Last updated on June 14th, 2024
When you hire a video marketing agency, sometimes you don’t need what you think you need. Joshua Wethington helps you sort through the various questions that clients have at the beginning, and find out which ones are going to move the needle the most, and why.
GUEST: Joshua Wethington of Broken Peanut Media. Find them on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by Dane Golden of VidAction | LinkedIn | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
It’s time for the Video Marketing Value podcast from HEY.com. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners, just like you, get more value out of your video marketing efforts. My name is Dane Golden and today we have a special guest, Joshua Wethington of Broken Peanut Media. Welcome, Joshua.
Joshua Wethington:
Hey, Dane. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast today.
Dane Golden:
Okay. I asked you on today to talk about what businesses really need from their video partner, because there are some things they don’t need, and some things that they think that they need, that they don’t, and don’t that they do. Isn’t that true?
Joshua Wethington:
It’s just confusing. It’s all-around confusing for most businesses.
Dane Golden:
Right. This is something that you do. You help companies with that and I thought I’d ask you a little bit about this. Does that work for you?
Joshua Wethington:
That works for me. Let’s do it.
Dane Golden:
Okay. When companies are working with a video marketing agency, what do they usually think that they need most?
Joshua Wethington:
Depending on the size of the company, or the brand, I usually get one of two responses to this, or when they start talking to us. They either say, “One, we want to create this 30-second commercial and bring in this big celebrity spokesperson, and we’re just going to air it on after The Late Show, and it’s going to go viral on YouTube.” Or they think, “Hey, we want to make a really funny viral video. That way, we get a lot of customers.”
Joshua Wethington:
It’s either, this really big commercial or a viral video, is what they think will solve all of their problems. When, in fact, most of the time, it’s something completely besides that.
Dane Golden:
Okay. To repeat, a 30-second commercial with a celebrity, or a viral video with millions of views. Now, these two things seem to have something in common in that they both are in the popular culture as things that work. They are … Everyone’s seen a 30-second commercial with a athlete, or whoever, and everyone’s heard of this concept of a viral video.
Joshua Wethington:
Exactly. They’re bringing in a little bit of traditional and a little bit of this new media. And all these brands just think, “Well, for us to be successful, on YouTube, or Facebook, or Snapchat, or any other online platform, we have to go viral.” When the reality is, even if a company does make a viral video, that’s really awesome for short-term sales, and getting large growth in a short period of time. But, as far as a longterm strategy goes, once that viral video stops getting advertising and it’s had its heyday, and it’s sizzled out, the company’s stuck with the exact same problem they had before they even made the video is, nobody knows who we are, nobody’s engaging with us, and we’re not growing our customer base.
Joshua Wethington:
What’s the real solution to the problem?
Dane Golden:
Right. And one of the key things I picked out, I’m not sure our listeners did, that you said. Once the viral video stops getting advertising, because no matter how funny a video is, these videos get lots of advertising, so they’re quite expensive, potentially. Right?
Joshua Wethington:
Yes. The misconception is, if a brand, like Coca Cola, or Nike, or American Airlines, makes a viral video that it just went viral on its own merit. Now, that’s not to say that, a brand do that, but most of the viral videos that we think of, like the Dollar Shave Club, Squatty Potty, PooPourri, all of these things, had some form of advertising pushing it forward.
Dane Golden:
It doesn’t mean that’s not well done, it just means it’s not just because people thought it was awesome.
Joshua Wethington:
Exactly. They’re all incredibly well crafted videos. They’re funny. You watch it, you laugh. You want to share it with your families and friends, but how they first got their initial hundreds of millions of views is there was definitely advertising, distribution and influencer marketing all behind them, which takes money from the brand.
Dane Golden:
Right. So these celebrity spokespeople, viral videos, in the end, those are huge budgets.
Joshua Wethington:
Correct. Most of the time we’re looking at anywhere from 500,000 onwards to get this thing from a pre-production to hiring influencers, or actors, doing the sets, shooting the creative, doing all the AB testing, and then going, and launching, and doing the advertising. Some of these videos cost millions upon millions of dollars to create.
Dane Golden:
Which may not be for everyone. What does the client really need the most, when they come to you, that they don’t realize?
Joshua Wethington:
Yeah. Most brands don’t have two and a half, $3 million just laying around to put into a video, but they do have some form of budget where they know they need to make steady social media content, and this is what they really need. They need a multi-level strategy that involves… You and I are both YouTube guys, so we always go back to YouTube’s own programing schedule of help, hub and hero content. I like to use that and I modify it when I’m talking to brands. I, basically, say, “Your multi-level strategy needs to start out with help content. This how-to tutorial product demos. Then you need to go into more of your product and service videos, and bring in influencer marketing into the second level, because it’s always better to have somebody else be a spokesperson for your brand than you. Just being your own brand, and talking about how great your own product and service is, that works a little bit, but it’s always better when other people are talking about you.”
