Omnichannel - Behind the Scenes Of Viral Video Ads With Meg Jackson Co-Founder Of One Peak Creative

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Send us a textUnlock the secrets behind OnePeak Creative's incredible transformation from a marketing agency to a powerhouse of online education with co-founder, Meg Jackson. Learn how OnePeak's journey of embracing change, from social media management and graphic design to photography, video production, and beyond, was fueled by a desire to reach more people and sidestep the pitfalls of burnout. Meg shares how the company has evolved into a go-to educational resource for content creators and marketers, offering strategies that resonate with the essence of personal identity and passion.We're diving into the heart of effective marketing strategies, where personal success stories meet innovative techniques. Discover how OnePeak Creative showcases the power of organic content strategies, setting audacious goals like hitting 100,000 TikTok followers, and navigating the challenges of running ads for the first time. Meg provides a hands-on approach to staying true to one's brand while fostering growth and authenticity in the digital era. Her insights into aligning content with personal stories, especially in the couple niche, offer listeners tangible methods to connect with their audiences more deeply.Curious about how to capture and retain viewer attention with extraordinary video hooks? Meg Jackson shares her personal experiences, revealing how tweaking just the opening line of a video can drive massive engagement. Unveil the "five elements of a strong hook" and learn to spark curiosity that leads to viral success. We conclude with a heartfelt conversation with Megan about engaging with OnePeak Creative on social media, ensuring our audience remains in the loop with their latest creative ventures. Whether you're a content creator or a marketer, this episode is packed with actionable insights to elevate your digital presence.Follow Meg on Instagram: @itsmegjacksonFollow One Peak Creative: @onepeakcreativeGet a FREE Copy of the High Converting Online Events Book: https://book.dominikalegrand.com/

I'm sure you have seen these ads popping up everywhere. Here are three steps to a slam dunk visual hook that got me views like this. Step one, choose a location that's going to stand out while people are scrolling. With over 75,000 students enrolled in their current TikTok Unreal Creator course, OnePay Creative has absolutely been dominating the online ad game. And it's a huge thing for me to say because I don't say that often. Their approach blends education with entertainment, making their ads both informative and super engaging and fun to watch. A truly unique ad strategy in today's advertising landscape, if you ask me.

In today's episode, I'm thrilled to welcome 1P Creative's co-founder, Meg Jackson, to dive in into their secret behind your success. And I was like, it's January. By my birthday, June 2nd, so six months, I am going to grow to 100,000 followers on TikTok. I don't know. So buckle up and let's get started. The future of marketing is going Omnichannel. Really nice to have you on the Omnichannel podcast. How are you? I'm great.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you today. I think this is gonna be really fun. Yes, for sure. So the reason why I have reached out to you and invited you to the podcast was because I was scrolling on Instagram. Usual story. And I came across one of your ads. And I didn't even care what you guys were selling but I'm like I'm just gonna follow this account because the ad is so much fun and it's just so engaging that I'm just creatively geeking out over the account so I'm just gonna follow it anyway I don't care just I want to see these ads so that's how I felt so tell me about One Peak Creative the genesis of the company I just

want to learn more about this whole yes definitely oh my gosh well first of all thank you that's such kind words um yeah we have a lot of fun with our ad strategy for sure so I really appreciate um you taking notice and and enjoying them um so a little bit a little bit about OnePeak. So I'm one of the founders of OnePeak, and we are an online education hub for content creators, marketers, small business owners who are looking to improve their video strategy. We launched our first online course in September 2023, the TikTok and Reels Creator Course, and we've quickly grown it to almost 75,000 students in the past year which is which is crazy we've seen a lot of growth but that's not where OnePeak started we've definitely gone through a few evolutions of our business my husband and I founded the company back in 2015

and at the time we were both marketers so we started OnePeak as a marketing agency doing everything from social media management, graphic design, website building, and slowly started kind of dipping our toes into the photography space. And it wasn't until 2019 that we decided to kind of go all in on video production. We brought on our now business partner Connor at that time and we went and pivoted into a video production agency. And so when we were first starting out in the video space, we were working with a lot of local small business owners, helping them with their video strategy, but then very quickly grew to working with national brands like Expedia, Fairmont Hotels, Doritos, PepsiCo doing national brand campaigns not just for social media but also for TV broadcast

