The Ryan Hanley Show - 222. How to Create Video that Doesn't Suck with Steve Stockman

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comHave you ever wondered why some videos go viral while others languish unseen? ✅ Join the Insurance Growth Masterclass: https://masterclass.insure✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley/✅ Hire me to speak at your next event: https://ryanhanley.com/speakingConnect with Steve Stockman✅ Steve's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/customproductions/✅ Steve's website: https://stevestockman.com/** More about this episode **This episode is a treasure trove of insights on crafting vertical short-form videos that don't just grab attention but hold it tight. We're talking about the magic of storytelling, the allure of a charismatic presence, and the art of structuring content that hits just like a well-timed punchline in a classic comic strip.With a blend of personal experience and practical tips, I break down the elements that make or break viewer engagement. Whether it's the raw authenticity of capturing moments as they unfold or the clever use of visual and textual cues, you'll learn how to give your videos the edge they need to rack up those views.Bringing his wisdom to our discussion, industry guru Steve delves into the heart of what makes a video truly meaningful. It's all about the payoff—giving your audience a reason to care, laugh, and feel. Steve generously shares his expertise in creating content that resonates on a deeper level, drawing from his trove of resources, including articles and book excerpts available on his website.This chapter is a must-listen for anyone aiming to evoke emotion, inspire change, or simply put a smile on their viewers' faces. Get ready for a compelling journey through the world of impactful video storytelling with someone who truly knows the ropes.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So the audience is the most important thing. And this is another one that people think is hard, but it really isn't. And the reason it isn't that hard is because you are also an audience and you also click on your phone when you're bored and go to another video. And you also choose what you're watching on streaming based on how good it is for you. Right.

So if you're looking at a story and it's boring, don't do it, you know? If it were as easy as we're just gonna put our benefits up on the screen and type, that's what you'd see in the Super Bowl. But it isn't that easy, right? We have to pull people in. We have to take them on a journey.

But the good side of that is we know boring when we see it. We know what the journey is. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Steve Stockman, a veteran filmmaker and author of the bestselling book, How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck, Advice to Make Any Amateur Look Like a Pro. And guys, I will tell you, that is exactly what Steve does today. Video is huge. Everyone's talking about it. There's all kinds of services and VAs and post production software and should you use AI, et cetera. What Steve does for us is break down exactly how to create video people will actually watch. Because guys, at the end of the day, you can have all the tools, all the equipment,

all the post-production, et cetera. If you can't create a video that someone actually cares about, that they're actually gonna watch, that they're actually gonna get a payoff from, and then either build brand value or reach out to you as a prospect to engage and possibly work with as their agent. If it's not producing results,

if people aren't watching it and feeling some kind of emotion from it, then the video is worthless. And what I love about Steve and his style and what he breaks down for us today is that he breaks everything down in a very simple format. It gives you resources and tools that you can use to learn from him.

So very happy to have Steve on the show. This is a great episode. And for anyone who's interested in video, you're gonna wanna listen to the from him. So very happy to have Steve on the show. This is a great episode. And for anyone who's interested in video, you're going to want to listen to the whole thing. Before we get there, I want to remind you guys that Finding Peak, my new consulting agency, is launching in February. We are going to have both kind of a one-to-many coaching program. We'll call it a mastermind, coursework, etc. where you're going to be learning exactly how I have been able to grow multiple agencies to, you know, incredibly fast. We'll break down the exact strategies. While I can't talk about specific details about my last

agency, we are going to go step by step how to do it. And then the other side of that is if you need hand-holding, if you need customized work, if you need kind of that next level, that's going to be available to you as well. You can always reach out to me at ryanatfindingpeak.com. That's ryanatfindingpeak.com. Happy to talk to you about that. But guys, go to masterclass.ensure. Masterclass.ensure masterclass.ensure that's http colon backslash backslash masterclass.ensure and you can get on the list get notified as we get closer to the launch and then once we launch this program you can get access to all kinds of uh discounts and additional features and products and stuff that we're going to be doing for the people that commit to finding peak early. And guys, this is what, this is, you know, kind of taking my legacy in this industry

and creating a through line for the rest of my career. I want to give you guys everything that I've learned. That's what I've always wanted to do. And, you know, for, for, for many different reasons for a long time, the only way I've been able to do that is kind of at a very high level through this podcast and through, you know, kind of keynotes and workshops and stuff that I've done. Finding Peak as a coaching and consulting agency is going to be about taking you to the next level, about getting down to the hand-to-hand combat, the nitty gritty, answering your questions, and making sure that you guys get real results. Inbound marketing, generating inbound leads, closing those leads, and ultimately retaining and generating max value from every one of those leads is the future of our industry.

