Interview With Konstantinos Kaloulis

Bill: Hello and welcome! This is Bill McIntosh once again. We are here interviewing some experts on Facebook video ads.
Today I have with me Konstantinos Kaloulis. I think I did, did I pronounce that right? How did I do with that?

Konstantinos: You did a great job, my friend, those are some excellent name- saying skills. [Laughs]

Bill: [Laughs] Awesome! Konstantinos is with DoodleDashVideo.com and he does some really amazing stuff with video all the way around. His company produces some top quality, like really super high end Doodle videos for being able to do sales, which I’m sure you guys have all seen some of his videos on some pretty big name marketers and brands all over the place.
He’s also doing some amazing stuff with Facebook video ads, which is why we have him here today.

Thanks, man, I appreciate you joining me and doing this with me.
Konstantinos: My pleasure.

Bill: He’s actually joining us from a beach house in the Greek Isles. You’ve got like really weird internet there, just so if everybody wonders, the internet is a little choppy over there, but he agreed to join us while he is taking a break from his. Is it sunny there right now?

Konstantinos: Actually, it is 9:23 in the p.m., so it just got dark. Yeah, we’re now into the cool atmosphere of the day, because right now we’re having like 40 degrees during the whole day. It’s a more relaxing time.

Bill: Right on. Let’s dive right into it. You’ve been doing Facebook video ads and I heard a little bit about what you doing and it blew me away, honestly. I’ll give a little kind of recap just to get us started on what you’re actually doing with video ads.
You’ve been able to create some really simple videos that look nice and clean, they’re really great looking video. That’s one of the things that sets you apart, is I notice you’re doing like really high-quality videos.
You run those videos on Facebook with some amazing results, which we’ll go over in a second. Get them to a little sales page with a sales video and you’re driving them right into like a consultation kind of a lead. If I understand, they fill out a form and sign up to basically be sold. Does that describe the funnel pretty well?

Konstantinos: Yeah, pretty much. We’ll go into that later on during this video and we can explain some things to our viewers.

Bill: What kind of ticket prices are you selling off of those leads once they get through that process?

Konstantinos: We sell, I have equity in 21 companies, the majority of those providing marketing services or high-end branding services to companies, all the way from small companies to Inc 500, the world’s top marketers and thought leaders, Fortune 500, etc., etc.
A lot of people joke around and say I couldn’t sell a bag of chips, but I could sell a $100 million house. We’re kind of high ticket, starting off at the low end of the high-ticket spectrum, which is $1,000 and going up to usually offers that are $25, 50, 100,000, but can be a quarter million, a half million or even a million dollars in a first contract, a first deal with a customer.

Bill: That’s pretty cool when you think about that, because with doing Facebook video ads, your speed to market, of being able to put out an ad, to getting a lead, to closing a $25,000 customer, that’s fast. What’s the life cycle you see when you first start up a campaign, do you actually start getting a paying customer?

Konstantinos: Sorry about that, I’m just closing down Skype real quick. I’m going to close down some links because you’re breaking off.

We never want to showcase a screen shot or anything like that to the viewers, just asking you to showcase that. What I understood that your question was, is how long from the moment that we start running traffic do we expect to have paying customers, is that correct?

Bill: That’s correct, yeah.

Konstantinos: For me, a lot of people are going to have a lot of different answers. For me, I usually see people filling out consultation forms within one to three hours of us actually putting out a, you know, be it a banner ad or a video ad.
I mean, as far as getting the actual customers, it can be as quick as five hours or it can be as soon as three days and that’s due to the fact that after they fill out a consultation form, we give them an option right after that, to actually pick a day and time so they can select when they want to get called to talk about said service.
If somebody fills out the form today and schedules a call for Monday, you know they’re going to get a lot of sales calls on Monday. But if they schedule a call for today or even if they don’t schedule a call at all, then my guys are going to call them up immediately and try to sign them on as a customer.

Bill: Cool. I just really wanted to highlight to show how powerful a tool Facebook video ads are, because if you think about that, from the moment of starting up traffic to having a $1,000-25,000 customer, can theoretically be done in a single day, like that’s crazy.

I want to kind of highlight the power of what can be done with results on what we’re going to talk about.

