E548: More and more creators are coming onto the scene every day. People using their face and faceless AI.
So how do you stand out?
This is one basic thing to focus on and then two things people don’t realize. Two hacks for creating above-average mobile video - TikToks and Instagram Reels.
This is what I have personally learned from making literally 3,000-4,000 videos since starting on November 1, 2022. And this advice will get you views and sales.
00:00 Introduction: Three Epiphanies 00:26 Critiquing Brett's Video 01:17 Strong Hook 02:33 Serious Delivery 05:41 Underproduction 06:52 Down to Earth 10:19 Turning Authenticity to Sales 14:08 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#socialmediamarketing #instagrammarketing #tiktokmarketing #digitalmarketing
I had three reappefinies yesterday. One of them is about how easy it is to make well-performing content, something that I always forget. And then two of them are just best practices for stuff that does well, that I forget that lots of people forget that it's overlooked. And I'm gonna tell you when you're gonna be like, "Oh yeah, that makes so much sense." And it's not even gonna be an eye roll, "Oh yeah, it's gonna be an, oh my God." It actually, so it had my friend Brett, who's been on this podcast before. Brett is the head of events at Forbes. He just threw the Forbes under 30-summit. One of my closest friends, he's literally an executive of Forbes. And I inspired him so much that he started making daily videos on TikTok and Instagram Reels. And I've just been giving him advice here and there. And his video yesterday sucked. It sucked. And I wanna read what I said to him yesterday. So he said, "What did you think of my video today?" And I said, "First of all, there was a pause "before the video which ruined the hook." You know, actually I see that from a lot of people. A lot of people who are starting out, they will record their video and they won't remove the pause right at the beginning. The video should just start with them speaking, but maybe it will start after they hit record. And then there's a moment pause before they start speaking. Gotta remove that and Brett didn't remove that. That was one. He had a really good hook. His hook was this new AI tool is going to completely change how videos are made. The way that he came up with that hook was I told to him, like for the next seven days, just focus on coming up with the spamiest clickbaitiest hooks that you can come up with. And you know, the hook is what keeps somebody watching. It's either for a video or it's for a newsletter or it's for an article. It's what retains people. It's what retains viewers or listeners. So the spamiest hook that he could come up with and he was talking about RunwayML's new act one, which lets you speak and then transform your face into the face of anybody else. Pretty amazing technology. So he came up with the hook. This new AI tool is going to completely change how videos are made. But he started the video smiling and for the rest of the video, he was smiling. So I said to him, you smiling made me care less. The line itself as in the hook, it has gravity, but it was not delivered with gravity. And then once the line was delivered, it took too long to get into the effect of the face transformation. Also, it felt too scripted, which is just a delivery thing. And that's actually going to be part of the third thing that I'm going to be talking about, which is just how easy it is to make well-performing content that I always forget. So he said, very good feedback. Thank you. And then I added, even Gary Vaynerchuk, when he says nice things, he's not smiling. It's kind of crazy. People just gravitate towards something that seems serious, even if it is not. And this, I think, blue Brett's mind. He literally is like, fuck, like blue his mind. People just gravitate towards something seeming serious, even if it is not, because they are speaking with a serious attitude. And I was really thinking about the top creators who talk and share ideas. They don't do a lot of smiling. I'm smiling right now. I like to smile on the podcast. I think for podcasts, for long-form content, it's better. And I think for long-form content, having a serious hook will work. But for long-form, you want people to feel good. But personally, when I listen to podcasts, I wanna feel good. I wanna learn something but also feel good. But I do think it's a bit different with short-form. Short-form is about capturing attention. Short-form videos, it's getting somebody to stop in the clutter of so many other videos, so many other creators getting somebody to stop and pay attention. And our brains are wired to pay attention when something seems serious, when somebody is speaking in a serious way. When there is a hook, when there is an intense hook in the video that gets us to just stop scrolling. And that's why you need the spammy hook. And that's why you need the speaking with gravity, speaking with a bit of intensity, but not being super smiley, my friend Brett. He comes from the world. He had one of the first podcasts. He interviewed Para Silton on his show. This was in like 2008, 2007. He interviewed Para Silton, Kim Kardashian, Jimmy Fallon, and all these big people. And he treated it like a late night talk show. And that's how he behaves. And I'm