Joshua Wethington:
Then we go into this hero level of advertising, which can be a sharable video, or we can incorporate some YouTube advertising, if we have the money in the budget for those kind of things.
Dane Golden:
And it may, or may not, be the type of advertising that people normally do.
Joshua Wethington:
Yeah, you could be really effective on YouTube, and Facebook, and Instagram, if you have just a steady budget and by just promoting content, by using keywords, now, for in-stream ads, or if you have a good media company and you want to take a shot at, maybe, making somewhat of a sharable video, and just free marketing that to your own email list or past users, past visitors, of your website, or people that have previously viewed your YouTube channel, if you’ve been creating content for a while. That can help spread it on a smaller scale.
Dane Golden:
When you first sign on with a client, what are some of the hurdles getting ramped up with them?
Joshua Wethington:
Now, one of the biggest hurdles, even today in 2019, is it amazes me how so many brands really don’t understand who their audience is and where their audience is. I have brands that come to me and they think their audience is on YouTube, when they’re in manufacturing or wholesale and, actually, LinkedIn is a better platform for that. I have other companies that are selling to 18 to 25 year-olds and they’re a lifestyle brand, so YouTube is a good place for that, but, sometimes, we get better traction on Instagram.
Joshua Wethington:
You just have to know who your audience is and what platform that audience is on, because not everybody has to be on LinkedIn, not everybody has to be on YouTube. You just have to meet your audience where they are and give them the content that, that platform supports.
Dane Golden:
Right, exactly. What else?
Joshua Wethington:
After that, one of the biggest hurdles is just simply getting access to everything that I need. A very good video marketing agency is going to want access to your channel. We’re going to be looking at your Google analytics. We need to look at your AdWords or your Facebook pages, if we’re doing advertising on there. It amazes me, when I go and talk to the directors of social media, or the directors of marketing, and I’m like, “Hey, I need access to this.” And they’re like, “Yes, somebody set up the YouTube channel five years ago, and they left, so we just set up another YouTube channel, but nobody knows the password to it.” That’s one of those clerical errors, but once we get access to everything, we make sure that everything is set up and working. So, as we start our process, everything is communicating and we can report correctly. We’re, pretty much, good to go.
Dane Golden:
Then what do you do?
Joshua Wethington:
Once we’ve figured out who we’re really speaking to, what platforms we need to focus in on, and what type of content we’re going to create for those platforms, that’s all the heavy lifting. That’s coming from a traditional broadcast media standpoint. We refer to all of that as pre-production, all the strategy, all the blending.
Dane Golden:
All this before the video?
Joshua Wethington:
All this before the video. This is where the blunt of the work happens. It’s also the most frustrating for the client, and I understand that, because we’re putting all these man-hours into this research, and doing all this analysis, crunching all of this data, and we’re giving them presentations, but they’re like, “You’re a video marketing agency. You’re supposed to be creating videos, and getting me millions of views, and bringing in business.” And if we don’t do all of this stuff in the pre-production phase, all that stuff isn’t going to happen further down the line.
Joshua Wethington:
Once we get all of that, and the strategy outlined, we go into production, and that’s when the fun and the magic really starts to happen. Because we get to start creating all this content that we’ve been talking about from a month up to three months, depending on how complicated of a project it is.
Dane Golden:
What’s this guy talking about analytics for? I just want to see the dog juggle with the monkey.
Joshua Wethington:
Exactly, just show me a sneezing panda and just put our brand at the end of it, and they’ll click over to our website. Right? Yeah, not exactly.
Dane Golden:
That’s the kind of customer I want. The person who loves the sneezing panda.
Joshua Wethington:
Yeah.
Dane Golden:
Joshua, when you’re a brand, or a business, and you want to work with a video marketing agency, they are all a black box. You don’t know why one is better than another. I mean, you can see, hey, they did a video I like, but how do I know if they’re actually going to drive in business, or be the type of company I want to work with?
Joshua Wethington:
Yeah. Some advice I’d give to a brand that’s looking for a potential video marketing partner is, one, I would just, in general, I would say, “Stay away from larger agencies.” If you go and search for a digital agency, or advertising agency, near me, the guys that generally pop-up, number one on Google, stay away from them, because they’re doing the broadcast commercials. They’re doing billboards. They’re doing magazines, print ads, and stuff like that. They all have a digital aspect of it, but they really understand that traditional media and the digital is just like a byproduct of it.
Joshua Wethington:
I would really search and start looking around on Facebook, or on YouTube, or on Instagram for smaller boutique agencies that are creating great content on the platforms that you want to be, because they’re leading by example. They’re actually creating content that’s working, and bringing in audience towards them.
Dane Golden:
Are you just saying this because you’re not a large agency, or do you truly believe that some of these large agencies just don’t get it, or they’re not nimble, or they’re too expensive? What is it?
