How To Make Strategic Content To Sell Any Product

0:00My garage sale content. it is scary if you look carefully under the hood how my garage sale content leads to business for vayner media with fortune 500 companies because the people that are consuming the garage sale content are the children of the executives who are making the decisions to go with vayner media content is never a bad thing this is the gary v audio experience I'm going full-time on my personal brand thanks to you because last year you told me to get on TikTok and I did and I hated it but I still hate it but yeah so yeah personal finance yep and then I also have a podcast that I co-host which is more in the like navigating the workplace employee advocacy that type of thing and I'm trying to figure out how to put those two things together but yeah Vancouver Canada and now putting all my time and energy into good for you awesome you know Jeremy very well Jeff Jeffrey I can't say hi to Jeremy it's good to see you brother how you been we're gonna give you a walk and talk back to your office awesome I loved it last time I'm not Jeff Travis founder of zeal concert and we're a virtual reality studio that produces virtual reality experiences our mission is to move people through the magic and immersive storytelling.

1:21So we produce VR content, but we also have a technology that is a motion pod that eliminates motion sickness, makes experience far more immersive with scent and haptics. And primarily we're building a network of virtual reality theaters in places like Weezen's, tourist centers. Interesting. A lot of B2B. Yeah. Makes sense. Awesome. Pleasure. So here to learn... Where are you from? I'm sorry? Based in LA. LA. Awesome. So I'm Kea, this is Yasmin. We're sister in Laws. we have a company called Bia that helps women from all the way from puberty through menopause so onset of menses interesting balance their hormones and it uses whole foods so we're all about food as medicine I think like 80 % of women have hormonal imbalances and don't know what to do they're getting band-aids like I shouldn't I don't know if I should say that on camera birth control things like that and we want to give them like an actual solution to their problem I love Love that.

2:14And we launched last year only direct to consumer, subscription-based, and 100 % self-funded. Wow, that's awesome. All Whole Foods? All Whole Foods. I'm such a buyer of this thesis. It changed my life and we're like, we gotta get this out to more women. I have a disproportionately educated girlfriend when it comes to Whole Foods. I'm like stunningly educated through osmosis. I'm well more prepared to help you now than before. So, can't wait. Good for you. I think you really, there's real upside in that. other than DTTC businesses are very hard. There's that part. We'll talk about it. All right, now this whole side of the table comes from Canada.

2:51So we're going to start with these folks in the middle who are one group here. Christine, one of you guys need to say hi to Gary. Introduce your peeps. Hi, Gary. So I'm Christine Lewington, CEO and founder of PIP International. This is my daughter, Shelby. She's in charge of marketing. And this is Troy. He's here for Hi-Fi. So what we are is we're an ag tech company and we extract the protein out of yellow peas. So plant-based. it's a clean plant-based protein and we're going to disrupt the industry because pea protein tastes like and ours does not so we have large companies i can't save them on camera sure that are at the table and how do i close them and how do i raise the real money because i just right now currently the guys are commissioning our 30 million dollar pilot facility and we're going to the 200 million i bought the land everything else is engineered and we're going big because you can't go small They want tens of thousands of tons, you can't just do a little bit.

3:45And so I've partnered with HiFi, who does things that you, I think, are going to understand the NFT raising money. So I'll hand it over to Troy. Yeah, quickly, Gary. So I'm Troy McDonnell, the chairman and CEO of HiFi Corp, a small U.S. public company, a kind of big company. We've built a securities token offering platform for clients very much like them. She's become an investor in our company as well. agritech green tech these things are essential in humanity these pub these private companies are looking to do capital raises and they're going to be using our platform to do security token offerings we have a new form of nft we think we can take nfts from being most of them being foolish to be very serious and we actually have a new form of security token offering completely legally compliant in the us eu and now in canada you have to be in a credit investor or no for some types of offerings.

4:40For her first offering, yes, it'll be a Rig D, I will succeed, but we'll also be doing Rig A's and do not need to be accredited. Understood. Okay, awesome, great, thank you. And you're going to do it? Hi, so I'm Nunu, originally from Portugal, living in Canada for eight years now. What part? I have an influencer marketing agency. 90 % of our business is focused on promoting gaming. So we do dedicated video integrations in the most organic way possible because I've been trying to do it on a different way from those outer platforms. So we have been growing and I hit kind of a threshold that I didn't know where to go from here.