Konstantinos: Just got another notification, again, they closed another $2,500 multiplied at 1.5. I’m really bad at math, but that’s the deals.
So there are sales happening just all over the place. Like we were talking about before, it’s making sure that we not only have a good quality product, because I do believe that it has to do a lot with what people are selling. People pay me $25, 50, 100,000 to more times than not just do one thing for them, which is focus on their product.
Here’s the thing: When people are spending tremendous amounts of time and money on advertising, in my opinion, and I may be wrong, I’m not God, I have the results to back it up, but they’re doing something very, very wrong with their advertising because those are not results that we get leads, like we already talked about, very, very fast.

Bill: What kind of a return on investment do you see typically? I know it probably ranges from ad to ad, but on average?

Konstantinos: I mean, right now, for example, for Doodle Video we have people who run traffic on Google, people who run traffic on YouTube, people who do traffic on Facebook. Then we have the CEO, obviously, who wants to put his hand in the cookie jar all the time and run his own ads and do—I also love jumping on sales calls sometimes and getting into the mix.

We’re seeing from, my guys have better statistics than me, but I was just looking at my statistics yesterday and some new things with video ads, some things that I’m testing out personally right now, we’re getting anywhere from $30-54 a lead. We’re closing, the team is closing 40-80% on the first call.
Here’s the thing, there is a lot of people in the IM space, buddies of mine, people that I look up to and pretty cool people that are really masters and assassins, looking at every single part of the conversion process. But here’s the thing: We just started really getting into the analytics and really split testing and doing a lot of that stuff, not even a year ago.
So for three years, our ads have been so profitable that we don’t care because for us, we’re putting in $10,000 and we’re making $100,000 in return.
If people manage to understand the basic things about advertising, they can all have the exact same …. I’m not making any claims at any point in time, but it’s not, we’re doing it and we’ve helped a lot—and by a lot we mean like 40, 50, 60 people just since the beginning of the year, also getting into running better advertising, so it’s not a one-hit wonder with us, it’s working in a wide spectrum and people in industries, etc., etc.

Bill: Gotcha. If you don’t mind, I know you sent me a screen shot of two different campaigns. You mind if I show them on the screen for a minute? I think I can lock it on my screen and show that, if you’re cool with that.

Konstantinos: Yeah, totally.

Bill: Okay, that should’ve come up. This is an example of one of your campaigns here. It might be a little bit blurry, but the stats are really like super impressive. It’s showing the magic zero sent video views, when they look like they’re free. $0.00 dollars per video view, that’s pretty awesome.
You’ve been able to get 72,000 people to view your sales—it’s a sales video— pitching your service for how much? That was $60. That’s crazy, that’s pretty cool.
People that not only you got a chance to pinch hit them with your sales pitch, but you’ve also got a chance to do a little bit of branding and at the same time, I can see you’re also building likes, shares, and getting traffic, which you’re turning into sales, all on about $60, that’s pretty cool.
I know you had another one, let me show that one here, this is from another campaign, it looks like about $150 spend. This one got 230,000 video views and about 4,200 website clicks. For $150, got over 4,000 clicks to your website on that one and those all went into that same process.

Konstantinos: Yeah, and just to, for me, zero standard views is not something that I really care about, neither is any other of those stats except for the fact that 4,200 website clicks and that’s not from company owners or a lot of other things that I don’t care about, those are from business owners in the US and Canada, which are clicks that are harder to acquire.

Bill: Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what counts. It’s the traffic, the leads, and the dollars that you make at the end of the day. The rest of it is all great to brag about, but really, ultimately, that’s what matters.


Konstantinos: But I mean, I do love what you said about the branding aspect, because today we were on—have you utilized LinkedIn at all?

Bill: I’ve done a little bit with LinkedIn, with my employment business.

Konstantinos: There is a lot of people talking about LinkedIn and so we were checking it out with my team just a few hours back today. We started exploring something called the Sales Navigator and it allowed us to, it gave us a very long list of people we’re connected to and it said the name of the company and gave the logo of the company.
Due to having thousands and thousands of connections, we couldn’t sit down and read what every company’s name was, so we ended up scrolling really fast through the list and the companies that made us stop and look and caught our attention were the brands that we already know, love and trust and what have you, the big banks and all that stuff.
When you talk about branding and getting your videos or everything that you have in front of so many eyeballs, it not only shows them the video, but it shows them the name of your business and it has that little profile image, which if people are smart enough, they’re going to insert their logo or something that’s memorable in terms of their brand and that image.
So definitely, over the long run, getting seen tens of millions of times is also going to have all these other benefits that are not direct benefits in terms of running the actual ads to get leads and sales right now.