and so yeah we ran started that in 2019 ran that until 2023. We ended up the reason we pivoted into the online education space is we were just burning ourselves out like we were on set um doing like three to four productions a week on set for 10 to 12 hours a day it was exhausting exchanging our time for money and so we wanted to find a way to package our expertise in the video space and see if there was a way that we could reach a broader audience to share what we had learned not not only in the video space, but in the content creation space, which we had seen was absolutely exploding. So yeah, that's kind of the long-winded answer,

but that's OnePeak and yeah, that's who we are today. I love the long-winded answers. And can you tell me why the name OnePeak came to mind? Was that your original name with the marketing agency? Yes. So we've kept the name, the same name through our entire journey. A big, a big piece of that is my husband and I just love the outdoors where we did a lot of like backpacking and stuff when we were first kind of like starting the business. And so, yeah, that's kind of where the name came to be. I feel like there's always one of our little like taglines is find your peak.

Like there's always a new threshold, a new mountain you can cross, whether that's in business or whether that's as a creator. So it felt like a good name. So your background is in marketing, right? And then how was that process for you to pivoting into photography space and then to video creation? It's I feel like any time you pivot, it's it's very scary for sure, especially when it's a skill that maybe you haven't fully mastered yet. But I think as entrepreneurs, we just I don't know if I can speak for everyone, but for myself, like when I have a pull to go towards something, I've always been under the, I kind of have this philosophy that if you just jump both feet in, you'll figure it out. And so that's kind of what we've done every step of the

way of the business is if the business wasn't lighting us up anymore at any stage, it's like, okay, where can we jump next to really enjoy what we're doing every day? So, yeah. Yeah, I love that. And thank you so much for sharing all of that. So I want to go and kind of talk about the creative process because I don't know if you have studied some of the, like what's been out there, like advertisement wise specifically, but I do find the way that you guys are creating those videos and ads to be outstandingly good you know it's not like a boring ad that you see on tv or even on

the internet but it's it's outstandingly good so oh thank you what was your inspiration behind that and what how did you get into the point where it's just it's so creative it's so engaging like what was that process oh well thank you um it's funny that's not where we started when it came to advertising for sure so when we launched our course um the first thing we did is look at what everybody else was doing in the online education space and a lot of people and there's still tons of people doing it today we're sitting behind a desk just telling you about their product and how it was going to change your life and so when we first started that's exactly what we did we thought hey all these amazing people that we look up to that's how they're marketing themselves that must be working that's what that's

what we're gonna take a swing at it with and so um that didn't perform great to be honest it it it didn't work as well as we thought it would and so we thought okay let's take a step back here can we approach this completely differently can we instead of trying to like educate people and jam facts down their throats about our product instead can we just entertain them and let learning be something that's kind of happening almost subconsciously while they're watching and so that's kind of where we've taken our ad strategy is always coming at it from the perspective of first we want to entertain people next we want to provide them some really impactful value and then we want that cell to just be so soft where it's they're they're buying into us

as humans and and relating to who we are and and to where our students are at when we're bringing like case studies and stuff into the mix but then yeah just really trying to make it approachable fun make people laugh you know keep it entertaining instead of just trying to to sell them right off the bat or or to jam information um in their face because that that doesn't work at the end of the day you know um there's a concept called infotainment and i think i don't know i don't know i think i don't know if you know jump card they're an la-based company and they also like talk about like infotainment when you mix entertainment with information and

just like yes it's mixed right yeah so we call it edutainment over here education entertainment same thing yeah exactly same concept but um we teach that a lot in our courses for sure so yeah we call it uh edutainment and um that's really like the winning mix but i think it's always leading with entertainment so who is the mastermind behind those random, like, even the script is so random, but like the clip, like who is behind like the fish, like the fish tank and that is like, who's doing that? Oh my goodness. I like to think that Glenn, Connor and myself are very collaborative in the creative process.

