Interview With Louie La Vella

Bill: Hi, everybody, it’s Bill McIntosh here. I am here with Louie La Vella. Louis is doing some pretty amazing stuff, so hey, Louis, thanks for joining us.

Louis: Thanks for having me, great to be here.

Bill: Yeah, I’m glad you’re here. I’m excited to talk to you because you’re doing some, you’re kind of working two different kind of angles that I think our people are going to be really interested in. You’ve got one angle that deals with a consumer audience and you’ve got another one that’s like a B2B audience.

Louis: Absolutely.

Bill: Yeah, so it’s cool, we get a chance to see kind of both sides of the same coin, so to speak.

Louis: You bet.

Bill: First, let’s talk about some of the stuff you’re doing in the consumer world, let’s focus on that first. Maybe you want to give a run down on what you’re doing there?

Louis: Absolutely. To give a quick summary of who I am and what I do, I actually work in the nightclub and bar space, so I have been running events and concerts and promotions for about 20 years now, since I was a teenager pretty much. On the consumer side of that, I of course still roll in the event side of my own promotions, my own prevents and working with venue. Being in that demographic of the very young age, anywhere from 21 to 35 year old is that core demographic, the millennials, I have to always be on top of the new trends, the new apps that come out, like Periscope, I was one of the first guys to jump on Periscope and probably stream DJ Tiesto, I was probably one of the first in the world to do it. [Laughs] Got it that Thursday morning and that evening there was a concert I was in Vegas at! [Laughs] I have to be on top of those type of trends constantly, which is kind of exciting, too. In that world, it moves to quickly and changes so quickly, but in our world, in more of the B2B world or if I’m coaching venues and promoters on what’s new and what changes, I actually get to experience that, test it out, jump all in and really see what’s working and what the psychology is of the consumer. So it’s pretty exciting and important to be on top of that.

Bill: If you were to give a little bit of an idea, this isn’t necessarily always about just little one—and I hate to call them little—but one club at a time promotions. You were telling me about a massive one you guys just finished, right?

Louis: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, anything like you mentioned, from the small bar and club that does 300 people or even 1,000 people, but even major concerts and festivals, just a few weeks back, I’m the head of marketing of a major festival up in Canada and we pulled 24,000 people through that and look forward to even double those numbers next year. The same blueprint and the same concepts that work for the small club and the small venue are working for the large festivals as well. You can definitely scale up this idea of digital marketing and it works, it works really well. Again, if you know the tips and tools, you know how to utilize Facebook marketing and YouTube ads and Periscope and all kinds of stuff, Video Views, things like that, you can scale up nicely or scale down, depending on the size of your venue, the size of your event, which is kind of cool.

Bill: Awesome. Kind of walk through the different phases of setting up one of these campaigns and we’re going to stick with the consumer side for the moment. When it comes to how you set up the videos themselves, is there any best practices that you’ve kind of discovered as you’re going through this on actual videos themselves that you’re using?

Louis: Yeah, absolutely. I think especially again, in my younger demographic niche, they like those micro moments. They absolutely like the raw video, the behind the scenes or the authentic, native style content. When we used to produce fantastic looking flyers and hand them out or put them on the poster, the poles, and even spending $500-1,000 to get a video crew in and make this beautiful commercial for your nightclub or bar, they just don’t resonate with that anymore. Reality TV has ruined everybody [laughs], but it’s actually good for us because it makes it cheaper for us. I’ve done wonders with my iPhone camera or Android, a smart phone. If you can conquer those micro moments and keep pushing that content out and engage and create a nice character with your brand, they love that. That type of stuff resonates really well with the younger demographic and not to say just the younger all the time, it’s actually starting to resonate nicely in the 35- plus as well. There’s been some crazy stats where Instagram users and growth is the 35, 45-year-old female, that’s growing quicker than any other market on Instagram. We know Facebook is already getting older as is, so there’s no reason to cut out certain demographics, like a 40 year old or a 35 year old isn’t saying that they’re not on digital, they absolutely are. As a little aside here, I like to work outside of my office a lot and go to the local coffee shop or the Starbucks, things like that, and I can also people watch while I’m there. I see every single walk of life and every single age demographic. When they’re having their coffee, they don’t have the newspaper in their hand, they’re on their phone. If you can connect with where exactly they’re looking on that screen, is it Facebook, is it Instagram, is it maybe the local TV station and they’re getting their news? 100% of that though is digital. To get back to the video best practice, I find that just creating a nice, native, authentic style video with your smart phone has done wonders and it’s a lot easier. You can do it on the fly, you can post it right away, and then you can go and boost it or advertise it if you want to, but definitely native advertising is working well.

