How do I consistently get more video projects?

Introduction

You run a video production company or you're a videographer or filmmaker, and you notice a gap in your pipeline. You start to panic. You've tried cold calling, cold emails, posting on social media, asking for referrals, attending networking events—but nothing really sticks. Nothing returns a constant flow of projects. Sound familiar?

This is incredibly common in our industry. We work in what has typically been a project-by-project business model. When one project comes to an end, you need to find, pitch for, win, and deliver the next. That's tough. That's stressful. That's what creates the feast or famine way of living where one month you'll have a ton of opportunities and be on cloud nine, but the next you'll have nothing.

What You'll Learn

• The Lead Generation Machine framework used by over 3,000 video production professionals worldwide
• Two key marketing concepts every video professional must understand: the Buyer Journey and Blue Ocean Strategy
• Why marketing with showreels and case studies alone limits you to less than 1% of your potential audience
• How to capture attention at the awareness stage and eliminate competition entirely
• How to build automated marketing systems that work in the background of your business

Why Traditional Marketing Fails

Typically, video production professionals market with their showreel and some case studies or portfolio pieces. But there are several problems with this approach.

First, your showreels and case studies are only ever going to work on people who are ready to buy your services. They've identified a problem, decided that video content is going to help them, and now they're looking for someone to create that content. They're already in the decision stage—and the number of your prospects in that stage at any given time is less than 1%.

This creates another issue: all of your competitors are doing the exact same thing, which puts your prospective client in a very strong position. Ultimately, it will come down to price. Massive effort, low conversion rates, low profit—not a good place to be.

Don't get me wrong, your showreel, case studies, portfolio items, and director's cut videos are all important—but they're only important in the decision stage. Because 99% of your target audience are currently outside of the decision stage (even though they still have the exact same goals, ambitions, challenges, and aspirations as the 1%), you're missing a massive opportunity.

The Blue Ocean Strategy

By attracting prospects in the awareness stage—making them aware of an issue or challenge they're facing, or an opportunity they're able to take—you're then able to fish in a big blue ocean that's full of your perfect prospects, and there's not a competitor in sight.

This is the foundation of the Lead Generation Machine framework. Instead of competing in the crowded "red ocean" where everyone is fighting over the same 1% of ready-to-buy prospects, you create your own space where you can build relationships with the 99% before they even start looking for a video provider.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Once you're clear on these concepts, you need to truly understand your target audience. This means understanding not just who your perfect customer is, but also which projects, industries, and types of videos are most profitable to you. You also need to understand whether going direct to client or via agency is most profitable.

This isn't about only pursuing the most profitable types of clients—you may hate a particular industry or style of video, and it's important that you love what you do. But by doing this analysis, you can ensure that whoever you are targeting with your marketing is indeed profitable.

One of the tasks within the Lead Generation Machine framework is called the Profitability Deep Dive, where you run a report on your past clients and projects. The formulas within that spreadsheet produce all the results you need, saving you time and providing quite an eye-opening experience.

Building Your Marketing System

Once you're clear on your target audience, you need to build marketing systems that work in the background of your business so you can concentrate on doing what you love—creating beautiful video content.

You start creating content, messaging, and hooks that capture your prospects' attention. Here's the key part: if they show any signs of engagement on that content—watching a video to over 75%, clicking on a link, liking, commenting, or sharing a social media post, visiting a certain page of your website—you then know that they are well engaged and are someone you can start a conversation with or serve your consideration and decision stage content to.

By doing it this way, you aren't wasting time and money serving your showreel and case studies to people you think might want to work with you. You're serving them to people you know are primed for your service and are already engaged. This is how you make social media marketing actually work for you.

The Power of Automation

The beautiful thing about this system is that it works in the background of your business. Once it's set up, you don't need to touch it as everything is automated. That's why the Lead Generation Machine framework includes 10 steps to ensure this system is working, optimised, and primed to create a constant flow of opportunities that are perfect for you into your business.

Take Action

Every single step you need to take to build this into your video business is outlined in The Lead Generation Machine book, which you can get for free via the link below this video. The framework has been used by over 3,000 video production professionals around the world to drive a constant stream of opportunities that are perfect for them into their video business.

If you're interested in industry-specific sales, marketing, and retention strategies that you can build into your business, grab free access to it all now. It's there waiting for you.

Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:50:00
So, you run a video production company or you're a videographer or a filmmaker and you notice a gap in your pipeline. You start to panic. You've tried cold calling, cold emails, posting on social, asking for referrals, attending networking events, but nothing really sticks. Nothing really returns a constant flow of projects. It's so common in our industry. We work in what has typically been a project by project business model. So when one project comes to an end, you need to find, pitch for, win, and deliver the next. And that's tough. That's stressful. That's what creates the feast or famine way of living where one month you'll have a ton of opportunities land and you'll be on cloud nine, but the next you'll have nothing. So in today's Q&A, we're going to put an end to that. How do I consistently get more video projects?

