How to create your own DailyVee show
using 3 virtual assistants and $7k
Not everyone has the luxury of a full service media agency in which to dedicate a handful of resources to produce a show like Daily Vee, so I thought I’d challenge myself to see what it would take to create edit and publish a daily marketing mentor show called MKTG Mentor, for 30 days using an approach that anyone could follow and adopt.
There was three reasons for this:
- To deliver value for free to my audience of CEO’s and business owners.
- Showcase what multi-channel marketing looks like in 2017.
- Fill a time gap when most people take their kiwi summer holiday.
PLUS I was super curious about what it would cost to replicate a Gary Vee style daily show using virtual assistants.
The answer is around $7k per month which sounds a lot until you realise just how much digital content is published.
Before I cover how I did it, and how you can too, this article is literally a marketing blueprint you can start right now if you fit in to one of these 3 categories:
- CEO looking accelerating your publishing capability by in-sourcing what multiple digital agencies (video, social, PR) currently deliver to you.
- Marketing Director starting to switch your TV advertising spend away from a channel that people ‘Tivo’ through and never watch or Sky+ and never ever see.
- Business Owner wanting a how-to guide with templates on sharing expertise across multiple digital channels
- Are a Marketing Agency interested in publishing higher production value content faster.
Can I watch the answer instead of read it?
Ok then. Here you go. This is is the final episode explaining the last 30 MKTG Mentor videos, published across multiple social channels including The Ryan Marketing Show on YouTube (which you should totally subscribe to).
Why are you sharing all this intellectual property?
I don’t know. It took me ages to figure out and I know that it will both save businesses agency fees and massively grow their reach, engagement and ultimately sales and revenue. I guess that’s why….because it’s fun to share, and when I do, interesting and unexpected positives consequences happen.
I like doing things differently to what you’d expect from 99% of marketers out there. Don’t believe me? Go and listen to one of the 100 CEO’s I’m interviewing about business and marketing … for FREE.
YouTube: 100 CEO Interview Project
iTunes: 100 CEO Interview Project
SoundCloud: 100 CEO Interview Project
Blueprint for creating your own daily show
You ready? Here it is. A blueprint for you and your business to create your own daily show on a topic that you are experts at, yet for some reason keep all that information to yourselves rather than sharing with the marketplace and establishing yourselves as true experts and practitioners in the multiple digital streams where people are ‘content grazing’ while they look for inspiration, entertainment and time out from their daily life.
Create the idea for your show. Mine was practical and easy marketing advice that any business owner could follow that didn’t have a dedicated marketing resource and didn’t want to keep inviting their marketing agencies back in for simple questions. What you’ll need:
- A fancy repeatable intro (watch 15 seconds in) together that delivers context to your show.
- A business outcome you’re looking for that isn’t a vanity metric. Likes and comments and reach don’t count. Think more about emails, opens, leads, phone calls.
- A timeframe to run the show. I picked one story a day for 30 days. You might select 2 stories per week for 6 months.
- A budget Remember, the more often you publish, the more scale you get and the lower the cost per publish. 30 videos over 30 days cost me $4k USD excluding ad spend and my own time. Add that and you’re looking at 7k USD. Halve the videos per month & halve cost.
Produce the story for each episode.
Each story was encapsulated in a single video. I wanted the content to be visually skip-able so you could fast forward and read where you were skipping to. Showing is more powerful than telling, so important concepts were accompanied visually with an example. Here are three different styles I played around with:
4–5 topic story with 1 minute for 1 topic with screen simulations
Sub 2 mins to cover a single topic with screen simulations
Rant Style around 10 minutes with no simulations
I found people watched the sub 2 minute stories more often on Facebook, but there was no different in number of views on YouTube based on video length. If it’s good content, people will watch. In total, just under 5,000 minutes of content was watched in the first month. Over the next year, extrapolated out, that will translate into 60,000 minutes or 1,000 hours of influencing.
Build your Production Team
The aim was a new show was published and promoted every 24 hours, just like Daily Vee. In addition to developing the idea and producing the story, that required a video editor, designer, social media manager and transcriber.
I also wanted to be able to able leave them to it without any to-ing and fro-ing. In fact, as it turns out, the whole project has taken place with out a single Skype call and only a handful of emails with the video editing guys. I trawled UpWork for hours on end and hand picked one person rather than open the job up to everyone. Spend time finding the right person. Don’t just put up a job for everyone to bid on. Be responsible and take a risk on someone. Shanece has proven to be worth her weight in gold, not simply because of her designs skills or her attention to detail, but because I could trust her to publish directly to my accounts. I chose a designer and she did all the social media too because her attitude is on point. WIN. (Here’s Shanece’s UpWork profile.) Shanece if you’re reading this you better prioritise my work over new clients you get!
What you’ll need:
- A designer-y / social media-y person to design to a template adding their own flair, then schedule Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts.
- A video editor who you like the style of what they’ve produced to date OR they are influenced by the same people you are. In my case, this was Gary Vaynerchuk as he is the star of his own show Daily Vee. I found Marjolein by getting involved on Twitter.
- Create a website just for your episodes. I built my own Netflix style site with my Vietnamese dev team because I wanted a place to showcase the MKTG Mentor series and the 100 CEO Project. I also think Netflix is the collected website that’s not a website on the Internet.
- Get busy with spreadsheets because nothing happens without a decent workflow. You may feel more comfortable with Slack or Trello which is great. I like ’em too… but for this I wanted a single view of all the content.
