of it, and usually if they have positive signals. So, really getting them to be invested enough to watch another video is really important. And so have you found that sometimes, especially for newer people, that they fight back against kind of almost.
The formula of YouTube script, because I’ve had experiences where, where we say like, look, this is it. You do your hook. You do, you know, your intro, you have your first point. You have maybe this first call to action. Then you have your secondary point, and at the very end you point ’em to this and they really want to go off script, if you will, and do kind of their own thing.
Do you have any like examples where people are like, no, I want to do it my way, and it just really didn’t work out for them very well.
Cyan Cooper:
Yeah I, well, well, a lot of times people will think, oh, it’s more authentic if I just speak from the heart or I say what I mean, and. It. It’s unfortunately when you’re creating content that you want to reach as many people as possible, you have to account like you have to structure your content accounting for the lowest common denominator, like, like the person who cares about you the least.
Because if you can even reach those people and keep them watching, then YouTube’s going to think it’s a good video and it’s going to promote it to more people. And that’s the whole point of being on YouTube in the first place. Is to engage people that way. If you aren’t interested in doing that, there’s other platforms that are better podcasting’s a better one where you can just start talking, you know?
No. Nowhere near as much pressure. But yeah, I’ve definitely gotten pushback and even, you know, even after working with our clients for a long time, like a lot of times they don’t even want to know it. They just say, just give me a script. Just, you just write the script and then like, I’ll make my edits to it.
And they, it, they usually won’t edit the beginning. They’ll usually edit somewhere in the middle if they have edits to it. So they don’t have to think about it ’cause they’re busy business owners, they’re not content strategists. So yeah, there is a bit of a mountain to get over with people oftentimes.
With that,
Dane Golden:
And what is the fifth tip…
Cyan Cooper:
Let’s go. Number five…
Dane Golden:
…on YouTube for business?
Cyan Cooper:
So assuming that you’ve done all these other steps, And you’ve done them reasonably well at this point, you should have a bead on what type of content your audience is interested in. You should be able to make content that is appealing to them. It’s getting clicks, it’s holding their attention, and it’s getting them to watch more of your videos afterwards.
And so you’re starting to get traction. The next step with this, and this is going to become increasingly important going into the future, or the last step with this, is to experiment with your format, because, As more and more people are turning to content marketing to try and reach their audience, everyone’s doing what’s easy, which is talking head videos that are speaking to what they know and addressing, you know, primary, like the primary issues that their target audience has.
But what happens when it becomes, your niche becomes saturated and there’s 500 companies that are all trying to do this, or business owners who are all trying to do this. Like, how are you going to stand out from them? How are you going to get the lion’s share of attention from your audience so that they can then become your customers?
And I believe in the future, it’s going to be who can have the most creative delivery of information. While still keeping it relevant and still targeting the right audience and keeping that value high. So some examples would be, and we do this with our clients, some examples would be like reaction style content where, you know, one of our clients is a worker’s comp lawyer and we’ll have him react to accidents that are happening in the workplace and then explain things about workers’ comp that people need to know in light of it.
And those videos do great because they appeal to a much wider audience, so they’ll get a lot of traction. But then he’s also it all still it, the algorithm still understands who his core audience is and it’ll deliver it to them as well. And then they’ll see him expressing his expertise, and it’ll get them to convert and to contact him.
Stories are great. You know, there’s people who are just masters at this. Obviously that’s a whole other skill altogether, and if you’re a busy business owner, you’re not going to have the time to figure out how to tell amazing stories that deliver all this information. So you might need to hire someone to help you with that, but that’s a great way to do it.
You know, covering news as news topics come out that are really relevant and interesting to your niche. Like those are the, if you’re the first one to cover it. You’ll be the first one promoted in YouTube. Like you’ll show up at the top as people start to search for it. Doing collaborations, trend jacking, if you notice like, our immigration attorney, she just recently had, there was like a viral case on ins on a TikTok where a woman was taken advantage of for 30 years by the comp, by the, household who hired her from the Philippines and they never got her a visa and they basically exploited her.
And this is in alignment with our clients, one of our clients’ primary case types, and we’re like, great, let’s do like this. Let’s do this. While this is trending, let’s do, kind of like a reaction to it so that we can ride that wave and we can ride that popularity.
Dane Golden:
Tell me the structure when you say yes, react. Like everyone knows what it is. We’ve seen a lot of reaction, but what is the exact structure of a reaction video for as an example.
