Brian Fanzo

So Brian Fanzo, Millennial Keynote Speaker, Podcaster and evangelist for change. It was mostly about the change, that's change, it's shocker, the change when it comes to today's consumers. consumers want an on-demand world. We want things where we want it, when we want it, how we want it. We want our Netflix shows all at once. And the question becomes, how do we connect with them and build conversations when they don't want to be marketed to, they don't want to be sold to? And so a lot of my talk was about, how do you connect with people at a human level? How do you break down those barriers? And really, how do you use video, more so than anything else, to shrink the distance between your audience? I talked a lot about in my talk that for the last eight or nine years, we've been using marketing, social media, websites, to go further and further away from our customers. We didn't want to talk to them on the phone, so we got their email address. Then we didn't want to even get their email address. We want them to opt in, and then we spam them with email. And I think today, I think every business is in the business of trust. And the question becomes, how do you build trust online? And so I talked about live video as well as social video, and really just how do you make video that is humanized and connects at that level. So that was the talk. And then ultimately, the goal is what the hat says, which is press the damn button and get people to really start putting their voice out. I think there's a lot of people that, we have a lot of bad news, a lot of things in our world right now that isn't great. And rather than focusing on that, we need to get more people sharing their stories. And that was really what the premise of my talk was. Well, I think that's part of the problem is now, I think to build trust today, you have to talk with people, not at people. And this is a big thing in video, where no one believes that anyone is perfect. And here's that weird world where I think a lot of marketing video for a long while up until now was broadcasting at people, telling you why we're so much better, and here's our product, and this is what we're doing. And nobody wants that anymore. And we can almost see through that. And so another question becomes, how do I talk with people? How do I let them into the thing? How do I tell them a story that they can relate to? One of the key principles that I talk about is I believe relatability is the future of marketing, which means people relate with people. We don't trust a logo. I don't care if your company's been around for 65 years or 100 years. Just because you've been around for a long time doesn't mean any consumer or customer today is going to trust you. Trust is actually through your people. And I talk about this a lot, because I really believe in employee advocacy and influencer marketing. Because we don't buy a product because of a logo. We buy a product because of the people that work there that we're like, oh, that person looks like me. They have the same problems as I do. I'm going to buy that product because we share those things. I think the old days of just giving something to a celebrity to talk about, or throwing something on a website or a billboard, those are going away. Because we see through it. We don't even look at that as marketing. And then another piece of it is I don't think automation itself is bad. I think the users of automation are bad. I think a lot of people are trying to automate, to I'd say supplement what they do. And this is something that I think we need to hear more about is that what you do online shouldn't replace what you do offline. It should scale it. It should allow you to build trust at a higher level. But for a lot of people, they're like, well, we're doing this, and we don't want to do this anymore. So we want to do it online. And they unfortunately don't do the same thing. And I think in this world we're living in today, I think you can use automation to shrink the amount of people. And then it's your job to have one-on-one conversations, or one-on-two. I like to think of every social media conversation with a brand right now is a one-to-one conversation that is being shared in public for people to consume. And if you treat every conversation online as if it's one-to-one, it changes the game. Because now people think that you care. And now people are brought together. But I think for so many brands, they automate messages. We've seen it on Twitter or social media. But they also automate video now, where it's very programmatic. And I'm a big believer in doing batch recording of video. But figuring out what works, and I like to say, you lean into what works. So if all of a sudden three-minute videos with subtitles works, start doing more three-minute videos. If those stop working, try 10-minute videos, or an hour long videos. I just recently worked on a project that they were doing two-hour long interviews. Two hours long. And their watchers, the people that are watching, are buying sponsorship programs at a higher rate, like 80% more than their 10-minute content. So they're getting less people to watch, but they're getting actually more people to buy and support the sponsors. And so the question becomes, what's the reason you're doing it? And then you have to lean into what works. I think for a lot of businesses, they're like, OK, we have to be on video. They just do video. And you're like, do you know why you're doing video? Do you know how much video you should do? If you don't, let's start testing things out and moving the needle forward. And so I think that's how we shrink the distance. We have to shrink it by trying new things out. And when someone comments on your video, comment back. And my favorite, I think I talked about this last time we interviewed, my favorite stat is repeat viewership. If you can get someone to come back and watch multiple videos over a short amount of time, that's a very mature lead. Because now they care that much. They've