5:21So I was approached a few times for people to try to acquire my company. I didn't know what to do and then I booked Matt Higgins on intro. So I met Matt and he said like like you're crazy, you're not going in that direction. You're gonna learn how to build your second tier of your company, your management team that you don't have at the moment and you will grow your business and definitely you will need like the four days help. That's awesome, that's very nice, Matty. That's funny, very cool. Where are you based? Kingston, I'm happy. And do you rep the talent? No. You rep the brands? Yes. Understood.

6:03cool let's rock and roll yeah so I have a podcast called it's time to lean with a co-host with a friend and that is all about career you know like employee stuff but then really my personal brand which is what I'm trying to grow I'm struggling I got on TikTok I started you know doing all the like repurposing the content and what I've realized is that I'm more, I'm an indoor cat and social media is requiring me to be an outdoor cat and I'm like struggling to figure out how to find my voice and my career to grow, really. Well, let's break it down because it's going to matter for everyone in the room.

6:50So introverted versus extroverted or however you want to paint it. Let's go a higher, are you worried about judgment? No, I mean, I don't really give a fuck about what people say. Do you not have the ideas? Because that's something that I've been thinking a lot more about. And some of you have consumed my content for a long time. Even my own team is hearing this for the first time. Even Andrew who films me. I've been thinking a lot about the ideas. I've come to realize that I took for granted how easy ideas are for me. We talked about this the other day for Vayner and Sasha. So this is one of the reasons I've started doing green screen content.

7:30again making assumptions that some of you are paying close attention to me and others aren't green screen have you seen this where i take a headline from an article and then i'm over it and i'm talking what early on when tiktok was popping something i said that i stopped talking about that i'm going to start talking more about is these platforms are now helping people with training wheels like when i first started youtube it was like camera post now with all the filters all the features, the music, the this and that, these platforms are really trying to put you in a position to be able to make the content.

8:05The reason I like green screen a lot is for a lot of people here, no matter, I just listened, almost every, actually I'm gonna take this back, everybody here can speak as a commenter on top of an article within their field, whether that's private equity or influencer marketing or food or food, right, or raising capital. almost everyone here, like I woke up, had an idea. I think having a grudge might be the great poison of our society. I've been thinking about this lately, a lot. That if you actually are a human being who is currently sitting with a grudge, that it's actually destroying you on an everyday basis.

8:45So I was interested in that, and normally the way I would do it would be, I would make, again, I think all of you know, like a grudge, I'd rant and post. White title, grudges are bad, away we go. what I did instead with this new behavior and I've got a point here for everyone is I googled articles about grudges scientific and things of that nature now I'm a little scared because I know I don't want to be a headline reader and just take something that might be a bullshit article you know so it's a little challenging but this is lightweight enough it's not like I'm making a scientific claim or you know like you know and so one thing that I'm trying to tap into for you is potentially the concept of is it the ideas Indoor cat, outdoor cat speaks to putting out stuff.

9:30Most common people are actually insecure about judgment and whether it's physical appearance, do they really know imposter syndrome, things of that nature, or just really are at that place in their life where two or three negative comments can really throw them into a snowball. If I could sense that. So then it might be about the ideas. Yeah, because I know what I did and my whole thing is, you know, I want to help other women who are just like me you know I'm going to jump in here what you've done is a the only thing I do for a living for the last 15 years is based off of what I've done I've just gotten good at making it more macro than a focus group of one yeah it's the starting point the only thing that you need to do in those scenarios is not be fearful of well wait a minute this is I and understand how much of this is we like even 4Ds this is a meta situation I'm answering your question but trust me I'm throwing this at everybody because there's different versions of it for everyone so I think not fearing speaking from a place of one and understanding how most things are universal and just changing some of the words of I to we may give you a starting point let's keep talking this is why we have this

10:49are you lacking patience for us to get there? No, I have all the time in the world. It's really for me more mission driven. I just want to reach more women, more moms, people that are, I don't have a finance degree. I just taught everything myself. Well, you will.

11:11If it's an altruistic, emotional point of view, it's completely based on patience. I wanted to reach everyone too. Start in 2009. Very few people were watching. More people watch now. How about the fact that in 2022, I know that I haven't even begun reaching how many people I want to reach. Right? It was only the last couple of years that I'm translating my content into Portuguese. Now people in Brazil and Portugal know who I am and they didn't 24 months ago. So, you know, I think a lot of times if you're truly coming from a selfless place, if you are, and I think all of us come from some version of selfish and selfless place.