Bill: Yeah, I know a lot of people love direct marketing and they love being able to track the dollar they spent to the $5 they made, but there really is this aspect of branding which for the long-term life of your company is incredibly important, it really is.
Then the other thing I wanted to show real quick, I don’t know if you can see, do you see the screen there with your video showing?

Konstantinos: Yep.

Bill: Okay, good. I’ll just play it, they won’t be able to really see or hear it too well,
but I want to give them an idea of your style. [Plays video.]

Bill: I want a gun that shoots out stuff and turns into money. I just wanted to show just a quick little brief clip showing an idea of what style of videos that you’re using and then get any tips from you at this point on, let’s start with the videos themselves, all the way through ad creation. Are there any best practices or kind of set-up tips that you have about that?

Konstantinos: Let me spark this up real quick. Many people have told me I’m like the only person who smokes on webinars, or whatever the case is, but it felt good.

Okay, I don’t know how well they managed to see that video clip, but it’s basically a hit man on top of a building and he’s sniping down this car and as the bullet comes close to the car and hits it, the car explodes into cash. That’s the promote of video agencies.
Answer this question for me: If you were on YouTube, whenever you’re on YouTube and you get hit with those ads, on a scale of 1-10, how many times do you click skip immediately?

Bill: Most of the time, yeah.

Konstantinos: Most of the time. So here’s the thing, if you saw an ad for a video production company and then you saw my ad, which of the two would actually grab your attention? Which one would you end up looking at?

Bill: Yeah, your ad will catch attention, absolutely.

Konstantinos: Exactly. It’s a hit man sniping down a vehicle, it’s like a movie, so
we do mini movies.
First thing you want to do is capture people’s attention but do it in a way that’s not, “I’m here to sell you videos,” or “I’m here to sell you SEO,” or I’m here to sell you any of that stuff—no. Let the person be entertained. They’re on YouTube to watch a BMW M6 get smoked by a Ferrari. They’re on there to watch a kid hitting his cousin in the head with a baseball bat. They’re there to watch beautiful ballerinas dancing, they’re there to watch something fun, get caught up on

something or have something that includes entertainment or knowledgeable value.
The last thing that they want to do is—like everybody thinks that yeah, let’s go interrupt our audience. No, man. You can interrupt them in the way that says, “Oh, man, hey, this is very interesting as well and you can check it out for 30 seconds.”
So what we do is we make sure that we really engage them so their mentality is not like, “Oh, I’m completely off topic and I’m watching this video because he’s trying to sell me something. It’s like, “Oh, this is cinematic, this is cool,” and at the end, “Oh, video ads. You know what? I enjoyed the 30 seconds of this video, the way that they did this video, it was very good, and they’re trying to sell me video ads. Let’s take a second and reflect here. Did it catch my attention? Yes. Did it provide me entertainment value? Yes. Do I want to accomplish those things with my audience? Yes. So I’m going to click on it and check it out what it is that they have to offer.”
So when these people come onto my lander or onto my sales page or onto whatever property that I send them to, they come in looking at me the way that everybody is going into the movie theater to see San Andreas or Entourage, they’re coming in from an experience. They’re excited for it. They’re like, “Oh, man, these guys are so cool.”
For me, that is the purpose of a video ad. It’s not to put myself out there with some lousy looking video. I’m not going to drop any scenarios or names because everybody is getting results, it’s just I focus and I cater to real business owners, real experts and real people.

Bill: A couple points I want to highlight on something that you said though, too. You talk about you’re not doing interrupt marketing. A lot of people are used to the concept of a typical commercial, where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, pitch my stuff.” You’re actually doing a little bit of storytelling and you’re doing it in a way that’s congruent with what they expect to see on Facebook. If you’re advertising on Facebook, you video is going to feel like something that they would expect to see there, not like an annoying advertisement that they’d like to skip. I know you’re also doing YouTube ads as well.
That’s really important when people are crafting their video ad that they don’t do that, they don’t make something that’s like the annoying commercial that jumps out and frankly annoys you. It has to feel like it’s part of the experience that they were used to seeing and then lead them into the path of like, “Oh, this is cool, this is interesting.” Then they get them to arrive at the point that they want to learn more or they want to find out about what you’re doing. But definitely be a little more subtle than just hitting them over the head with your sales pitch right inside your video ad.