Bill: Well, I know this is good news for the people watching this, in that I think that when people get the idea that they’re going to need to do something related to video, they immediately assume and kind of think about it being like this very polished, high-production value, very edited, expensive process. The funny thing is, I mean, I’m finding the same thing. In my video marketing, it’s the opposite. Not that we’re going to make ugly looking videos on purpose, but it is the raw, not heavily edited, not super polished stuff that does tend to work well. It’s quick, I like to be nimble and quick and move fast with my campaign, so it makes it easy that way.

Louis: Absolutely.

Bill: And cheaper, like you said, you’re on your smart phone. Shoot the video— Louis: Yeah, it does make it easier, you don’t have to hire a big crew, like I said. I think you hit a huge key right there, where you can move on the fly. We’ll talk about my business to business core as well, and it is teaching promoters and club owners and managers how to utilize now digital marketing. I put out videos as well and Q&A’s, things like that, and because things change so quickly in social media and digital, it’s nice to be able to just screen capture again, a nice step by step, or something like we’re doing right now, it doesn’t have to be in a TV studio worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and people can just appreciate the new knowledge because we can react quickly to the market changing us, which is really neat. I struggled as well with the quality because during my promoter years, I actually worked for a TV network in Canada that was nightlife and music oriented. I interviewed Lady Gaga, Richard Branson, Back Street Boys, and we produced television. I have a good chunk of ten years in between that that I overlapped some television production. So as we’re creating this smart phone video or stuff like that, I thought, man, those videos suck! But that’s exactly what people wanted to see. So I had that internal struggle as well and got over it quickly, but I understood the polished video. I think if you were doing the television medium, I think that’s what they want to see. I used to think, too, the B2B maybe wanted something more polished as well, because they were spending money on it, we were charging thousands of dollars for the videos or for high-ticket coaching, things like that. I just see more and more, especially because my demographic was young and they’re getting older, that’s our demographic, as they keep getting older. They’re just giving us a little bit better leeway, which is awesome. Like you said, you can change quickly, you don’t have to spend all the money and the time creating the videos as well, which is a blessing for business owners.

Bill: Sometimes some of my greatest campaigns have come on a moment of inspiration, like, “I wonder if I shot a video that did this, I wonder what would happen?” Now you just shoot it with your phone.

Louis: Exactly.

Bill: With very little kind of editing, up it goes and you can actually find out what happens.

Louis: Yeah. You can test things out on the fly, like you said. Again, I’ve been driving, had sunglasses on, I’m like, “Oh, I need to put this one-minute video together.” My phone is holding on its holder and I can just point it at me and, “Hey, guys, I’m on my way to a client, but here’s an idea.” Then when I get there, I can upload it and people can resonate with it. It’s all information, really, that they want to see, not necessarily that I had to stop, book studio time, get the nice lights together and teleprompter and all that kind of stuff. I think if we were stuck in that style of production, we would always miss the boat on what changes and you just wouldn’t be able to give results anymore to your clients.

Bill: Okay. Now on the actual videos themselves, any other best practices that you found? Video length, style, any other tips that you can give there?