11:52It's being a human being. Then we really are talking about patience because there is no hack. I'm not gonna be able to tell you, be like, well, you know, like for example, green screen. Why am I saying that? Because green screen is over indexing. That video of me talking about grudges would have gotten 400 ,000 views on Instagram for my current situation. The green screen will get 1.7 million. So that's a tactic that I love because one, it's working for people on the other side. Two, the algorithm is clearly seeing that so it's helping with organic reach. Three, it will help a lot of you make a piece of content in a way that maybe you couldn't otherwise.

12:32You have a thought, you don't know what to do in a one minute video but if you Google an article, green screen it and then speak what you were thinking about that subject matter, now you do have a piece of content. I have a 30 person content team, Andrew will tell you, that now is probably like, wait a minute, Gary's basically now just doing green screen. He's doing it by ourselves. Like, are our jobs in trouble? Like, he doesn't need us. That's powerful. That's powerful and very powerful for a lot of people here. Because I, you know, everyone's like, easy for you, Gary. You have a team. I'm like, but I didn't have a team for the first eight years of my content creation.

13:05What about that part of the story? So, what else? Well, what else is, so I have this podcast and I'm trying to figure out how to. Weave it in. my yeah leave it in because all of my like professional experience is in leadership like HR employee you know I was a manager you know so um and I really most companies are like shitty most managers are shitty and most employees like don't know what their rights are they don't know what they can ask for or what you know how to go about it and so I have this whole thing which is really sort of skills like my whole career which I love talking about I love you know having so why Why are you doing the podcast?

13:47Because I love that. Good. And I have like so much deep knowledge on that, but it's completely different from - That's okay. The personal finance stuff. That's okay. So let me give you an insight. So my garage sale content. It is scary if you look carefully under the hood, how my garage sale content leads to business for VaynerMedia with Fortune 500 companies because the people that are consuming the garage sale content are the children of the executives who are making the decisions to go with VaynerMedia. Content is never a bad thing. I often, I just, I wonder if, if I think like, if it takes away from, nobody cares enough.

14:40That's ego. No. Nobody's watching those two places and be like, I'm gonna take away from this for like, they don't give a fuck. That is just pure ego. Like nobody cares. By the way, you just gave the number one argument why everybody who cares about me in business doesn't want me to do 90 % of the things I do. Gary, you can't make a fucking video that's yelling into the screen about receipts because the Jets won a football game. You're undermining your intellect. I'm like, no I'm not. The end. We have a lot of classic thoughts that were built on the old media and distribution framework. Humans are multiple things.

15:22You can be, yes. Like who, who, who, the only people that are telling you to niche down are people who sell niche courses and have never built anything for real. Yeah, I hate that. I like hate that shit. So don't do it. Correct. I would tell you to do more shit. Like start a third podcast talking about kites. I'm being dead serious. I believe the more you give the world to attach with you, there are people who are attached to me because they're Jets fans, because they like garage sales, because they like wine, because they like business, because they love modern blockchain technology. Because they like, I give, think about how I'm doing it.

16:04I mean, it's everywhere. And like, it's complete, like there is no logic to it by old points of view it becomes an energy cost game not a strategic game if you don't have the energy to do both that i respect that becomes logical right we only have so many resources financially or emotionally but if you have the capacity notice how quickly i said great when you said i love it i didn't want to hear anything else because that is an energy driver not sucker people actually don't understand this when i tell people to do a piece of like you should to do a Star Trek podcast, they see it on surface level the way I say it, which is like somebody else might be a Star Trek fan and then they may give you business.

16:46What it really is in disguise is you love Star Trek so much that that hour each week is giving you energy for your other 60 hours. My obsession with the New York Jets, and I'm realizing right now because we've been so bad for so long and now we're actually having a decent season, I forgot because it's been so dreary, I forgot how that four hours on a Sunday drives my entire week. So I think you need to be doing more. It's just that the content has to be strong and strategic across the board and that's what 4Ds will teach out of like the essence sock. But that theory is not true. It's more that you just have to make more content of the thing that you want to monetize.