We already know how to do cold outreach. We already know how to retain and do work that account executives. But what about all that inbound business? How do we get more of it? And how do we maximize what we get? Well, Steve, Steve, thanks for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it. I can't wait to launch it. Go to masterclass.insure. So I will tell you that- I love you for listening to this podcast.

I should have mentioned this one before we went live or whatever, but I actually, in the insurance industry, like got my street cred, whatever cred I have in the insurance industry, which this is one of the largest insurance podcasts in the insurance industry, which this is one of the largest insurance podcasts in the insurance industry, creating video. And when your people reached out to me

about what you were doing and would I be interested in having you on the show, I was like, oh my God, this is fantastic because I am in no way a video expert, yet somehow in this particular industry, people think that I am. So I'm so excited to have somebody on who like knows what they're actually talking about and can give us kind of the, the real deal and has resources for, for the audience to actually go to and learn more from. Uh, well, I'll try to live up for that. I'm, I am hopeful that after

all these years practicing, I know a little bit more about video than most insurance people. But I guess we'll find out, you know, quiz me. We'll see what I can do for you. So for a long time when I'm asked, how do you how do I make video look good? How do I make myself look good? And, you know, you get all these emails about what cameras I should use and lighting and all this stuff. And I'm like, and I want you to critique this advice. This is what I'm interested in.

Critique this advice. Okay, go. So what I'll say is I'm going to make you Spielberg in 30 seconds. All right, 30 seconds. Grab your phone. Hold it above your head at a down angle. And then find wherever the sun is and be behind it. Right.

Or be in front of it. Sorry. Be in front of it. Right. And then just don't be in an echoey room. So if you have a down angle, the sun is in front of you and you're not in echoey room, there's a decent chance your video will be good enough.

How, how did I, how do I do with getting people at least a minimum viable, uh, Spielberg? It's in, it's in my top 10. Okay. Right. So, so I'll tell you, I'll tell you where we're perfectly aligned is that spending a huge amount of time worrying about equipment when you're a video novice is a wank. You know, it's just, there is no point to it at all. It's like going, well, I'm going to take my first golf lesson. So first I need these $30,000 clubs.

It just, there's no way that you know enough to tell the difference between a $15,000 driver and a $100 driver. You just don't. And so I would say I'm with you a hundred percent on that. The other thing is that equipment at this point in the evolution of video is not the thing that determines whether your video is going to be any good or not. The phone that you have in your pocket shoots better video than Hitchcock could shoot in his mid 20th century career with a crew of 150 people.

You know, it's just, it's amazing. Smartphones will make you look good. It's almost hard to make them make you look particularly bad. So I think that your advice of holding it up so that you can see people's eyes, you know, when you're looking up at the camera and also having the light behind the camera, basically. Yeah. So that you don't look like a refugee from the witness protection program. Those are great pieces of advice.

Yeah. Even now, the phones can probably fix it if you put the light in the wrong place. Yeah. It is crazy. I do not not i have not upgraded i have an iphone 13 but i have a buddy who got the iphone 15 pro max whatever like the newest biggest baddest iphone and you know it's basically the same thing except i will say like the cinematic mode on that camera i would have to spend like 10 hours with, I used to have a, this is a long

time ago. I used to have a Canon 1DX and would do all kinds of ridiculous vlog stuff that was completely unnecessary to do with that camera, but I overindulged, et cetera. And it would take me 10 hours to get this like buttery cinematic motion with the, you know, all this stuff. And with that, he just was like walking, filming his kid playing soccer. And it looked like it was like some $10 million production video. And, uh, I just said, we, you know, this, we need to start thinking about, and this is one of the things that I, this is really where I want to go. I wanted to get the, you don't have to spend out of the way, but like, uh, uh, I was like

this, you, we no longer have to worry about how to get the video. We'd like capture the video. That's that's we're beyond that now. And now we can talk about what feels like the actual harder part, which is how do you actually create a video that doesn't suck, which is what your video course is on, which is what your book is all about. And, um, we're going to make sure that everyone has those resources and knows to go there. And I highly recommend them for, for everybody that's listening. Um, but, but what's that next step? So we're beyond equipment and all that kind of stuff.