Louis: Yeah, video length is a great one to talk about, especially because I find— and not just my demographic—90-some-odd percent is seeing mobile instead of desktop, so if any one of us goes on our Facebook ads reporting and you see the different devices and placements that you’re on, you’ll probably see out of 10,000 views, 8-9,000 are mobile. So video length is massive to think about, definitely shorter is better at that point. 30 seconds is fantastic, obviously Vine and Instagram are forcing people to think about 6 and 15 seconds. It’s training the market to want smaller, which is, again, quicker for us to create, but it also becomes tough to put the content in. We chatted offline and we’ll bring it up again, where I had some nice step-by-step videos, but I had to think of how am I going to advertise this? I can’t advertise an eight-minute video, nobody is going to sit there and watch it. I had to create one-minute videos, almost like teasers. Answering the question of what they wanted, now click over so that you can get the full step-by-step video, and which became my landing page.

Bill: I think this is important for them to realize this as well. Everybody who will be watching this, is to realize that shorter really is better. Yeah. We’ll move over to the B2B side in a second and you can show that example. You’re just not going to get somebody on Facebook to watch a 10-minute long video and I think that’s also something that people have to kind of strip back out of their mind because they have this preconceived idea that not only do they need to be polished, but they need to be long and that’s absolutely false.

Louis: You’re right, and speaking of that, I mean, again, it could just be because my nightclub owners and managers have a different attention span, but as I was learning how to create my high-ticket program things like that, webinars were working great. You get the interest of the nightclub owner, they jump onto your either webinar or a nice, long video with lots of information, things like that, and they were 20 minutes, an hour long, and you’re trying to build the trust. I looked at reports, I was a marketing guy, I’m looking at reports and the video view length was just not there. So I actually shortened my actual landing page video that talks about, “Hey, nightclub owners, your marketing sucks and this is why, come call me type of thing,” and it’s seven minutes long. It’s extremely, extremely effective. I can turn on the client tap like on and off. If I put the ads on, I’m going to get the applications and forms in, so it works really well. I found that, in especially my niche, and I’m starting to see it more and more for other owners, other businesses as well on other spaces, that shorter is better for that as well. The long webinars, people are like, “Hey, let’s get to the point here,” you know what I mean?

Bill: Yeah.

Louis: That’s what I’m finding personally and it may resonate with a lot of different viewers on this—

Bill: You talk about two-step elsewhere, in this member’s area they’ll see information on funnels and how to put them together, but this is an example of one that’s really, really good. I really like how you structured that. You’ve got a video that actually you used in your video ad that goes into Facebook, is say 30 seconds to a minute? Does that seem like the sweet spot?

Louis: Yeah. I think this one ended up being a minute. I recorded another one that was three minutes and I’m like, “That’s way too long, nobody is going to sit there and watch me ramble on.” It’s funny when you say ramble on for three minutes, it’s only three minutes, but I did re-record and I chopped it down to, I believe it’s just a minute long.

Bill: Okay. So we’ll call that zone 30 seconds to a minute and a half, 30-90 seconds is kind of the sweet spot for the video on Facebook. Then for you, your funnel, you’re getting them off of Facebook from there, after they’ve watched a video, and then you hit them with a 5-10 minute video there.

Louis: Absolutely.

Bill: Then you get them to take your action for your conversion or your lead, create a lead or a sale after that.

Louis: Yeah. It works well because not only do I build a custom audience for people clicking over and watching my landing page video, they may take the action, like give me their email address or in that particular case it was one of those iFramed, schedule a call, so they can just pick a convenient time that I was available and it was very direct, there was no get the email, let me hound them back, it was just like—boom—here’s a video, you love me now, schedule a call, let’s get on this call. I was building a custom audience for people who were landing on the website as well, but also, as we know, on Facebook you can build a custom audience for views as well. People who viewed my one-minute video as the ad, and it was basically the teaser, like you mentioned, to my landing page video, you have the three-second custom audience and the full-video custom audience. I was able to utilize both of those and now retarget them. So retarget people that may have watched the full video but not clicked over, retargeted people who have gone over there, clicked over, but haven’t filled out a form. There was a lot of retargeting kind of action that I was able to do, just based on that one-minute video that I utilized as my ad.