spent that much. I don't even care if it's five-minute videos. If someone has watched two five-minute videos in one week or in one month, that person apparently is enjoying the content. That's the one you want to reach out to with a personalized message. And I don't think enough people are even tracking that. Most people couldn't even tell you if they have the same people watching their video. Or even understand how to understand that data. And so I think that's where we're moving towards. I think the power of video is that anyone can do video. Right now, the problem, the reason I think most video sucks, is because anyone can do video. It's like, OK, now let's come back around. Let's have a strategy. And it's also little things. If you're going to put video on your website, track the video and understand who's going to view it and understand where they're going on your page. And when you start looking at those things, just because they watched the whole video, what did you inspire them to do? If they clicked out and they ejected, OK, apparently you didn't inspire them. They watched the video and they weren't sold. Or they weren't overwhelmed. Or your call to action didn't work. And I think right now we're in this weird spot where, even at this event, video was a conversation. But I still think we're missing the strategy behind it, the analytics behind it, and then where we go from there. But at least we're talking video, which is a good thing. I think with video, you have to start small and start a little bit everywhere. This is something I think I believe in video. You don't know what works in video until you try it. That's the press the damn button idea. If you're not sure if it works on Instagram, or if it works on YouTube, if it works on Facebook, you need to try it. Or even if Facebook Live works, if the live video works. And then once you try it, start trying different things. One of the questions I get all the time, I'm sure you guys get it as well, is what's the perfect length of video for Facebook? And I always reply back, do I know all of your customers? Do I know who your customer is? If your customers only watch content at night because they are busy during the day, they work 9 to 5, well, you're going to have a different time frame, a different audience, than someone that is appealing towards college students, where college kids are looking for any distraction during class to watch video. Are your audience, are they watching it with sound on or sound off? Little things like that where I think we have to start looking at that. And so I tell people, start it out. Start trying things out. And then the other piece of this is before you do any video, define what success looks like. I think for a lot of people, they're like, well, I'm going to do video. But they do a bunch of video, and they're like, I'm not sure if it worked. I'm like, well, what are you measuring? What was your goals? We didn't really have any goals. And you're like, you have goals in your email marketing. You have goals in your sales leads. And I think that's one of the things that's really interesting. And then another thing I heard today, I was sitting and talking to a couple people I did an interview today. My friend Marcus Sheridan, and he's the sales lion, one of the things he was talking about a lot is that teams need to look outside of the marketing department and to find the value outside of marketing. So if you're creating sales videos, these should be sales focused goals. But they should also understand what marketing is doing, right? If you're creating videos for HR or for recruiting, you should understand that this should be built from the HR team. I think a lot of teams, the marketers come to the HR group and say, we're going to be better at recruiting. And you're like, well, are you thinking of it from a recruiter's perspective or a marketer that wants to create recruiting videos? And I think this is one of those worlds where we're going to hopefully see more people getting involved in the strategy. But I think a lot of people, I would argue that a lot of people that are doing video today, brands especially, they don't know what success really looks like. And you can't put the same success as an email open rate on a video. Those things don't kind of coordinate. I think that's a big missing spot for most people. So I think we're going to start to see more video specialists in multiple different teams. I think we're seeing that in a couple big organizations. I know one of the organizations here at HubSpot was talking about that, where their multiple departments have a videographer. So that's going to be a very interesting piece. I think the marketing team is going to oftentimes lead the strategy, how we're doing things. But I like the idea of giving multiple different departments access to your video library. So multiple different departments can see exactly what people are talking about, why they're talking about, what they're talking about. So I think that'll be an interesting trend. I also think we're going to see leadership have a better understanding of video. And the other thing about it is we need leadership on more video. I think oftentimes people are going all in on video, but we're not hearing from leadership. We're not, leadership's like, well, we like video, but I'm not going to be on there. And I think we're going to start to see that change a little bit. It'll be interesting. I think for me, recruiting, recruitment, HR, is a massive win. If your business is about trust, and you say, hey, we trust our employees, we have a great culture, you should be using video. Just because your website says you have a great culture doesn't mean you have great culture. But if you put your employees on video, if you're using video across your entire HR department, now you're proving that you actually have a great culture instead of just talking about it. I think for a lot of companies, they struggle with that, because it's almost an element of, well, what if I do