How do we actually get something that somebody wants to watch? Well, so the first thing that I tell people is that you have to understand how this one basic thing about how video works, and that is that video works in shots. So if you watch television or a movie or a really great YouTube video, you're going to see that the camera rarely points at the same thing for more than 10 or 15 seconds. Like in a commercial feature or TV show, you'll almost never see a really, really long shot. But when people go to soccer games or they start shooting an event at work, they run the camera and they run around and they point and they just leave the camera going for hours. And that's

not how you tell a story in video. Video works in small bits that add up to a whole. So if the first thing you do is think about video in shots, it will make your video 2000% better instantly. So what I mean by that is a shot is just like a sentence. When Mrs. Cooper taught you nouns and verbs in third grade, that's what you want to go back to. So a shot is a noun, a verb, and maybe an object. So Bob hiking is a noun, Bob, hiking verb, right? So we can shoot that shot with our cameras. If there's no verb, there's no action and it's just Bob, that's a still photograph, right? And if Bob is hiking off a cliff, which would be the object,

right? Then that's a great shot, even better because we're going to watch Bob plummet to his death and that's great video, right? So you want to think about it like a sentence. And when the sentence is over, you want to stop. So if you're at a company function, the CEO giving a toast is maybe a shot that might even be a little long. The CEO raising her glass might be your shot, right? And then another shot might be a gym accepting an award. And another shot might be your shot, right? And then another shot might be a gym accepting an award. And another shot might be the waiters setting down the dinner plates. And if you think in terms of these short shots, then the video that you're shooting of your event or your home video is going to look like a movie when it falls out of the camera

and be much more entertaining instantly than if you just ran it for 20 minutes. Make sense? Yes. No, it makes complete sense. And so let's, let's take this into this audience. So, you know, at any given moment, there's somewhere between, let's say, 8,000 and 15,000 independent agents and professionals listening to this show. And a lot of them, the reason they listen is because what we tend to focus on here at Finding Peak is growth, scaling, marketing, sales, etc. Okay. So if they're, but I will say, and you were, you know, very accurate in your initial statement, very few, if any of them, and we could even go so far as to say none, are professional videographers or video creators.

So do you think it would be a fruitful exercise to maybe break down, say, one of the things that I see a lot of them do is maybe go to a client's location and try to create a little co-marketing video with that client, say a bakery or maybe a warehouse, depending on what that client particularly is or they're providing insurance for. How could they, maybe we could walk through a little bit how they could set that up, what you might do maybe off the cuff to tell the story of that client or their relationship together with that. Do you think that would be okay? Sure. Okay. So, so once you get the idea that you're breaking down your video into shots, the next big thing that you need for a marketing video is the story that you're going to tell. So the question that you have to ask as an insurance agent is, what do my customers want to know that will take them on some sort of emotional journey that's going to either amuse them or surprise them or anger them or make them feel strongly about my business one way or another.

What's that story I can tell? So if you're going to work with a bakery that you're working with, the first question that you want to think about when you start communicating to your audience is, what do they think is magical about working with me? And I use the word magical advisedly because I want you to get beyond, oh, it's a thing we do. Like we write insurance. You can say that about every single agent on the planet, right? But saying these guys provide magical customer service and they provide support in analysis and other areas that I would never

have expected. And they're always there when I need them. And they always return my calls or whatever the thing is that makes your agency better than anybody else's agency for the customers who love you. That's where you want to start your story. So I guess the question is when you talk to this bakery or you're thinking about going to this bakery, what experience have they had that is magical for them in terms of working with you that surprised the hell out of them that made you stand head and shoulders above all the other people? Because our analysis of our target wants to start with the people who already love us, right? And that's where our stories come from. Gotcha. And then positioning whatever their answer is in kind of what's in it for the

audience kind of way, would that be taken? And then that was that the next logical step is to say, okay, what do you believe current client and whatever friend who owns a bakery is magical about us? And then how do we express that in a way that shows what's in it for someone who's watching? Yeah, for sure. And I would even go further and be more specific about your next step is once you know what's magical about your agency for your customers, then the question is, what story are you going to tell? So before you go to the bakery necessarily, you might want to make sure that you understand something that all the customers are going to agree with, right? Something that all the customers are going to feel, your best customers, what do they think is magical about you? What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from

the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And in exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, et cetera. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous

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Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to leave a comment about the show because i read all the comments or if you're on apple or spotify leave a rating review of this show i love you for listening to this show and i hope you enjoy it listening as much as i do creating the show for you all right i'm out of here let's get back to the episode now if the bakery has a good example of that then that's a story you can tell you can tell the story about how they had an oven catch on fire and there were problems and they were having problems replacing their oven and you stepped in and did X, Y, Z for them. That was astounding and surprised them with how great an

experience this was. And the way you want to tell it is in the form of a story. First, this happened. They had a problem. Then they had a challenge that they didn't expect. And then working with us, that challenge was solved. So that's a nice little two-minute story about what makes working with your agency magical for this bakery based on what you think makes working with your agency magical for all your other clients and then you can tell that story yeah okay um so do you have or recommend like uh you know i what i recommend people again not i somehow get asked a lot of questions about video even though i'm not uh you is something I do for my business, not what I do for work. But I've always used like the story grid model.

I don't know if you're familiar with that. And this is synonymous with a lot of people. But like beginning hook, middle build, ending payoff and try to get people to frame their stories in just some way. Because otherwise they tend to be meandering. I see a lot of videos that are well-intentioned or maybe even do have a good story, but it's like it mashed up in all these things and doesn't really tell you why you're watching until two minutes in. And is there like, do you teach through your work and through your videos? She was like a framework or something. Yeah, but I think it's simpler than we want to make it. And I don't know the story grid per se, but, you know, Plato was the original story guy way back in 250,000 BC.

So, but I like to go back to, to the very basics of storytelling, because storytelling is something that people think is hard. It's kind of like, oh, I'm going to shoot videos, so I have to get expensive equipment. And when they hear about storytelling, it's like, oh my God, I have to learn how all this works. And it's really much simpler than that. So let me give you the four elements of story that I like to tell people to use. First, story is about a person. So there's a hero to every story. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. And if you do that, you win, right? So every part of your story needs to be about someone and have a beginning, middle and end. So if you're doing that bakery story about how magical your ability

to help people who've had an oven disaster is, the first thing that you need to consider is who's the hero of the story. And probably you want to make the hero the baker, but it could be that the hero is someone who works in your agency who went out of their way to help them. It could be that that's the story. And then the story changes depending on who you choose as the hero, which is up to you. So if the hero is the baker, then at the beginning, their challenge is running this extremely busy, very popular bakery. And at the very beginning of the story, their oven explodes and takes half the bakery with it. And then the middle is their attempt to make sure that their bakery is put back together so that they can continue that outstanding customer

service and do whatever their customers think is magical about their bakery. And so they come to you with this challenge. And the end is that you and the bakery work together to get them 100% up to speed at the least possible cost and as fast as humanly possible so that they don't disappoint their community and their customers. So that's the story if you make the baker the hero. If you make the agent the hero, then the beginning is the phone call from the baker. And the middle is discovering what the baker's crisis is and figuring out how you're going to help that baker get their bakery back together. And the end is from the agent's point of view, what it took to make those extra phone calls to push vendors and to work with the underwriting insurance company and whatever it is

that vendor needed to do to get everything up and running as promised by the date promised and what happens when you deliver it. So the story changes a little bit depending on who you choose as a hero, which is why that's a very important element. Yeah. I love that. I think that's often misunderstood and even my wheels are spinning in my own head about different things that I've done. And I can see that. I can see how much the story changes as you position that hero. And it seems the most selfless don't start there. We probably just start with, hey, I want to create a marketing video for this bakery and I'm going to go over there and have him tell me why I'm awesome and what he does and off I'll go, you know, and we're not thinking, well, so where does, so, okay, so we have the hero, where does the audience play into this or do they play in? Like, let's say I want to

track more small businesses in my local community using this baker. I've decided I really want to tell the story from the baker as the hero. Do we draw the audience in? Do we consider the audience? How do we work that aspect in? Well, this is the thing about video, right? If you do a video and it's not interesting and it doesn't take your audience on an emotional journey, their phone can transport them instantly to a rerun of family guy, right? They don't need your video for anything. Even if you've bought tons of Facebook ads to get them to click on it and watch it, they're gone in three to five seconds if they're not treated to something that is worth their while. So when you say, how is the audience a part of this? The answer is they're the only thing that matters.