Cyan Cooper:
Typically, you know, you’d set the stage so that people know what to expect, and then you’d get right into it. You’d start showing, you know, whatever it is that you’re reacting to. And then, you know, you can do it any number of ways depending on your equipment and how you have it set up. But the core idea is that you pause, like you, you see something that’s like relevant and important.
You pause and then you react to that. And then you play and you resume watching it together with the audience. And then when something else consequential comes up, you pause or you have something you want to add and then you react to it. That’s, if it’s longer, if you have short form stuff that you’re reacting to, like the workers’ comp lawyer with, injuries in the workplace, you know, it’s, you’re just showing the whole thing happen and then he gives his take on it.
So there’s a lot of different ways you can do this. Maybe you’re, Dr. Mike. He’s super popular on YouTube. He will react to, he’s a doctor and he’ll react to medical stuff on, say, TikTok. And so he’ll watch a TikTok, like a short TikTok and React and then watch another one and then react and watch another one.
So it really depends on, what you’re reacting to, but the format kind of follows those lines.
Dane Golden:
Is the title, say React in it.
Cyan Cooper:
It can, I don’t think it, it necessarily has to, if like, in the case of Dr. Mike, most of his audience. Already knows what to expect when they tune in. And he’s so popular that when his stuff gets pushed out to more people, it has that social proof. They’re able to look and see how many views it has.
Like, oh, this looks interesting and cool. Click on it. So you don’t necessarily have to say react. But, we’ve, for smaller channels, you know, when we’ve been growing channels and people don’t know who we are and we don’t have a track record of making really popular react style stuff, we’ll add the term react into the title.
Yeah.
Dane Golden:
Shelly? Comment? Question?
Shelly Saves The Day:
No, you got my mind spinning with lots of different ideas and possibilities and that’s always good. That’s always a good one. ’cause it’s always nice to have someone else come in and just kind of take a different. You know, even though we all do the same thing, we just do it in different ways. And so it’s always fun to brainstorm or just hear other people talk about how they run their business or how they work with their clients, because then it starts to make you think like, I wonder if I should incorporate some of that into mine.
Or, you know, how am I hitting some of these things? Or am I doing a disservice by not talking about them? So that’s where I am usually when I’m just like thinking about that. And then, you know, deer in the headlights
Cyan Cooper:
Yeah I apologize. I know, it’s a lot. I, I, like I said, I don’t often come out of my cave and talk to people about YouTube, so when I finally do, I’m like, I have so much to say. So
I, I
Shelly Saves The Day:
you don’t get to interact with people that do what you do day in and day out. You’re usually working with clients. And so when you work with, other than either educators or you know, people who you know strategists and you work with them and you’re like, I should do that too, or like, oh wait, but did you think about this?
And that’s like my mind starts running a million miles a minute thinking about that kind of stuff.
Cyan Cooper:
Yep. So I excuse the rambles today. I apologize.
Shelly Saves The Day:
No apology.
Cyan Cooper:
I got carried away.
Shelly Saves The Day:
No, it’s good.
Dane Golden:
Great. And Cy Cooper, tell us how to spell your name once again and tell us about your business and where to find you.
Cyan Cooper:
So C-Y-A-N, it’s my full name. Cyan Cooper, C-O-O-P-E-R. And if you want to find me, most of the things that I post are on LinkedIn. I am going to start a YouTube channel that’s in the works. It’s going to be awesome, but it’s not there yet. And, yeah, if you want to go to my website again, it’s 100C, 100c.io.
We can’t take any clients right now. We’re full, but, we do have a wait list and, we, we deliver.
Dane Golden:
And Shelly Saves The Day. How can people find you?
Shelly Saves The Day:
You can hang out with me on YouTube under Shelly Saves The Day, or definitely come check out my website. ShellySavesTheDay.Com.
Dane Golden:
and ContentMinis.com? I want to be the voiceover ContentMinis.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Absolutely. You got the job you’re hired.
Cyan Cooper:
I am sold. Yeah.
Dane Golden:
“Your content only smaller.”
Shelly Saves The Day:
That’s correct.
Dane Golden:
And I’m Dane Golden from VidActionTV. Find me on YouTube. Find this podcast, the Video Marketing Podcast wherever you find podcasts, and on my VidActionTV YouTube channel. Also, if you want to talk to me about consulting for you, you can go to TalkToDane.Today.
Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.