Bill: Cool. Then just for reference for everybody, too, you’ll see some information in the member’s area that will show you how to do what he’s talking about. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably—what percentage would you just guesstimate out of your leads, come out of that remarketing, if you were to take a wild guess?

Louis: 75-80% pops in my head right now, could be more. Especially nowadays with a lot of internet marketing going on, I think we still need to touch several times before we make the sale, it feels like anyway, especially something more high ticket. Even in my niche, where consumer wise, and I want people to buy a ticket or come out to the event, I feel like I need to get at them several times. I use retargeting with them as well. They may click on something, go to my ticket sales page but not purchase, so I want to retarget those people. “Hey, don’t forget, tickets are going to go up tomorrow, that kind of idea.” It’s useful in every single business.

Bill: Yeah, I think it’s huge. I would say if you’re not utilizing those elements of retargeting and with the videos, as you said. When we talk about retargeting, you’re basically isolating an audience of people on Facebook that have viewed a portion of your video, all your video, or have hit your landing page and then you can re-advertise to them all over again. If you’re not doing that, I’d say at least half of your conversions that are sales or leads or you’re just leaving them on the table.

Louis: Absolutely. I mean, people get sidetracked, they book the call and don’t answer the call, or if it’s ticket sales, they got to wait till their friends say, “Yes, we’re all going,” first. There’s a lot of reasons why they don’t make that purchase. Retargeting is great because it really does just remind them to make that purchase or make that action. It really is extremely important to implement.

Bill: Again, another reason why I love Facebook video ads so much is that this is the only type of ad that lets you do this kind of retargeting, there’s no other way to redo it.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely. Like we mentioned a couple minutes ago, anybody who’s viewed your video, Facebook will throw in a custom—well, they’ll make two custom audiences, like you said, one that’s done three seconds worth, I think it’s up to three seconds, and then another custom audience, someone who’s watched the entire video. You’ll get some people who are very engaged, that watched the whole thing, and then people who may have just seen it auto play and stuck a few seconds of time and then maybe scrolled through. You may want to go back and say, “Hey, watch the video.” It’s great to have those custom audiences.

Bill: Then, the other thing is about video ads that make them so unique is it is a branding experience. It’s direct response marketing, which I love, I love being able to spend a dollar, track the click, make a sale, and move on. But when you’re using video ads, you are branding and you are spreading the awareness of you and your brand and that has a lot of long-term value and it’s sort of a side effect really of doing this kind of advertising.

Louis: Yes. I mean, earlier we talked about the DJ Marketing Lab, which was a partner/client of mine that we created a Facebook page basically called DJ Marketing Lab and we were going to start—and we still are—starting to grow out that brand, create it into a membership site, that kind of idea. Basically teach DJ’s and promoters and talent how to utilize Facebook marketing and Twitter marketing, that kind of idea, and grow themselves as a brand. I think it was actually our first ad, was a video meme that we grabbed a hold of and we pushed that out as our first, I guess, point of action for people to recognize our brand. I’ll screen share that right now, if you’d like.

Bill: Yeah, let’s take a look at that one.

Louis: Go on over there, let’s go to screen share and I’ll show you some of the amazing—

Bill: Is that really crazy one?

Louis: Yeah, so here we go, you can see that now. You can see my cost per video view was zero. That doesn’t mean it was free for me, it meant it was well below one cent per video view. If you look at some of the basic numbers right here, for $89, we hit 23,000 people and that’s the paid part of the ad. With all the shares and the likes and the comments, that kind of idea, just from what we paid for, we actually gained another 20,000 views organically. Technically, this half-cent, it was actually a quarter of a cent per view if you calculate even the organic. Massive click-through ratio, which was obviously because we had all this great engagement, people clicking through, this link here actually brought them to our actual DJ Marketing Lab Facebook page itself.

Bill: Isn’t that cool? Where else are you going to get where your audience is passing around your ads for you?