Konstantinos: Definitely. Another video ad we have, it’s a trap, and inside that trap, the trap is being held up by a stick and there’s a donut. You see a cop car rolling by and the cop sees the donut and the car stops and he goes to grab the donut and the trap falls on top of him.
You see this other cartoon character come, pointing his hand and laugh, and it says, “With the right tools accomplishing your goals becomes much easier. That’s why at DoodleVideo.com, we do this, this, and that.”

But we have to make it fun and I believe that marketing this year and next year is going to be led by two things and that’s video blogs and especially video advertising.
The other thing that I want to talk about is we love and we’ve split test this a lot and because I get to work with people who spend a ton of money, not only on ads but on driving traffic and we get to split test their results with sales videos or big ads and a lot of other things, top marketers and thought leaders. We’ve noticed that the script is also very important because we want to get out of the typical script that manipulates your audience into taking some sort of action and turning it into something that’s more cinematic, more of a storyline. Something that’s going to get them to laugh, smile and be like, “Huh, that’s pretty cool.”
Instead of telling them, we want them to come and look at it and say, “Oh, I need this.” Not for us to tell them, “You need this because you don’t have leads and sales.” Does that makes sense?

Bill: Yeah, it’s almost like instead of trying to shove and push your prospect through the process, you’re sort of just luring them along on their own, but let them lead them through.

Konstantinos: Like a perfect every-day scenario is, like I know you’re a big marketer, I don’t go to a lot of marketing events, I love to hang out by the beach, be here in Italy, and other places here in Europe a lot, but how many times have you been to an event and then you just meet someone and you love their personality, you have so much fun talking to that one marketer. Then there’s always the other marketer who is going to come up to you and be like, “Oh, bro, you’re such a big marketer, I love you, you’re so impressive to me, let me buy you

dinner, let me buy you a beer.” A lot of people run their marketing as to the latter. They try to go and they try to do everything, they try to suck up, they try to do anything possible to manipulate and earn that friendship versus when you’re just being very awesome and you’re giving them something that makes them smile, that makes them happy and makes them feel good inside, while still offering them obviously your message, because it’s a business.
Then you don’t only get more clicks, but you get clicks that are more ready to buy.

Bill: Awesome. I like that! I think it’s important and it doesn’t matter, I know for you you’re selling video services, so you have to be like at the top of your game in terms of what you’re putting out in the video marketing and while maybe other markets might be a little more tolerant to not having the perfect video, it still has to follow those same basic guidelines. You’ve got to tell a story—the interrupt marketing that you talked about—you don’t want to beat them over the head to force them in, to click and buy, but kind of lead them to the path. I like that. I like that, man.
As far as the actual setup on your Facebook ads, is there anything there, kind of tips that you could share or anything that you’ve learned while messing around in there?

Konstantinos: Yeah, as far as, so here’s what I tell a lot of people. People can come to me, I can give them the world’s best videos, because we do all the way from $997 on Doodle Videos, but it’s $997-25,000. For $25,000, we sell what other people sell for TV commercials for $100,000 or more. My 25K product is the highest quality animated video production available for online use.

I can give that to them and yeah, they’re going to get some decent results, no matter how much they suck at advertising, but every single person needs to be split testing. You need to be split testing at least at the basic level. Find an audience that’s made up of 650,000, run some ads, test the image first, test the headline, test the video, test the audiences. Obviously test male or female, test desktop, right hand, mobile—for us, mobile is not converting anywhere close to desktop, so we’re completely starting to eliminate that. Well, we’re still running some ads to it, but not anywhere close to what we’re doing for desktop. But I think people just really need to be split testing.
Another thing in terms of video ads, which is something that I’ve put in my video ads package, is the fact that people are not—I’ve seen some people do this in a very ugly way with videos, but when you’re running an in-screen video ad on YouTube, what do you want to do? You want people to click on the screen, right? Click here. What we do is we actually animate that at a very fun interactive way so we might have a butt-in somewhere and we might have an animated mouse that’s just like jumping on it, like, “Click! Click!” We’re like, “Hey, dude, click here, this is where you need to click.”
Versus on Facebook, when a Facebook video ends, it gives you those links. So what we do in our Facebook videos is we completely animate that in such a high quality that literally the viewer can view what’s going on and she understands that when the video ends, “Oh, yes, to click that link right there.” Because as marketers, we think that everybody understands where they have to click or that everybody understands what the word conversion means or website explainer videos and I had to find out in a very painful, financially painful way, that not a lot of people understand what website explainer means.