We all definitely have our strengths more so like approaching it where it's like instead of being like we need to follow this like a to z playbook how can we just keep people engaged entertained throughout and what visuals could we bring in and then how can we build the script around that later so it's almost thinking about like what could we visually put on the screen that's going to pull people in and how can we build our script around that? We find when we take that approach, it works really, really well for us. So it's always the visuals first and then you think about what the script is going to be like. Yeah. And sometimes we do it the opposite way.

But I find that thinking about like what can is visually going to stimulate people and then how can we build the script kind of around that? So the Uber story, for example, when you were in a car like those that that came first and then you built the script around that as well. It's hard. Those, see those, that kind of ad is a little bit, that is kind of more of like an ad, like brand piece format, whereas the ones that we do for our course are very different. So that one, we would have built the script out first. I feel like I'm really confusing your audience here, but it's the kind of different when it comes to like creating like a, that was more of like a brand ad, whereas like when we're creating like an edutainment style ad for our products I find that we like to think about like what does the audience want to see and then how

can we go from there it's really exciting we're actually going to be launching um a brand new course in January in January called the video ads academy where we're going to be taking people through exactly how we create our ads and what that looks like so I'm really excited for that that's very exciting what is your favorite ad that you've ever done whether it's on the infotainment side or whether it's on sorry edutainment side or whether it's on the just for one peak is there anything specific that you feel like that was so much fun to make that's a tough one I feel like honestly anything that we're creating um for our courses right now is really lighting me up because we have complete creative control since it's our product that

we're marketing um I find it's just like the shoot days are just so fun like we're literally laughing so hard like you bring up the fishbowl like I literally take a fishbowl full of water and like fling it at the camera my husband got like drenched in that moment like we keep it really fun and we keep it really light-hearted so I feel like any of those ads where we have full creative control um I'm really enjoying making how long does it take to shoot like a one minute ad oh so it totally it totally depends on like contextually what's happening in the ad it ranges for sure um but we like to try and and this might be a little bit crazy but we like to try to try to shoot everything um in a day if we can so we'll typically start in the morning and try to wrap by the afternoon um and we make which we choose our locations um very strategically so we can try

to accomplish it in that and yeah we find that works really well for us we're we're typically putting new ads in market every couple of weeks so we have like a quite a quite a quick cadence there so we want to provide as much value to entertainment as we can but also not be like spending a week producing an ad we'd like to try to do it as as quickly as possible but as effective as possible i love that thank you so much for sharing that yes i wanted to ask you about um so here's one thing i noticed about your company and your brand specifically is that you actually embody what you teach so you're not just like selling the course but you have your own instagram you know you have your tiktok's account like you all of you individually have your own accounts that you are

creating content for yes so that is so unique to me that when you embodying your teachings and we can check the numbers are behind you it's not just that you're making up yeah yeah it's definitely was intentional where it's like if we're going to be teaching people how to make organic content and eventually teaching people how to create ads that convert we need to have proof in the pudding we need to practice what we preach creating an organic strategy for ourselves to like prove that we knew what we were talking about was definitely intentional um I remember when we were starting to build out the framework for the course I set a goal for myself where I had never posted a personal TikTok before like I'd we'd helped our clients and stuff

with videos but I'd never done it myself I'd had Instagram for forever but TikTok just wasn't something personally I had done so I set a goal for myself where I was like, I think it was January. And I was like, it's January by my birthday, June 2nd. So six months, I am going to grow to 100,000 followers on TikTok. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I've never done that before personally, but I'm going to try. And so that's using everything we teach in the course. I'm going to follow the framework to a t and see if I can do that and I think it was by like the second week of May

I had passed 100,000 followers and I had I think I had accumulated almost like 80 80 million views which is crazy and I think by my birthday I was at like 115,000 or something. And so I could say, hey, even if you're starting from ground zero on a brand new account, this can work. And so, yeah, that was a really and and at the same time, Connor, my business partner, was doing the same thing on his golf channel. And I think he grew his to like 50,000 or something was getting millions of views. It was really important to us to be able to practice what we preach because yes we had helped our clients do this but personally for people that were creators that we wanted to take our course we wanted to make sure that they