Louis: It was amazing. Again, like you mentioned, it’s a huge branding opportunity because out of the 23 or 40-some-odd thousand views, we hit 60,000 people and then that was a great ad test. Not only was this gaining some huge branding for us, that DJ Marketing Lab, we’re going to start building up an audience, going to launch some products, that kind of idea, people were engaging. But we were also, like we mentioned a few minutes ago, creating a nice custom audience. Out of all these tens of thousands of views, I was now building a custom audience to go back and actually retarget and utilize that to retarget people that may be interested in products, that kind of idea. It was absolutely unreal and all for less than $100. I like to run different layers of ads, but we ran quite a bit of that style of Video View ad and again, like you mentioned, massive branding, a lot of custom audience build up and then you can go back and retarget and add some added touches for when products are released and things like that. It’s really powerful stuff.

Bill: Cool. Then while I have the screen up there, let’s show, I think you have one of those that were oriented toward the consumers, of getting guys and gals to show up at the venue. Let’s take a look at that one.

Louis: I think it was over here. Yeah, this one here is a nightclub in the Ontario area and again, I run several different ads, so this one in particular, I think was male and female at a certain age demographic that went to the local school. I like running another layer of ads of people who are locals but maybe doesn’t go to school anymore. Ones that like one particular DJ, another one likes a different DJ, that kind of idea. As an example here, again, this was only a $30 spend. We had more of a posting engagement ad because I had posted this directly onto the Facebook page as well, so it’s actually tracking post engagement. You can see here, 363 video views, but for this one in particular, our objective wasn’t just for branding, it wasn’t just to get the video views, it was actually for people to click on this link, which actually went to the sales page. I mentioned earlier, before we started our video, that out of this 47 web clicks on this particular ad, we had 30-some-odd actual ticket sales. It was an extremely high conversion. Out of 47 clicks, we got 30, I think it was 32 at $20 or $25 at this time. When we look at the numbers, our total spend being $32.93 and we made upwards of $6-700 in the ROI. It was fantastic and it was because the video was the driving image, the driving—not image—but video, the driving force to this particular app. So they stopped, they looked, they were excited, it was party animals in there. It talked directly to the right market and it allowed them to click through, which is extremely important.

Bill: One of the things, too, which I think is really important, is even though that we’ve kind of been talking heavily about video ads, it is important to do just like what you’re showing here, to do engagement ads on your video posts. Again, the member’s area will walk them through of that and if they’re confused about that, I’ll show them how that works. It’s important to do that. I think if you just stick with video ads only, you’re missing the boat. It’s really if you can kind of do an engagement ad and a video ad that really complement each other.

Louis: They do. Like between the two, one was just a direct video views ad push and the other one was a post engagement. I think the important thing is not to just go for that direct sale, that hard sale all the time. Like you just mentioned, if you’re doing a little bit more engagement, you’re trying to entice people to click through or share things, like, comment, that kind of idea, you’re causing some community. I think community is a big key in all of our businesses, whether it’s B2B or even the consumer end with me and nightlife or events, things like that. The more you build community and trust, the more that they want to support you. Everybody wants to have that 15 seconds of fame. They want to be the first to tell their friends about something. They want to be the guy to share. That’s why when you go on Twitter or Facebook, if there’s something newsworthy, every single person on Facebook is sharing the same news item, they all want to be the guy or girl that shares it. If you can give them the conditions to be that person, to be that popular person or that 15 seconds of fame, they’re going to run with it.

Bill: Cool. Let’s run over those stats again. It was $38 spend.

Louis: Yeah, I think the one was $38 or $32.93 and out of the almost 50 website clicks, we had, I think 32 sales at the $20-25 range. That’s one layer, yeah.

Bill: $6-700 on a $30-something ad spend, that’s pretty darn good.