17:27Got it? It's not decrease the leadership thing. It's add more to the financial thing. I'm gonna keep doing what you tell me to do. There you go. All right, Jeffrey. By the way, YouTube Shorts. I'm repurposing to YouTube Shorts. It's like a hot mess. Well, it's only because it's early. Number two, and this is very big for all of you. Remember, when you title your YouTube Shorts video, even if it's not directly obvious to what the content you put out, if you're repurposing from TikTok, title it for search because YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Right? So you might make a video that lightly touches on taxes, but you might title the video, How to File Your Taxes.

18:12Got it? Because you're doing it for search. All right. Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. So, you know, I have ideas. I just started a campaign to start posting on LinkedIn three times a week. I want to start a podcast where I interview the filmmakers correct your content is a very active but remember when the target is a B2B decision maker that's the sizzle but make sure back to like jab jab jab right hook for every filmmaker because that's cool try to have somebody on the show once every two or three times that is an actual decision maker that you're trying to reach because you'll be able to use the content from that episode as ads against decision makers and she or he's gonna say something that is disproportionately gonna resonate with the people like her or him.

19:11So where people get caught is they think their thing is boring. And so they go for the cooler thing, right? You thought properly. I'm gonna do a podcast. Who the fuck cares about the licensing fee or the structure or some of the hardware? Like that's boring. What's cool is the fucking movies, right? On the flip side, you're doing it for marketing and you're trying to shoot fish in a barrel of a very small group of people. I still believe that one of the biggest things B2B companies need to do is make their content strictly for the CFO, strictly talking about why their thing saves their company money.

19:50Even if it's like whatever that is. That's why I love HR. All these dopey business people, like disrespect HR, that's where all the money is. if you have retention and good culture all the hidden gray of the money you're making versus the black and white all the CFOs pay attention to it's not even a fair race it's a tortoise and a hare nonetheless give that some thought okay right okay sounds good and then the other thing I was wondering about is just in terms of calibrating the breadth of the message so if I start writing posts I want to create content I can get very this is a struggle both and and and and and this is again And this is the sub, you know how we talk about subconscious bias now in society?

20:33Like you don't realize, but you have these feelings. And I'm trying to get people to be okay with that because we're just human beings. We grew up in our circumstances. And the quicker we realize we do have it and the quicker we also don't judge people for having it, the quicker this world can get nice. Everything is and. It's unbelievable how deep the subconscious bias of or is in business. If you're posting three times a week, and you know I want you to post four times a day, but if you're doing three times a week think about what you're asking. You're doing 12 posts a month. And there's not the like what comes to mind is am I going to seem very inconsistent?

21:08This goes back to the ideology of like there's nobody's going to read all 12 to begin with. Who are we looking inconsistent to? Again, what is really starting to and it's amazing it's right off the bat on both of these we have a major, major issue with over believing academia and under believing reality. the concept of who's consistent about anything. Of course you're a human being and you have your values and what have you, but all of us as parents and operators and human beings have to adjust to reality at all times. We also should start championing people's ability to change their mind. That is my greatest strength.

21:49New data, new decisions. New information, new life situation, new observations. You're not gonna bother anybody if you go high sizzle metaverse and then come down hardcore nerdy, you know, motion sickness technology. But then those people aren't going to see the other one and go like, oh, this is so pedantic, right? Do you believe humans work that way? Yeah, like that's, right? I mean, to your point, I almost think that the reason I'm doing some of the stuff I'm doing is to go to the extreme. I'm like a very well-respected businessman who's wildly not respected by the establishment because they see a video of me buying a t-shirt for a dollar and give zero fucks because there's no reason to.

22:34All you're trying to win on is relevance to as many people as possible. The people that will eliminate you because you're talking about multiple things are the least interesting people on earth. You're just trying to get people to consider you and the way to get more people to consider you is to touch on more things. You're not the encyclopedia, you're not BBC. And even those things we've seen evolve. Right? Like even CNBC or like, you know, even like Wall Street Journal, if you look at the history of publications needs to expand for relevance, even though they started as something very narrow, it's the inevitable chess move.

23:19Nobody's gonna eliminate you because you touched on two different things. This goes back to how I think it really works. I would challenge you to also add to your content what fly fishing taught me about business and make the whole first 17 sentences about fly fishing because you love it. Or darts, or hockey, or rock climbing, or surfing, or chess. We need connection points. When we're going through that stream on LinkedIn, I'm more likely to stop if you're talking about knock hockey than if you are talking about the metaverse.