00:00:50:00 - 00:02:00:00
Now, as you may know, I teach marketing, sales, and retention strategies to video production professionals. And I'm lucky enough to do this because of my 16 years experience in the industry, building a production company from scratch to being valued at over $20 million, losing it, and then building back stronger. Obviously, the people that I consult with and teach today come to me because of this very challenge. They need more projects. They need more clients. They need more profit. They need a system in place that works in the background of their business so they can focus on doing what they genuinely love, creating beautiful video content. Now, I'm not going to be able to teach you every step that you need to take in a short Q&A video, but what I want to do here is to talk you through the marketing strategies that over 3,000 video production professionals around the world have used to drive a constant stream of opportunities that are perfect for them into their video business. And that's what is called the lead generation machine. And if after watching this video you think that the system might be right for you, you can grab that framework and all the steps outlined in detail in my book that's called, funnily enough, the lead generation machine. And you can get it for free via the link below.

00:02:00:00 - 00:03:00:00
So what is the lead generation machine framework? What do you need to do? Well, let's walk through the framework that specifically provides the answer to the title of this video. How do I consistently get more video projects? Let's start at the beginning. First of all, we need to understand the basics of our marketing and more specifically the two key concepts that it is absolutely vital to understand when it comes to marketing our video production services. Those two key concepts are the buyer journey and blue ocean strategy. And I actually have two videos that talk through those concepts in detail which you can watch via the links below this video. But to summarize these concepts in a few seconds, we attract prospects that are perfect for us and our business by capturing their attention and making them aware of an issue or challenge that they are facing or an opportunity that they are able to take. By focusing on our prospects at the early stage of the buyer's journey, the awareness stage, we ensure that we completely eradicate the competition.

00:03:00:00 - 00:04:16:00
Now, typically video production professionals will market with their showreel and some case studies or portfolio pieces. But there's several problems in doing that. First of all, your show reels or your case studies are only ever going to work on people that are ready to buy your services. So, they've identified a problem. They've decided that the creation of video content is going to help them. And now they're looking for someone or some team to create that content in order for them to fix that issue or achieve that opportunity. So they're already in the decision stage and the number of your prospects that are in that stage at any given time is less than 1%. And that creates the next issue because all of your competitors will be doing the exact same thing which puts your prospective client in a very strong position. So ultimately it will come down to price. Massive effort, low conversion rates, low profit, not a good place to be. Don't get me wrong, your show reel, case studies, portfolio items, director's cut videos are all important, but they're only important in the decision stage. So, because 99% of your target audience are currently outside of the decision stage, even though they still have the exact same goals, ambitions, challenges, and aspirations as the 1%, by attracting prospects in the awareness stage, you're then able to fish in a big blue ocean that's full of your perfect prospects, and there's not a competitor in sight.

00:04:16:00 - 00:05:40:00
So the rest of the lead generation machine framework is all about building the systems to do exactly that. Obviously that's a very top level overview of those concepts. But as I've said I have two videos where I go much deeper into both of these and the links to those are below this video. Now once you're clear on those two key concepts you're then able to truly understand your target audience. Here we need to understand not just who our perfect customer is but we also need to understand which projects, industries, types of videos are most profitable to us. We also need to understand whether going direct to client or via agency is most profitable. Now I'm not saying that you only look to attract the most profitable types of clients, industries or types of video projects. You may hate a particular industry or a particular style of video and it's important that you love what you do. But by doing this, you are able to ensure that whoever you are targeting with your marketing is indeed profitable. One of the tasks that we run through within the lead generation machine framework is called the profitability deep dive where we run a report on your past clients and projects and the very clever formulas within that spreadsheet spit out all the results that you need. This saves you a ton of time and is actually quite an eye-opening experience. I've actually gone ahead and made that resource available to you below so you can download it and run this exercise yourself.

00:05:40:00 - 00:06:58:00
Identifying who our perfect prospect is is a vital step in this entire process because by doing that and by working through the steps outlined within the book, we get crystal clear on who we're targeting and that work gives us all of the answers to the questions that we'll have throughout the rest of the framework. So once we're clear on this, we then need to build our marketing systems to work in the background of our business so we can concentrate on doing what we love, creating beautiful video content. So we start creating content, messaging, hooks that captures our prospects attention. And here's the key part. If they show any signs of engagement on that content. So that could be watching a video to over 75% clicking on a link, liking, commenting, or sharing a social media post, visiting a certain page of your website or a certain blog post. We then know that they are well engaged and are someone that we can start a conversation with or serve our consideration stage and decision stage content to. By doing it this way, we aren't wasting a ton of time and money serving our show reel and case studies to people that we think might want to work with us. We're serving our show reel and case studies to people that we know are primed for our service and are already engaged. This is how we make social media marketing work for us.

00:06:58:00 - 00:07:48:00
So once they show engagement on that content, we can then transition them to an opportunity. And the beautiful thing about this system is that it works in the background of your business. Once it's set up, you don't need to touch it as everything is automated. That's why we go through the 10 steps of the lead generation machine framework to ensure that this system is working, optimized, primed to create a constant flow of opportunities that are perfect for us to our business. So, that's a quick answer to the question in hand. Obviously, every single step that you need to take to build this into your video business is outlined in my book, The Lead Generation Machine, which you can get for free by using the link below. So, if you're interested in industry specific sales, marketing, and retention strategies that you can build into your shop, go get free access to it all now. It's all there waiting for you. Have a great day.