Louis: I mean, I have other clients, great engagement, where we do birthday specials for bottle service. If you book your birthday and it’s huge for the nightclub industry and bar industry, you book your booth, you get yourself some platter of food, whatever the promotion was, and these guys pack 18-20 bottle service reservations Friday and Saturday and I think now they’re spend, because it’s just maintenance at this point, is $150 a week in Facebook ads, and bottles are $200. So they’re making tens of thousands of dollars on 100-and-some-odd- dollars in Facebook ads. No promoters, they don’t hire anybody outside, they don’t hand out tickets or anything like that, it’s just strictly Facebook ads. Because it’s so targeted, if you can talk to your market really well and be very targeted, the ROI is through the roof, it really is.

Bill: The last thing I want to point out this consumer thing and then we’ll talk about the B2B and wrap up, is that you’re actually doing this as a service. So when you get good at doing this and you understand how it works, you’re placing ads like that and getting the local business to pay you for it. I think that’s an enormous opportunity, even if someone were to just specialize in this exact kind of promotion and that’s all they offer, that is super valuable. For you it’s club owners and promoters, but this strategy works in any kind of local retail business.

Louis: Absolutely. I mean, my wife runs a vegetarian festival and a baby expo in our local cities, which are completely different, even thought they’re events completely different from the nightclub debauchery that goes on on my end and I take the same blueprint and I apply it to her businesses and it does extremely well. I mean, high 90 percentile of ROI is all digital marketing and the majority of that is Facebook, because everybody is on Facebook right now, so absolutely.Like you mentioned, if you can master a couple of these tools, businesses need traffic, they need sales. Like we mentioned, radio isn’t working anymore, television isn’t working anymore, print isn’t working anymore. I’m not saying that they stopped working completely because they suck, I’m saying that the ROI isn’t there anymore. Again, in my industry, for nightclubs and bars, we used to just write a quick check, $1,000 a week, $2,000 a week, and we said, “Okay, you create the ad for me,” they’ll pop it on radio and people will come running in, it was easy. That no longer works. It’s not just in my industry, it’s in every industry. The segmentation of people’s attention span is all over the place, not just musically, but all over the place. When you’re still spending $100 for 30 seconds or more, if it’s TV, that kind of idea, you’re not going to get the right ROI. People still need traffic, they still need sales in business and it moves so quickly, most business owners can’t figure out what’s going on, so when we can figure that out, it’s a massive service to offer.

Bill: It’s a premium service. Even if you just show up at the local business with your iPhone, shoot a little video, do a successful Facebook campaign for them, demonstrate the kind of ROI that you are already getting, that is incredibly valuable and a premium service.

Louis: Absolutely. It’s so needed right now for not just my industry, for every industry, because like I said, people have lost touch with what’s going on. They have a Facebook page and even a year or two ago, when they posted on Facebook, it actually helped them out and it was free. So now everybody is a little bit angry at the fact that they have to pay. It’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with buying traffic, like it’s a commodity, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you can really set yourself up that, “I can buy as much traffic as I need,” like it’s a commodity, you can win the world with that. A lot of business owners kind of lost touch with what’s working and they get frustrated and angry that “Twitter’s not working, I make a post, nobody’s buying anything. Facebook’s not working.” They forget that two years ago, I liked probably half the pages that I like today. So if you think about the competition in the newsfeed itself, no wonder your reach is diminished to absolutely nothing. Of course, Facebook is a business, they want to make money, too, but they provide the tools to make the money, if you understand how to use them, you can crush it, absolutely.

Bill: Cool. Let’s switch gears and move over to your B2B side. You’re coaching and offering services to promoters, club owners, things like that, thinking them marketing, is that right? Maybe you can explain a little better than I can.

Louis: That’s exactly what I do. I do get calls every single days from different nightclubs, managers, owners, promoters, saying, “Now, we’re running events doing what you also do in our own city and what’s going on? We’re loosing numbers.” This trend is worldwide. This exact same story, anywhere in the United States, anywhere in Canada, Australia, London, England, Europe, all over the place is the exact same story, where the numbers are declining, they’ve lost contact and engagement with their fan base or their customer base. They just don’t know how to get them back or how to really engage with them. They’re calling every single day to get me involved to help them out. I used to do the work for them, where I’m like, “Hey, it’s X-amount of dollars every week, I will manage your campaigns,” and this and that and I found that they are there. They understand their customer and their market better, so it was easier for me to transition into a coaching kind of scenario, where instead of them paying me, let’s say for example, $1,000 a week to do their ads for them, I was able to coach them for a set amount, for maybe 4-6 weeks, give them all the information I know, maybe funnel them into a membership as well, where they can keep up to date on the changes, but teaching them how to fish, so to speak. This way they know their market, they know their customers, and they can play around with the ads themselves because they now have the knowledge. That seemed to work much better.