a video and that person leaves? Well, then you record another video. I think it sounds simple, but if that happens, that happens. I think we get a little bit too, everything has to be evergreen. How many people keep the same videos on their website for an entire year anyhow? Not very many these days. Things are changing so fast. So I think you have to be OK with doing a video, and maybe it's a short-term video. Maybe it's a landing page video that doesn't last that long, but I think we have to be, now that we can create video, this is the weird world where it's a little cheaper to create video now and produce video and edit video, but just because it doesn't cost as much money now, we should be able to take advantage of that. Funny enough, where they're like, well, now I just give you less budget. And you're like, no, that's not. Now that we are able to do it at cheaper, we should keep the budget the same so we can do more things and we can hit more departments. And I think that's going to take a lot of shift. And I think the trend's starting now, but it's probably two or three more years before we really get teams understanding their value of a true video budget. So I think we're going to hear things like dynamic video. We're going to hear things like participatory video, where you're doing kind of like pseudo live video. I also think one of the things I really think is episodic video. I think right now in this world we're living in, we have so many distractions, so much going on. I'm doing this already with my podcast. So my podcast, I record it on live video every Monday at 4 PM Eastern time in the US. And I do that every Monday because you don't have to follow me. You don't have to sign up for an email newsletter. You don't even have to know who I am. You just know that you can tune in every Monday at 4 PM and you can watch my content. And I think for a lot of brands, you're going to have to start doing that. It's almost what is working in podcasting. Podcasting, you know. Every Tuesday you're going to get a new show. We have to start thinking like that as videographers. And we also have to start thinking about having a beginning and an end, multiple seasons. Because for some reason, we sometimes were like, well, we're going to create these 30 videos. And then we do the 30 videos. And we're not sure if we're going to get more. We're going to get less, if there's a new season. And I think Netflix has kind of proven that. We have the Hulus and all the different video channels. But I think in the future, we're going to see a little bit more episodic content. We're going to see much more employee-driven content, which I think maybe this is me wishful thinking more than it is a prediction. And even influencer content. I do a lot of stuff with the brands that I work with that they do a video and they put me on their channel. We're doing an interview right here. You're getting insights. I just did one for IBM. And it's my face talking about the cause that IBM's working on. And two years ago, there's no way IBM would have put a non-employee on their video channel. They let me take over their account. And it's me talking about only the stuff that I talk about. But for a marketing perspective, now they're like, oh wait, Brian works with them? And Brian likes their tools? Well, I look like Brian. I can relate with him. And I think that relatability is really hard to be relatable if you're automating, if you're not using your employees, if you're not leveraging influencers. And so I think we're going to see an emergence of more influencer collaborations, as well as more employees on video, which I think is a great trend. I think when you do it really well, it's transformative. I come to these events. And there's a lot of companies I work with, a lot of software tools. When I meet the team that I'm working with or that I've been communicating, I give them a big hug. We've connected at a level where we're a customer brand relationship, but our connection is that raw. And I challenge every brand. How can you make it like that with every one of your customers? If you want to beat the big Amazons, this is a question I always see all the time. It's like, well, Brian, we're competing with Amazon. We're losing business to Amazon. Well, guess what? Amazon's never going to give you a hug. Amazon's never going to talk to you one on one. And if you as a brand are able to do that with your consumers, people are going to easily go to buy your product compared to going on Amazon. The problem is we try to just compete with Amazon by doing the same thing. And you can get it overnight by Amazon with one click, or we can get it whenever you ship it out. Amazon's going to win. So I think it is. It's shrinking that distance. And I really challenge a lot of businesses. How do you build trust? In this world right now, trust is hard to gain. It's easy to lose. You can lose it in an instant. If you sell out, if you're sales pitching people, even here on the floor, when you go to different events, you would appreciate if someone runs into you. They shouldn't be pitching you their product. And I got pitched twice yesterday, just really hardcore pitched in the hallway. And it was disappointing. I was like, well, I have no plans on working with you. But if they would have done a little bit of research and they had connected with me on that personalized relationship side and talked about things that I care about, we'd probably be doing business. I would have probably bought their tool. And I think that's where we're moving forward. It's exciting. I think video is disrupting the whole landscape. Because the people that used to automate, and I would say the people that were faking it. You've been selling things. You've been behind the scenes. Well, we'll put it on our website, but it doesn't really work yet. You're getting exposed. But the people that are doing good things right now are getting amplified. And I think that's going to only continue the trend over the next couple years.