And this is one of the parts that we forget when we're doing marketing video because because we know so much about our business and we know so much about what happens. And we want to tell it all and we want to say why they should be coming to us. And we forget that if we haven't drawn them into this story and given them something of value, a moment's entertainment, a moment's interest, a moment's involvement, then they're just gone. They have no business sticking around for any of that. So the audience is the most important thing. And this is another one that people think is hard, but it really isn't. And the reason it isn't that hard is because you are also an audience and you also click on your phone when you're bored and go to another video. And you also choose what you're watching on streaming based on how good it is for you. Right. So if you're looking at a story

and it's boring, don't do it. You know, if it were as easy as we're just going to put our benefits up on the screen and type, that's what you'd see in the Superbowl, but it isn't that easy, right? We have to pull people in. We have to take them on a journey. But the good side of that is we know boring when we see it. We know what the journey is. So the thing that most people do, and sometimes they do this in the name of considering the audience is, oh, well, I must do these things. I must have a story hook. I must get my key benefit out there. And it's like, yeah, those are good things to try to do. But first and foremost, if your video is boring, no one's ever going to watch to get to the story hook. Yeah. They're never going to watch to get to the story hook. Yeah.

They're never going to watch to get to the benefits. They're just gone. Yeah. It's funny. I was doing some research the other day for this podcast. And I do, you know, intermingled with interviews. I do kind of solo episodes on topics, questions that I receive, things that some of my clients are struggling with. I'll anonymize them and answer those questions for people.

And I, you know, this is, I don't mean this to sound egotistical, but I'm sure it's what everyone does. I put a video out and I was like, when I got done, I was like the content of that video. I was like, this is really valuable. Like I'm giving, you know, I'm giving, do this and X is going to happen. Like, you know what I mean? Whatever. And it'm giving, you know, I'm giving, do this and X is going to happen. Like, you know what I mean? Whatever. And it did like, and I was like, and so, okay, you know, I'm, you know,

and I'm very self-reflective, you know, I try to, I just want to get better. So I started looking at other people who did, let's just call them like straight talking head videos and to what you said and to the audience listening. So you guys know that I'm as much at fault and learning like all of you, even though I do a decent amount of video. I was watching other guys like Ben Hardy does straight talking. It's just him talking into a microphone or talking to his freaking cell phone camera for like 10 to 12 minutes straight. But in post-production, what they do is, as you said, they might take a still image and maybe just slide it while he's talking about climbing the mountain to success or, you know, or he'll have he'll take his face off completely and just have like scrolling turn or like what is that called? Motion words where the words come in as they talk or whatever. And, you know, just all these different cuts and moves. All it is.

I mean, all he sent to his video production was him talking into his cell phone and you know then obviously the content is good but then he did this thing where you can tell in post they thought okay what does this shot look like what do we need to show here to amplify this part of the message and and you can just see how much more engagement he's getting, how deeper and richer it is. Obviously, his audience is bigger, but like the idea is it. This was so validated for me like a month ago. It's unreal.

And I was like, oh, my gosh, I am boring the shit out of people with these, you know, with, you know, me talking with a black screen and captions underneath is literally probably making their brain hurt, even if the content is valuable. Yeah, I think if we're subjected to a video that visually bores us, you know, like 50% of your cerebral cortex is about visual stimuli. Yeah. That's because when we grew up on the Serengeti planes, you know, and we evolved watching for, uh, stuff that was important to us. And we used our eyes as our, our primary sense. And what we wanted to know was, can I eat that? Um, is that going to eat me?