We just have to make it very crystal clear for the audience, where to click. I don’t know the capabilities of this Google Hangouts, but can you quickly go on that video ads page, do you have it up and running by any chance?

Bill: Let me just look here, I can pull it up. I’ve got it here, let me show it on the screen.

Konstantinos: Okay, cool. Yeah, I see it.
Bill: I see the video ads page here, yeah.

Konstantinos: If we keep scrolling down, you’ll see that YouTube and that Facebook logo.

Bill: There we go.

Konstantinos: Is one of the videos missing or is it not loading for some reason?
Bill: Yeah, it’s showing one video here.

Konstantinos: Actually that should’ve been two, so anyway, like over there, it got like animate that, so see how it shows the two things? They can either replay the video or they can click here and visit our home page. That’s what I was talking about.

Bill: So when you end the video, you demo out for them and show them what to do next.

Konstantinos: Yes.
Bill: Oh, very cool.

Konstantinos: Just especially on Facebook, we saw a pretty big bump in conversions from adding that at the end of the videos. So, I think that’s pretty cool.
Another thing that I think is very, very important is that we have to be very direct with our message and we have to have a short message. From our split tests—and we used to run Facebook video ads, I’m going to lie now, but it might have been like a year and a half or two years ago, we did like the illegal ways of running, you know, doing stuff and promoting—I forget the exact techniques. But before you had the option to actually run a video ad, we were running video ads.
We have to have a video that’s 30-45 seconds, it has to be fun and it also has to be very specific about what you’re trying to offer them.
The latest offer that I put up was, I’m doing a service, it’s $100,000. Right now what we do as part of that is we create them a website that looks like the website on Doodle Video using html5 in WordPress, PayPal and all the world’s top companies are using websites like that. So we do that, we give them a home page video in my 25 case style and every single month we give them two video ads.
We give them 2 video ads every month for 12 months and the website explainer video, we actually split test it every 5,000 videos or every once a month depending on their traffic, we will find all the drop off points and remake that video in those drop off points so that it keeps converting higher. Does that makes sense?

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Konstantinos: So I mean, the ads that we ran were a little bit fun but they also, 100% explained the offer that it is that we’re offering. We told them exactly what I told you in the ad, more or less. From the moment that somebody clicks on the ad, they’re going to land on the page and they’re going to know exactly what the offer is and then they’re going to see the extra video to see that extra piece of information so that they can then fill out the consultation and get on the phone with somebody on my sales team.
Here’s the thing, the worst thing anybody can do in their business, if they have a sales team, is give that sales team a load of crap for leads. The more they try to sell it and they don’t, the more disloyal everybody gets and eventually they go from closing 40-80% to closing nothing for a month and a half. I’ve been through that scenario a couple of years back, where I lost a 150 or a couple hundred thousands dollars in a month because they closed nothing.

What I was trying to do was I was trying to get as many leads through them as possible. I’m going to create an ad, depending on the offer, I might talk about a little bit less, I might talk about a little bit more, but I will always talk about it and the higher ticket the ad, the more I’m going to talk about the offer. I’m going to qualify people on the video ad. I’m going to further qualify them on the actual sales page and then after they’ve signed up for that consult call, my closers can get on and close at 40-80%.
By the time they get to that consult, almost 100% of the time they’re going to know exactly what they’re getting and they’re going to know exactly how much it costs. Does that make sense?

Bill: Absolutely. This has been really valuable. I know I picked up three or four things that I’m going to implement in my own video ads from what you’ve said here today. Absolutely great stuff. I really appreciate you just being an open book and sharing what’s working for you, a lot of people wouldn’t do that. I got to say, thanks for doing that.

Konstantinos: It’s my pleasure, man. I really appreciate you having me on for this Google Hangouts.

Bill: Yeah, right on. We’re going to publish this in the member’s area and I’m going to follow up with a little bit of information about your business as well. If anybody is interested in getting a really high quality, top-notch video done, whether it’s for your Facebook video ads, sales letters, whatever, I’ll put a link in here for you as well so they can go over and check out what you’re up to.

Konstantinos: Yeah, perfect. Guys, if you’re looking for video ads, explainer videos, sales videos, landing page videos or investor pitch videos, you can visit the link that’s going to be placed somewhere on the member’s site and we’ll be very, very happy to talk with you about your business and everything that you’re doing. So cool stuff.

Bill: Awesome! Thanks, man, we’ll wrap it up here and we’ll see you around.