- A transcriber so that every video comes with captions. I know it’s a hassle and it’s an extra step and can delay things… but if everyone is watching with sound off, then you MUST do it, otherwise you’re wasting your time. It turns out that around 40% watched with sound off and 60% sound on, which means that the intro and captions got people curious enough to go sound on (big commitment I know).
Get the captions in SRT format so you can push to Wistia, YouTube and Facebook easily then also get a transcription so you can use for producing SEO content. Yep, all those digital birds, one stone. Michele in Melbourne was not only time-zoned just right to keep the daily heartbeat of content running, but I could trust her transcription quality so didn’t need to watch back the videos for yet another screening.
Got this far? Yeah, editing content on a 24 hours news cycle will start to give you some appreciation of the depth and breadth of what’s required now. Not for the faint-hearted.
Build Your Publishing Arm
Publishing across YouTube Instagram, The Ryan Marketing Show Netflix style site, Facebook, Twitter, PLUS Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories daily is no mean feat so I outsource everything except Instagram and Snapchat.
I didn’t want to lazily link all the accounts and publish the same thing everywhere. Each channel needed it’s own unique take, which does add to the overall time, but definitely helps with engagement. So what content when on each channel?
Facebook got a little extra copy that gave the browser an idea of what was going to be in the video followed by some advertising in the ‘view more’ area with links out to other social channels.
YouTube got the summary bullet points of content only.
Twitter got the episode title and a 45 second video clip.
Website got a video link only because it’s Netflix style.
Instagram Stories got a screenshot of YouTube playlist upload with a call to action to go an watch it.
Snapchat Stories also got a screenshot, but of Instagram to keep it fresh.
Custom Instagram Images was the biggest win in driving traffic and I highly recommend this quote based approach combined with getting your hashtag game sorted.
Get Smart on Audience Targeting
Targeting a particular audience was an area of the daily MKTG Mentor video challenge that I didn’t outsource, because I wanted to know who was watching and be able to inject new stories into only the feeds of people who watched at least 50% of the previous story.
Because it was January, I knew people would be on summer holidays and looking at their phones a lot, and so my hunch was that this content would give them something to watch in a month that’s traditionally very slow for news in New Zealand. It’s also the time when people start thinking about what they’re doing for the new year.
Audience development is also the area I enjoy the most, and is something that you want to make sure you’ve got a handle on whether you insource or outsource your digital campaigns.
What was hugely successful
- Instagram Posts with targeted hashtags. From a standing start converting my personal Instagram to a public business account, I was getting 50–70 likes per post daily but most of the comments were either spam or simply interested in building their own followers.
Marketers don’t care as much about other marketers!
- Facebook fans up 10% in a month and daily reach averaging 2,000 per day.
PER DAY.
The amount of ad spend varied but rarely went into double digits. For less than $10 a day, I’d created a viewership of 50-60,000 people over the month because video content cuts through the noise.
YouTube Subscribers could’ve been better having added 20 more from a standing start of 4 subscribers. This is important because YouTube sends video digest emails automatically.
Email Subscribers weren’t promoted but I did get great feedback from my existing business owner email list from the additional MKTG Mentor content.
Twitter posts with video helped with profile views. I was quite surprised to see the number reach 1,800+.
On my bio are direct links to the MKTG Mentor channel and I tracked the clicks of these which shows about a 10% click through rate.
This makes me happy.
What was a massive fail
Marketing is about generating leads. I couldn’t place a single lead that directly resulted from a conversion pixel firing. But I don’t care either. I know that top of funnel marketing is about awareness and interest. I picked up three leads, just without the pixels firing. Here’s the problem for us marketers. If you get assessed on the digital metric alone, you may have trouble showing ROI.
I also know from a recent interview with CEO Brett Burgess — Sales Impact Group that you are kidding yourself if the first sales call = a purchase every time. Rarely is your sales cycle aligned with your buyers buying cycle.
So let’s revisit the three reasons I started this challenge.
Yes I delivered value for free …
to my audience of CEO’s and business owners PLUS marketing agencies and marketing managers around the world. It also helped with some local recognition. I got feedback like:
‘ah, that’s what you do!’ June
‘dude, you’re always in my feed. Every minute there seems to be another video. How do you do that?’ Ben
‘I’m not in to marketing and don’t need it, but I watched a couple, and get what you’re trying to do. No one around here is doing it.’ Sam
‘I am following your video series religiously, but would like more in-depth ways for us.’
Yes I showcased multi-channel marketing …
GaryVee invented the style with a production team of 8. I invented a lean version with a virtual team of three (four including me).
Yes I filled a time gap I had…
when most people take their kiwi summer holiday. OK so I didn’t get as much of a tan, and didn’t drink nearly as much beer as I would have usually… but that’s what it takes to live differently.
Yes I discovered what it cost to produce…
a Gary Vee style daily show using virtual assistants in the Amsterdam, New York and Melbourne to augment my own skills based in little old Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. $7,000 USD sounds like a lot for a small business, but is a drop in the bucket to reach 60,000 targeted people with your message if you’re used to advertising on television.
What happens next
I need to find a company that want to adopt this approach and innovate in how they reach their consumer base. Two of the leads I pitched this approach to understood the benefits, but because the ROI isn’t clear (it never will be), they preferred to keep doing BAU… business as usual. I know this publishing methodology works but maybe not here. Maybe it needs a transformational company with values that are centered around innovation.
This is now the next step. Finding an organisational canvas to apply this marketing approach.