Right. Um, can I have sex with that? And, uh, am I fitting in with the community? And these are all based on visual cues. And if you don't give us stuff that tells us visually what's going on and you don't keep that visual cortex involved constantly, we get really bored. And what we feel is claustrophobic, right? So, if we're forced by a camera to stare at one guy just sitting there for 10 minutes, we're going to feel like we're missing stimulation that we should be seeing. There might be a wildebeest over there, right? Somebody with a spear might be over here. We don't know. We're trapped in this little box of watching this guy, um, you know, talk straight to us for 10 minutes and it just makes us, our skin crawl, it makes us really uncomfortable. And that's one of the reasons that thinking in shots really works is because you're constantly changing up the visual stimulus. And also like you're saying, putting words on screen and,

and different camera shots. It's kind of like when I did my video course that I adapted from this book, one of the problems with doing a video course, that's about how to shoot video that doesn't suck is if your video course sucks, you're in big trouble. So I had to actually produce it like I would produce a TV show. And so it's got all kinds of cuts and it's got all kinds of different shots and it's got actors doing examples and it's got graphics and words on screen. And I realized, I kind of didn't realize when I started that I was really going to have to get that into it. But as I started to watch it and look at the script, I went, this is not going to work unless it lives what it's supposed to be

teaching. Um, and it's hard, but once you get into the idea and once you start seeing the world that way in your videos, uh, it gets a lot easier and becomes habit. So that post-production piece is something that I know holds back a lot of people, a lot of professionals in general, but a lot of professionals in our space is they'll, maybe they're comfortable enough to get on camera and they're okay at telling a story. And let's say they're, let's say they're decent at everything we've talked about so far. And then, but they'll get to that post-production piece and they'll be like, yeah, but I don't have time for that. Or I don't know how to do that. Or I don't have the money necessarily to pay somebody, you know, because they're assuming it's super expensive. So maybe just help, help these individuals and myself

included, I guess, better understand the method. Like, how would you recommend to, if let's say one of these insurance, you know, they take your course and whatever, and they call you and they go, Steve, man, I think you're the, how do I do this at my shop? Like, I love what you're doing. Like, I want to get for me

as close to this as I can get. But I don't have like, you know, you know, a huge company's budget. How do they, how do they start to get there? Um, there's a few ways that I'd recommend first, let's understand the most important thing about post-production. Post-production is when you take all that footage you shot and you configure it into something that really tells the story in a tight way. And people, again, think post-production is super complicated. The truth is that post-production is cut, copy, and paste. It's just like Microsoft

Word. So if you can write a Word document, you can edit a video. And the simplest thing to editing that video is put all the footage in a row in whatever editing program comes free with your computer or your phone and cut all the stuff that's boring. Just zap it and then see what you have left and then cut some more stuff that's boring and then maybe move a couple things around. Really easy. Now, having said it's really easy, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the kinds of people who really like to edit video and the kinds of people who would rather kill themselves. So my wedding video is still not edited and my kids are in their 20s. I don't edit. I'm a director.

I hire people to edit. And what I would say to small business owners are two things. One is if you have a decent size agency, there is a pretty good likelihood that someone in your agency likes to add it. So find them and either assign them some more work or offer them incentives to do some more work for you and see if you can get them to cut your stuff. Easy, right? They're hobbyists. They love it. They'll do it. It's a good experience for them. They get better as they go. Another option is to talk to local colleges in your area and find students who are learning to edit and offer them some fair but paltry wage

to come in and edit your video for you. Another is just practice cut, copy, paste until you get better at it and forget about all the bells and whistles, which odds are are stupid anyway. Yeah. You know, nobody needs to see sepia in a video. Nobody needs the kaleidoscope effect. You know, none of that's important. Movies are told in cuts. So just cut your video together yourself and try it. And then your last option is if you go shopping for a real honest to God editor in your market, most cities have them. And a pure editor, I don't know, junior editor, hundreds of dollars a day.

So if you've got a grand, they can cut you a two and a half minute video. And if it isn't worth it to you to do that, rethink doing video as a way of marketing your business. Because once again, a video that sucks will not be watched by anyone. So either do the editing right and make it look nice or accept the fact that all the time you spent shooting it was a complete waste. I know that's harsh, but I think it's true. I can tell you firsthand that it's true because I have created plenty of videos that suck and learned the very hard way, as I described before, that, you know, it's funny. mindset works is I would rather push out 10 shit quick videos than spend that same amount of time on one video because quantity over quality, right? Is the mentality. And it's like funny, I've been doing videos since 2011 to market various insurance businesses and stuff. And like

the videos that I took in some cases, weeks to create, tens of thousands of views, still watch today. The ones that I pounded out 10 videos in a month, just banging them out and getting these ideas out, each one maybe has 500 views and people forgot them as soon as they were done. And like, you know, that, but there's still that constant mentality of like,