23:52you see where i'm going do you have a sense well before we run out of here do you have a sense of which communication style suits you best audio video or written word i uh probably written word or video i mean i don't mind being on camera well then if that's the case you should do video and then transcribe have an intern or lowest cost transcription right think about the double benefit you know if you're willing to do video I mean I have a lot of I've written five New York Times bestselling books and I've never written a sentence of it it's all out of my mouth video transcribed to book even the last book because I did during COVID literally like my team visited me at my apartment I just talked we just filmed it all so and now you have much more content if you film it that you can use in other places so I would definitely lean into the video and transcribe it to the written work.

24:44Even if you directly are doing an article, speak it, if you can, and let that be the written thing because then even the video becomes extra, now all of a sudden you're at 12 a week instead of 12 a month. That's how you get there. Make sense? Cool. Yeah. Well, Gary, thanks for having us. You've been a huge inspiration to how we built BIA. We've listened to a ton of your 4D, so it's an honor to be here. Humbled. I'd love to give you just a bit of a plan so you can have more context. But we launched last year. I think the first year was us really figuring out do we have product market fit? Does this resonate?

25:19We've hit that. We're mid six figure business right now. We're profitable. We're reinvesting every dollar in so we're barely profitable. For customer acquisition? No, we have not done any paid marketing. All word of mouth. Yeah. So that's kind of how we built the business and can't want to share more about it. Makes sense. Yeah, we both heard one of your podcasts and the next day decided we're doubling down on content. So we're doing about three or four pieces is a contact per social platform. We have a newsletter. Per? For Instagram. That I understand. Three or four per platform per week? Day?

25:52Per day. So how many, what total per day?

25:59Oh, 12 to... Love, love you. Yeah, 20. So pumped with you. Yeah, and then 80. And it's working? Oh, it's been wonderful. Did everybody hear that? Yeah. Three times a week? Go ahead. I made it three times a day. There we go, my man. Progress. We were doing a little bit of influencer marketing in the beginning, and then we decided to double down on our own content. Yes. Working way better. Yes. So it's been fun. You know how, like, you know, like I always tell people in this one, they're always like, Gary, why is that? I'm like, you know how you love, we all love children? Like children, we universally all agree, like we love this seven-year-old.

26:36We love our children more. Yeah. An influencer can only love your product so much compared to you. Totally. Yeah, so newsletter, about to start a podcast, which we'll probably put on YouTube, and we're trying to decide all of that right now. You want to talk about that for half a sec? Because it's super important. I think you'll do well. Yeah, we started to record content. We're trying to decide. We're interviewing a lot of experts, but we also want to do our own original content. So we started recording, but we haven't figured it out. When you say your own original content, just you guys on the show?

27:08Just us. Yeah, so I would do both in one show. Let me tell you how to figure it out. Back to and versus or. Think in segments. I think the show should start with five to seven minutes of you guys. Think about Regis and Kelly. They banter in the morning. Guess, guess, guess, guess. Close the show. So I think the way you should do it is do six, seven, eight minutes of you guys. 30 minutes with the guest. Six, seven minutes of you guys to close out. maybe that one has like a little segment or a little game or hot take or you do something with each other or like for name association or whatever and then you're done then you have the post-production for all of it segments yeah and the way we're thinking about it so youtube for sure and i have a podcast i've been doing it for like two and a half years weekly personal just passion of mine that gives me energy love that thank you and we had some health interviews and we saw it really works, we now want to double down on YouTube.

28:08I guess for us, I don't know if I'm being too conservative with our marketing dollars. We have not spent anything. What do you think, how do you think we should prioritize? Well, you can't get more conservative than zero. I know. I probably need some help. But Ed, should we be spending, where should we be focusing on marketing? I mean, doubling down on YouTube, that makes sense. When you guys have, tell me a good war story of a piece of organic content that went viral. Go. I mean we have a few but one on Instagram it was like over a million it was this mocktail that we did you should take that video and run ads against that against target audiences because the algorithm aka the human beings everyone's like Mark Zuckerberg China it's fucking humans responding to shit these platforms are very simple they just want people to stay on it for as long as possible so they can run ads so they're not like Zucks isn't pushing propaganda of like you loving VR.