could really like look look at what we were doing and and be inspired by that so yeah that was definitely very intentional and you know what i want to add to this is that you didn't just create a TikTok and did a random thing. You actually built it around who you are, right? So it's not just like you doing like throwing things to the wall and like getting like attention that is like a weird attention. Like you see those kids doing, right? Or dancing. Like it's more like Megan in its entirety. how can I yes build that and you know right exactly it was really intentional I wanted to share like Glenn and I's crazy life as parents and like who

we are as people and hope that um other people that whether they're parents or not we're just inspired by our like relationship really it was what it came down to we kind of were in the like couple niche which is like a very interesting niche if you haven't like gone down that rabbit hole on on tiktok or instagram it's really cool to like i just love being able to like have a little behind the scenes look into people's lives and i feel like even if i don't know them personally or have any connection like if they can entertain me and um they are providing me some sort of value in our case it was in the value the value of our videos was like you're gonna you're gonna laugh you're gonna have fun you're gonna see a

funny reaction or or see a challenge that we do with each other and so yeah our goal was just to be able to entertain people and to bring a little bit of laughter into their lives and it ended up working really well for us so yeah yeah, we do definitely try to create as much content as we can because I think it's important to be able to also learn as well, like to be continuously learning, continuously pushing ourselves, seeing what works, what doesn't. I think it's really important to, especially if this is what we're teaching in the space, to kind of stay on top of it and keep ourselves fresh. I want to go a

little bit behind the business if you don't mind sharing. Are you running your own ads? Like is it something that you do or do you have someone an agency that you work with that are doing all those things for you? Yeah so I'll share a little bit of our ad journey. So when we were launching the course last September, September 2023, we first started a bit before that experimenting running our own ads. So prior to this, we hadn't spent a dollar on marketing our marketing business or a video production agency. So the thought of like dumping money into ads was kind of scary. It was like, oh, is this going to work?? Is it not gonna work? Will it pan out? And so when we first started, where our expertise shines is on the actual

like ad creative side of things. We had never run an ad before in our lives before launching this education company. And so we started by like spending $50 there, a hundred dollars here. Oh, maybe we'd get a course sale, but then the next day it wouldn't do so great. So we were like very emotional advertisers where we would have like a laser vision on the

numbers and be kind of like pulling the triggers of like turning ads on and off based on that. And so we realized very quickly that we were not ad specialists and we needed a little bit of help. So we had a friend locally who had run a media buying agency and we asked if he would help us out. And I remember, oh my gosh, I remember sitting down at our first coffee meeting with him and him looking at our product, looking at our numbers, looking at all the things and kind of taking a step back

and going, yep, you know know i think i could scale this for you guys to spend like ten thousand dollars a day on ads and i think i almost barfed i was like sorry what ten thousand dollars a day that's insanity like we just like dipped our toes and he's like no i think i i think i could scale this thing you have a product that is really marketable to such a wide range of people whether they're creators small business owners or marketers I think we can scale this thing and so that's exactly what what he helped us do is is slowly started increasing that ad spend and we kept pumping out really great creative um and now we're spending upwards of like twenty five thousand dollars a

day on ads which is crazy and right now you're feeling like really good about it it's you getting your ROI yeah exactly and like one thing he taught us is like all you need to do is be able to turn one dollar into two like if you can just simplify it that much to be like that's all I need to be able to do um then you're profitable so I think having that perspective shift too was really big in the beginning um and yeah it's been a really crazy, fun journey for sure. Love that. You know, I purchased one of your courses because of the ads and I was like, I'm going to interview you. So I might as well do my market research, buy the product. So when I was on the page, I'm like, hmm, okay, let's buy this. And then, oh, some upsells here and there. And then next page, some upsells here and there. And then I'm like, hmm, I really need to have some self-control here

because I'm going to... But I love how that's intentionally built up to like, oh, you might need this too. And so is that also the ad agency that has been putting all that together? Or is it you guys? So we've done all of that kind of like backend stuff. Like we're doing all of that in-house.

We definitely like have brainstorm sessions and stuff with um our media buyer to kind of like test new things everything is a b tested so all of our landing pages are a b tested what upsells we include in the sequence like everything so we've kind of narrowed it down to a formula that works really well and then when we go to introduce a new product into our product suite, like, for example, the Video Ads Academy in January, then that as well will be A-B tested on how we're going to position that and the type of upsells, order bumps and stuff that we'll include. So again, we were so new to the space, like we knew nothing. I think when we first launched, we had no order bump.