I need to get another video out. I need to, and we just have to remind ourselves. And I'm literally speaking to myself that one great piece of content is worth a thousand of nothing. It's worth all infinite shit pieces of content probably. Yeah. My favorite example is, um, dollar shave club. So if you look, if you look up a video, I think they did it about eight or nine years ago. It might have been longer. I can't remember. But look up the Dollar Shave Club video, which is around on YouTube. And their introductory video is very, very funny, beautifully done, captures them perfectly. It's stunning. It took a lot of work to make. But as a result of doing that piece, that piece alone propelled their company to success. And then they sold for like a billion dollars to Gillette, I think. So don't quote me if I got some of those companies wrong, but Dollar Shave Club, look it up. So a video can make an enormous difference in your business if it's the right video. And it will make no difference at all

in your business if it's the wrong video because no one will ever see it. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. And for those of you listening, if you remember back in 2018, Sydney Rowe and I created a Dollar Shave Club-esque video to promote a conference that we were putting on. And you go back and you search that. I think you can search Agency Nation's YouTube channel. But you find that video and look at how many, that video took us a month to create. It took us a week to kind of bullet out. It took us another week to kind of script out what we wanted to say. It took us another week to plan the shoot and then a week to shoot the video. And I still get, I still see that video getting viewed and brought up to this day.

That's something we did back in 2018. And I don't know, and this is maybe because I'm an idiot. I've never spent that much time on another video again, yet that is still by far one of the best piece of content that I've ever created. So maybe I need to remind myself of the lessons that I've already learned. And I am so glad that you're on here, Steve, to remind me of how short my memory is and how much of a dummy that I am. So we all are. I'm joking. I well, I think this is great.

I, you know, I will say that in our industry, there is a growing, you know, there is a there's a sea change happening in our industry where baby boomers are starting to phase out and you have this next generation of let's call them late 20s to early 40s agency owners. And they've grown up in an era where video and marketing and video on social media, et cetera, has been a big part of their life and have grown up in an age when that's been accessible. inaccessible. So I think that now more than ever, if they're willing to adopt what you've said and what you teach in your video course, which guys, if you go to stevestockman.com, right on the front page, you'll see, bam, there's the video course. You can sign up, you can get two lessons for free. I'll also have links in the show notes and everything. And then there's links to the book and all that stuff as well. I'll have links in the show notes for you guys. But I want to finish with a vertical video, short form video, because this seems to be something

I see a lot of people trying. A lot of people do it in one of two ways. They seem to just do raw talking into the thing. Maybe they put captions on it. Maybe they don't. Or it's this very templatized, every video looks almost exactly the same. Like usually there's like a bar on the top with their logo and then their face will be wedged in the middle and then they'll have maybe captions and every one looks exactly

the same. That seems to be the two versions I get. Neither one really seems to be working particularly well for anybody. So what are your recommendations if you have any for a vertical short form that kind of reels video that a lot of people are using? Well, there's, this is where it gets a little complicated. So, so let me see if I can pick it apart. One of the reasons that short form video works like Reels or TikTok or some of the other short form stuff that goes up is because the people who if you are not great on camera, do not appear on camera. And the flip side of that is if you have somebody in your agency who is great on camera, make them your spokesperson and put them on camera all the time. And you'll know the difference because you'll look at them on camera and go, wow, she's terrific.

And that's your person, right? It doesn't take brain surgery to know that some people are good on camera and some people are not. So that's a huge thing that people discount. So regardless of the formatting around someone in a short form video, if the person doing the talking is charismatic and interesting and talking about interesting things, you will actually pay attention because they're just going to grab you. That's why movie stars get so much money. It's because they're charismatic and interesting. The other kind of option, there are two other ways to make a successful video like that. One is if you happen to be capturing something amazing, like you have your camera out at the moment that your son catches a football thrown by the quarterback of the Detroit Lions during the playoff game and it lands in his lap and you happen to catch that.

That's going to be a great short video. It's not repeatable, but it's a great short video. Yeah. Right. And then the last thing is a lot of great short form video is still structured like a story. So if you, if you remember back in the olden days, we had something called newspapers and in the back of the newspapers, we had these things called comics. And you could read these comics every day and on Sundays. And on the daily comics, they had three panels. They had the setup. They had the response.