Joshua Wethington:
I think it’s all of the above to be perfectly honest. Large agencies are really expensive, because you’re paying for the building, all the space, all the account executives. It amazes me. When I started working with larger brands, and I would be on the opposite side of the table and speaking to some of these account executives at these agencies, and they were kids fresh out of college that really didn’t understand everything in these large prints. I’m like, “This is who you communicate with?” They’re like, “Yeah. These are the people that run the day-to-day things.”
Joshua Wethington:
My own biased opinion is, large agencies are dying and their business model isn’t agile enough for brands that need to grow on social media.
Dane Golden:
Okay. But you still haven’t really told me, you told me who not to look for, you told me how to look, but how do I know who’s better than another?
Joshua Wethington:
You can look for somebody that has experience in your industry, but all business, ultimately, comes down to is, who do you click with? When you get on the phone and you talk to them, who’s the guy, or the agency, that is going to give you all the details and that have the vision of you? I would look for a partner that has both, the strategy and the creative, and the advertising side, all in one house, because, typically, the smaller companies that handle all of that, you know that all of that is going to be in sync. So you’re not talking to one person about your strategy and then another company is doing the creative. Then a third company just gets that creative and they start running ads against it.
Joshua Wethington:
When that’s all in sync, and underneath one house, it’s that old philosophy, one throat to choke, but it’s all in sync, if they’re doing it right.
Dane Golden:
Okay, yeah. That sounds good. A business has found their agency and they’re happy to be working with someone like you, but what type of goals do they set up? How do they know and how do they report back to their boss that they’ve done a good job?
Joshua Wethington:
There’s a variety of different goals and you have to work with your customer to figure out where they’re at. Are they looking to build their audience and just put content out there, get some brand awareness, build up brand loyalty by putting out more content so just more people know who they are? Are you trying to correlate the video content and go directly into sales or use this video content to start building up your sales funnel by collecting email addresses, doing product demos, getting people to sign up for a webinar? All of those are really good metrics to measure, like we’ve put out 10 videos talking about this topic, and we’ve noticed a 5X increase in people in our webinars, or something like that.
Joshua Wethington:
Or are we just trying to put out videos and go all the way to measuring ROI through product sales? Is the video content meant to sell a product, right away, from our website? So we can just measure the traffic and how much product sales have gone up based on the strategy we’re implementing.
Dane Golden:
Excellent, Joshua. Tell me, Joshua Wethington, where are you located and does that matter when you’re working with a client?
Joshua Wethington:
Right now, my agency is based in Dallas, Texas. I really don’t think it matters where we’re based out of. Right now, typically, most of our clients are either, in Los Angeles or New York, so we work remotely and just fly in, do Skype calls, and do our weekly phones, and come in once a month, or once a quarter, depending on the clients’ needs. And most people are pretty happy with that, as long as we’re doing the work, and we’re getting the results that we’re promising and we’re getting paid for. People really don’t care where we’re based out of.
Dane Golden:
Just to review, what are some of the types of services that a video marketing agency, like yours, would offer?
Joshua Wethington:
My agency, in particular, we do a lot of YouTube consulting, so that’s one-on-one consulting with both, YouTubers and brands. We do content strategies and audits for both, creators and brands, depending on where they’re at. Then we also move into the higher level of service, where we’re either doing channel management, managing these social media channels, optimizing the content, and actually doing content creation, because we’ve been doing online video creation for over 12 years, now.
Dane Golden:
You really know how it works. Excellent. And it’s called, Broken Peanut Media. Why did you call it Broken Peanut Media?
Joshua Wethington:
Let’s see, 2009, way back in the day, or 2009, when I was creating my company, I basically didn’t want anything to be Wethington Video Production, or anything to do with my very long last name. So, I came up with Broken Peanut Media, just basically because I wanted to be a little different. I knew I was going to be online, and peanut is, actually, my older brother’s nickname. So, I named the company after him.
Dane Golden:
How can people find out more about you?
Joshua Wethington:
You can go to our website, brokenpeanutmedia.com, and check out all of our services, or you can find me, pretty much, anywhere on social media using the handle, videojoshua.
Dane Golden:
Videojoshua. Thank you, Joshua Wethington of Broken Peanut Media. People will be able to find this episode by searching for hey and Joshua Wethington. That’s W-E-T-H-I-N-G-T-O-N. My name is Dane Golden and I want to thank you, the listener, for listening to us today. I do this podcast, The Video Marketing Value podcast, from HEY.com and the videos, because I love helping marketers and business owners, just like you, grow your customer community with helpful how-to videos. Because, when you share your expertise in a way that helps your customers live their lives better, or do their jobs better, you’ll earn their loyalty, and their trust, and their business. Thanks to our special guest, Joshua Wethington of brokenpeanutmedia.com. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.