We had no upsells. It was like, here's the course. Hope you like it. So now we've grown it to more of a little bit more robust strategy where we have a lot more products that we can offer our students and help them in specific areas. So for example, like we noticed a lot of people were really struggling with their hooks. So it's like, hey, we can build a mini course all about just like perfecting that first three to five seconds of your videos.

So we created the art of hooks course, or we had students reaching out being like this is all great but like i'm just really not confident showing up on camera so we created a course called comfy on cam to help people like get over that like mental block of like getting in front of the camera and and sharing their stories so we kind of tuned to our turn to our community a lot to be like what is it that you need and can we create products um that can help support you no matter what stage of your content journey that you're in and i think you're doing it the right way because you're listening to clients demand customers feedbacks and you're building on that instead of experimenting with something that you don't even know if they want to need right totally yeah i love that and um what do you think and i'm just i want to go a little bit on the your students and like what are the things that you're seeing in the space obviously

having contact with them and creating cars courses for their demands so what do you think as a creator that are just starting out in the space wanting to do reels and then monetizing them for a living what are the biggest mistakes that you see that people make in creating their first shorts and reels yes i'm i say oof because there's a lot of things kind of fluttering in my head right now. But I would say the biggest mistake that I see creators make is that lack of a strong hook at the beginning of their video. It really is so important because the algorithm rates how well your video is going to do and who it's going to push it further on to based on your watch time. If people aren't making it past the first three to five seconds, then your watch time is going to tank. And that means that all the effort you put into creating this awesome piece of content is going to go down the toilet, which sucks. So we say really focus your time on perfecting that first three to five seconds.

We actually say focus. You should be focusing like like 80 of your time of creating the piece of content should focus on that first um three to five seconds it's funny like if you go in the we have a private facebook community that comes with our with our course and so people are always sharing videos in there getting feedback from other students it's a really cool like collaborative process um but when i'm schooling through there i do find that like the majority of the videos that are shared like they're good, but it's the hook that's lacking. And I think a big misconception that people have around hooks is that you just need to deliver like a bold statement to camera and you're going to like blast off into viral land. But unfortunately, that's just not how it works. So I'll share an example of something from like my own experience where I found that I really kind of like where it first kind of like hit home to me for me, the power of

a strong hook. So a few years ago, my husband and I and our little one went on a trip to Tofino, which is like a surf town out here in BC where I'm from. And I had all this like beautiful footage from the vacation when I came home and I was so excited. I'm like, oh, I'm going to post this really cool reel. Everyone's going to like see this beautiful place I went to. I'm going to like put stitch all these videos together, have a nice voiceover. It's going to be awesome. So I posted the video crickets like got not a ton of viewership. I was like, oh, this is odd. I thought this was really great. But then what I

realized is I didn't give people like people weren't making it pat like you can actually go into your insights and see where people are dropping off in your video. And I noticed that after like the first three seconds, people were out of there. So it's like I wasn't giving them a reason to stick around to see all this awesome footage that I had. So I decided to take another whack at it and think about like, how can I spark curiosity about this vacation? And so one interesting thing that happened on the trip was that we found out that I think she was like a year and a half at the time, our little one was scared of sand. So we had spent all this money on this like extravagant vacation

to this surf town beach town and we get to the beach and our daughter hates sand like awesome this is great um so i thought to start the video with my daughter has a phobia i've never heard of before and it absolutely ruined our beautiful vacation so right there just that change of instead saying like come with me on my trip to tofino instead using a hook that sparks a bit more curiosity, that video went on to get, I think it's almost at like 2 million views. So just that little difference of bringing in that curiosity factor makes just like a wild transformation. And it can really happen overnight. It's quite quick. Once you understand being able to spark that curiosity it'll totally transform your strategy