like, you need to ditch the late night talk show attitude and just talk like this is the most serious thing in the world. I said to him, I said, if all you do is focus on hooks and speaking with gravitas, you will grow really fast. Now, of course, there's always exceptions to this. There's plenty of videos that do well when people are smiling. I myself have had many viral videos where I'm telling a story and I'm smiling. There are exceptions. I think telling a lighthearted story, obviously it's not going to be good if you're telling that story and you're doing it with intense gravitas and you're not smiling at all. That's not gonna make sense. But if you're sharing advice or if you're sharing a prediction about the future or if the story isn't that lighthearted, then not smiling. Telling that story with intense gravitas, that's going to help it perform. Hooks, no matter what are important, no matter what in the hook can be, it doesn't just have to be about speaking. It can also be how something is said. It can be the way that music combines with the visuals. It could just be the visuals. It could be a sound in the audio. There are so many things that a hook can be, but for people who are speaking, the hook is generally going to be the line, the line that you come up with. And my friend's hook was, this new AI tool is going to completely change the way that videos are made. So his video flopped and then me on top of my mountain knowing it all, I'm like, "Hey, I want to try to use your hook "and make a better video than you. "Can I do that?" He's like, "Yeah." So I take his hook and I do make a better video than his. But right, it's funny when you make some, everyone is their own harshest critic. And right when I released my video, I realized I had made a fatal mistake. I was just, 'cause it was late last night. I was so focused on getting it out so I could go to sleep. I think it was around 11.30. I'd already spent maybe 75 to 90 minutes on this video. All the tech that I was using to get assets for the video wasn't working properly. And all these things going wrong. So I spent way too much time on this video. I just wanted to get it out. And then once I got it out, I watched it back myself with the music and I said, "This is too perfect. "This is too overproduced." And the video flopped. It did better than my friend's video, but it's still flopped. And I don't, I don't just, I think it was kind of boring. I had a good hook. I spoke with gravitas, but it was too overproduced. It was too perfect. And I said to my friend, and this is the third thing that I wanna share, which is about just how easy it is to make well-performing content. I think, and this is as somebody who has done this, dozens and dozens and dozens of times before, if I went to a cafe and I recorded this video and didn't put in graphics manually in an editing tool. And instead, I just recorded the graphics on my laptop. I went to a cafe with my laptop. I delivered my script in a cafe. I'd be speaking quietly with hushed tones because I'm self-conscious of the people around me. Then I turned my phone around 'cause I'm recording it on my phone. I'm not even using a professional microphone. You hear the cafe sounds around me. It's like, oh my God, this guy is out in public. He's whispering, what's he gonna share with me? And then I share it on my computer. And it seems really authentic, really genuine. Like, I am showing you something that maybe I shouldn't be showing you and the hook was good. That's what it sounds like. And that is this type of stuff that gets people to pay attention. And I've done this so many times. I have done this and it works so many times. These videos always perform above average and they take a fraction of the time to make then over-produced videos. They're super reliable and they just, they get people to pay attention. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to take the exact script that I used yesterday when the video flopped and my theory is that it flopped because it was too over-produced. I'm going to take that script and in a few days when people have forgotten the video and despite the thousands or tens of thousands of views the video has, I don't think many people have really watched it through so I can make it again. And I'm going to use that exact script at a noisy cafe. Like I said, I'm gonna be speaking in a hushed tones under my breath, kind of self-conscious because there's people around. The visuals that I put in, it's going to be literally me recording the screen on my laptop and the script is going to stay the same. And I think I think the video will do better. And then it's me making that video in instead of 90 minutes, like what I did yesterday, making it, and I'm not even gonna put music. I want the cafe sounds. Instead, it's going to be me making the video in 15 minutes or 10 minutes. So the good news is I think it's just so, I actually, I think people really gravitate towards under-produced content. Like I've said a bajillion times on this show, for the first year that I was making daily short for mobile videos, I was shooting on the selfie camera of an iPhone 8. That's like potato quality video. It looked really bad. And the videos did, a lot of the videos did really well. They just, they seem more authentic. They seem more genuine. People