And they had the punchline. Right? had the response and they had the punchline. Yep. Right. And if you look at the really great, funny TikTok and short form videos, they follow basic comic strip format. They're, they've got a hero and a setup and some kind of response and a great punchline at the end. Or sometimes they'll have repeating punchlines because that's a thing you can do in a video pretty easily, but they're set up like little stories. So the question is always if, if I have a charismatic spokesperson or not, what story am I telling and what's the best way to get it out there?

And that's going to kind of guide you to, to the answer on short form video. Yeah. Cause you got to give your audience something. Yeah. I, I, I completely agree. I, I, uh, you know, I, I've been doing a lot of testing with reels and I did, uh, if you ever heard of 75 hard. No. Yeah. So it's just, it's a mental toughness program. It's put on by this guy by Annie for Stella and long story short, discipline is not, you know, organization and discipline is not like my strong suit. And I said in 2023, so one of the things I want to do is challenge myself to this 75 day thing. And it's, it's basically just seven things you don't necessarily want to

do every day and you force yourself to do them to practice discipline. Okay. So part of that is you have to work out twice a day. One has to be outside. So I made a commitment to show the workouts in a short form video, just to show people, Hey, at 42, one, I can do this too, that I am doing it and holding myself accountable to you, the audience for doing this, whatever. Okay. Well, I used, so I would record myself either working out or whatever I was doing. And then I used this app CapCut, the app doesn't matter, but it had like templates, like story templates essentially set up. And what I started to realize what, so, so over that time period, I went from like 5,000 to 112,000 followers on Instagram, which does me no good for business because most of them are following me for reasons that have nothing to do with what I actually do for a living, but whatever. What I found that was really interesting

was I started to figure out the formatting of the templates that did really well and the formatting of the templates that did not. So it was like simple things like how quickly the cuts moved, as you said. Was there a payoff at the end in terms of, you know, oftentimes it would be like a Morgan Freeman thing or, you know, some like inspirational quote or whatever being said over the top and um but the the what was being said and and how it hit the number the amount of cuts uh simple things like was it just like gray text at the bottom is the captions or was it like these cool like the the word is highlighted in yellow and the rest of the words are white so it's capturing your attention or you know these things like really mattered in terms of

whether you got a couple hundred views or maybe you got a hundred thousand views on, you know, in some of these things. And it was, it was wild to see that. And at first it was, for me, it was very random, but over the course of the 75 days, I really started to pick up on, and I, and I, I did not necessarily pick up on it to the depth that you're describing it here, but I did start to see like, there's a real difference. And you could think that the video quality or the way I framed myself when I was doing whatever was perfect. But if all these other pieces were not in place or it didn't grab them right away, like the ones that just had one image going for a long time, obviously were the easiest to create because you didn't have to put all the cuts in, but they all did not do the best

by far. I mean, not even close. Instead, that rapid cut to a story that went along with the words almost always got exponentially more traction, comments, et cetera, than the ones that would just be words over the top of one exercise in an unbroken line. Yeah, I think payoff is the key word I heard you say. It's got to give the audience a laugh or an inspiration or a feeling or something that they can take away that's valuable to them. And I think when you hit that, you probably did way better than when you didn't. I think the rest of it is important, but not first principles. You know, first principle is give the audience something that they will value from their point of view, not something you go, you should value this.

But it's more like, oh, I see. I'm entertaining them. I'm enlightening them. I'm making them feel something. I'm showing them a journey. You know, that's, that's what we watch video for. And you have to do that, whether you're a marketing video or, or a feature filmmaker. Yeah. I love that. Steve, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing this. Obviously we'll have links to your website, to the video course, to the book. Where else can people connect with you if they just want to follow along with your work? Where are any other places that people can get ahold of you or connect with you or see what you're doing?

You know, I would go to the website, stevestockman.com because that I've got like 200 free articles that you can read and you can read excerpts from the book and all that stuff. And you can reach me with questions and comments and all that from there too. So I would definitely start there. Um, and, uh, I'd love to hear from you. So Steve, thanks for having your time, man. Uh, this is something that I know this episode is going to be incredibly valuable to, to

this audience and, and to, uh, my industry. And I just appreciate you sharing it with us. Thanks so much for having me. All right, buddy. Be good. All right. Take it easy. Thank you. Thank you. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the OneCall Close system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle-tested, the one-call closed system eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes

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