and i love seeing students um have big like overnight wins like that i love that and how about your daughter does she like sand now is she okay yeah she's good now now she's just like obsessed with the beach we go all the time but yeah that was a tough pill to swallow because be like i remember i'm like oh i'm so excited for her to like take her take her steps on the beach and this and that and i put her down and it was just like screaming oh no it was a long week for sure love that and um you said so we need to spark curiosity in the way we start our videos is there any other way we can start or is it always that we need to lead with curiosity? Is it like, because you mentioned like shocking factors are like not the best.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because there's a lot of different ways to spark curiosity. It can be like visually what people are seeing on the screen. Do you have something that's kind of jarring that's coming up that they're like oh what's going on here can you include like a really compelling like text block hook that like shows like like states something that they might be interested to learn more about later in the video can your actual caption of the video hint to something later I'm kind of nerding out right now but there are a lot of ways that you can spark curiosity in your hook um we we actually call it like the five elements of a strong hook it's not just like the statement you say to camera there's actually like five different ways that like while a viewer

is scrolling you can capture their attention which is really cool i love that and i think one of the um the main course that i purchased um there is an extra like hook pdf that is very helpful because you guys are actually giving like like an insertable sentences that i can just apply to my own stuff that is like so easy to just like you know implement and plug in my own stuff and i i'm i am running an own uh marketing agency so i apply everything to my clients you know like yay let me check if this is working and to be honest with you like it does and i used some of the hooks in the description it was basically um to show a location of a new restaurant in a mall but it was like um i think the caption was something like um you might

be wondering where is it and with like an eye emoji like a question love that and then the guy was like i was you know speeding up the clip as he was walking and then people watched all the way into the find out where is it and yeah some of them they go like i watched all this way and you guys like took the longest route because we literally took the longest route but anyway it was funny and uh very effective you know oh i'm so glad that um you're you're able to to utilize what what we've taught and that you've seen results that's really cool love hearing that i love hearing any student win yeah yeah i was happy to share that with you so about your growth like do you have any plans for obviously you talked about the um the video

editing course or the ads academy yeah yes yes that's coming um any other growth we are going to be launching a group coaching program very soon which i am so excited for so that's been something people have wanted from us um since we launched. But as a small team of three, it's definitely hard to fulfill when you've grown a community of nearing 80,000 students, which is crazy. So we are going to be launching a group coaching program. We brought on a new director of coaching who's going to be helping us facilitate that. Very excited about the group coaching program. I think it's going to be great and I think there's going to be a lot of really great actionable ongoing tips in there for our students that they'll get a lot of value out of I was just about to ask if you have any like higher touch point programs

because I'm like I love that the courses are like self-paced and there is the community but I'm like I just I feel like you know some people need more of that instant feedback and also you know maybe I don't know how most people are they buying courses but they never actually implement it I think for those reasons I think getting that implementation part and just that instant feedback is very important to have that type of support like group coaching support yeah I'm excited for it maybe eventually we'll do like more one-on-one coaching down the road like a higher ticket offering but I think for now group coaching like I just love the idea of community and being able

to like not only learn from like experts um so because we'll be bringing in like guest speakers and stuff too which I'm really excited for but also to just learn from one another and to be able to like lean on other creators, keep help, keep each other accountable. I think that there's something really special about that. So I think the group coaching is going to be, it's going to be really cool. And I can't wait to see how it evolves.

Me too. I love that. Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing your insights. Is there any lesson that you'd like to share with the listeners maybe one piece of advice oh oh my goodness again i feel like i have so many things floating around in my head i think one piece of advice would be don't i think one big thing that's been floating around um the marketing space for years is that you need to be like posting all this content all the time and just like huge volumes of content post three times a

day this and that but if you can focus on the quality of your content rather than the quantity and like really be intentional with like the value that you're providing um and the caliber of content that you're creating I think posting just even like one to three great pieces of content a week rather than like burning yourself out trying to post a ton of content every single day you're gonna see success quicker that way because you're gonna be able to really fine-tune your craft and find those formats that are gonna be a slam dunk for you and then put all your eggs in that basket and you'll your growth will just explode so that would be a big piece of advice i have thank you so much my gun and thanks so much for coming and

sharing your insights thank you yeah it was so much fun yeah this was great thank you so much uh how can people find you on social media i'm gonna put everything in the description but you can also tell sure sure sure so um you can follow us at one peak creative tiktok instagram and then um our links to our websites are there as well so um that's the easiest place to find us yay thanks so much megan