resonate with that. I think we're even trending towards more authentic genuine video rather than over-produced video. A lot of the time too, over-produced video, it connotes corporateness. People see something that's over-produced and they think this is going to be corporate. And it just, it says in their mind, this is going to be boring. Even if it's not boring, it might still feel boring because it feels corporate. I think that's what happened to me last night. In 2025, you're probably going to see me make a lot more low effort, authentic videos that are a lot more engaging because I'm speaking in a more engaging off the cuff way. But they're a lower effort. They take less time to make. And it's more about sharing the ideas and sharing the ideas in a way that gets people to care. So okay, how do you turn this into sales? How do you turn this into selling stuff? Well, doing this, doing this low effort, quote unquote, low effort stuff, this authentic stuff, this off the cuff content. Like I said, this gets people to pay attention. It gets people to care. A good example is I made this was a year and a half ago. It's one of my favorite comments that I've received in any of my videos. And I was having this day where I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to make a video about today. And I have these days all the time, even though there's a million and one things that I can make videos about. But I still, just like anybody else, I still have days where I'm like, I'm not feeling any of my ideas, what am I going to make a video about? This video has been so successful that I reuse it every couple of months and it always goes viral. It always gets millions of views every couple of months that I reposted. But it was, I think it was summer, 2023. And I went for a walk in Brooklyn, where I'm from. I was home and I said, I'm just going to walk and talk out ideas. And then I said this one hook to myself. Nobody knows this about Google. I didn't even know what the content was going to be after. And then I'm like, Google search console. No one knows to use Google search console. Yeah, that's true, really like so many people who have websites don't know to tell Google that they exist using Google search console, which is Google's own proprietary tool for accessing their search index. People don't know that. So that's what my video is going to be. And I went home and I made the video really fast because it was late. It was one of these days where I just procrastinated making a video. So I filmed my face with my iPhone 8 selfie camera. Actually, I think I used the front face and camera by this time, but it was still an iPhone 8 camera. So I fill my face and I say, nobody knows this about Google. And then I just share exactly what I shared with you about Google search console. People don't realize this about Google. If a website isn't getting a lot of traffic, Google won't know it exists, it's just like this. But Google gives people a tool for telling it. Go to Google search console. Connect your site, it's very easy. And then submit your home page here. This tells Google, hey, I exist. It's 2023 and somehow people still don't know about this decade old tool. That video blew up. And the comment that I received on that video, which I still remember, is I don't even, someone said, I don't have a website. I don't care about SEO. I don't care about digital marketing, but this made me want to use Google search console. The person doesn't have a website, has no interest in SEO. But my video made them want to use Google search console. And I told it in this very authentic down to earth, off the cuff way with a good hook. Nobody knows this about Google. I wasn't really smiling. I'm pretty sure I wasn't smiling when I made that video. And I think I was speaking in a relatively serious tone. And it got people to pay attention. And it got people who had no interest in this before, wanting to use this tool. And that is crazy. So I think these three things are really powerful. I think there's very often overlooked, even by me who's making, who's made thousands of videos. I'm overlooking forget these things all the time. Number one, focus on the hook. Come up with a spammy-est hook you can be shameless about it. Number two, speak with gravitas. If you're sharing an idea or a future prediction, or even a story that's not a light-hearted story, don't smile. Even Gary Vaynerchuk. When Gary Vaynerchuk is giving his big raw raw speeches, big raw raw talks, or a prediction, he's not smiling. In most of Gary Vaynerchuk's videos, he's not smiling. So number two, don't smile, unless it's like a very light-hearted video. And then number three, shoot in an authentic way. Try to make the video under-produced, to be honest. Don't feel bad about making it fast and having sloppy cuts and there being background noise. It gets people to pay attention. And this is episode 548 of my daily digital marketing show. I've been making daily videos, daily short-form mobile videos every day since November 1st, 2022, so I've learned a lot. And these are, even for me, I'm constantly learning every day. And same with this podcast, this is 548 days in a row, making this podcast without missing a day. And I'm still learning a ton of making this show. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