Bill: Cool. Then you’re using video ads to drive traffic and leads to close your coaching clients, so talk about that a little.

Louis: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, video is probably my primary way to get any clients to take notice of me, whether it’s doing things like this, but also video on landing pages, like I mentioned earlier. I found that shorter videos were doing much better than longer videos, that kind of idea. In the last little while, I’ve been testing really short videos, and as an example, I’ll show you that right here. One example is I have like an eight-minute video that goes step-by-step on Facebook’s hyper local ads, and of course, not everybody knows about that, where it’s more of a radius ad, so your address locally—and it’s perfect for a bar or a nightclub or restaurant—you can create a radius of 1 mile, 10 miles, 5 miles, and show your ads to people who are standing around. It’s huge for tourists. A lot of nightclubs and restaurants say, “How do we get the tourists? When I create an ad, I can target Las Vegas, but if you’re from California or you’re from New York City visiting, you’re not from Las Vegas, you’re not going to see my ad.” It’s true, right? So how do you get the tourists? Well, the hyper local ad really fixes that. It just allows you to create anybody who’s standing in your area, within the few miles that you set will now see your ad, so it’s great for tourists. So we created different promotions, like Tourist Tuesday or Show Your Out of Town ID and Get a Free Appetizer or No Cover—whatever the promotion is, this is how we executed it. I created an eight-minute video, step by step, screen sharing basically exactly what I would do, how I would create the ad, but it’s an eight-minute video. This was kind of a little lead gen where I can get people to actually call me and now want to explore all these different tools and get more into a high-ticket scenario. I couldn’t put that eight-minute video on Facebook and advertise it because nobody in their right mind is going to sit on—especially because 90-some-odd percent of the people are on their mobile phone. There’s no way in hell somebody is going to have their phone and watch eight minutes of me screen capturing video, right? So what I did was I created a one-minute video and it basically is, “I get this question a lot, people ask me how to attract tourists and it’s not as hard as you think.” It kind of in one minute, summarizes how Facebook has this new tool. I have a step-by-step, no charge, if you click through, you can go to my page and there’s an actual eight-minute sort of mini course and you can get the full, for free, step-by-step on how to do it. It was great that I used the one-minute to advertise and that was what I really pushed out on my ads, to get the enticement, to get the interest level and my face to face there, and then have them click through to where my landing page was that had the actual eight-minute step by step and then of course a form where they can fill out a coaching application. It worked wonders. But I couldn’t advertise an eight-minute video.

Bill: I really like that campaign and I’m so easily distracted, would those hyper local ads work with video ads?

Louis: I believe hyper local is just an image right now and you cannot target interests, it’s just your area and male/female or age. I really hope that they add interest. I don’t think there is, I mean, I could take a quick look while we’re chatting here, too. I don’t think that you can do hyper local with video. Again, I’d like to have a couple of extra hyper local ads—no, I think it’s just image, yeah.

Bill: Okay. Well, bummer, when you brought that up it just made me think, work with video? Okay.

Louis: I believe it’s just an image and of course it doesn’t have all the demographics. The cool thing with hyper local though, is they did add an extra call to action. Before it was just like our page, next to that was get directions, which is great again for tourists, click here and it goes right to the map. Now it says, call now, so it actually calls up, brings up your dialer. Again, for us, for instant reservations, things like that, you’re like, put the area code and number, people out there memorize it, get out of the Facebook app and then type it in, it’s never going to happen. Now with the new call now call to action, you click on call now and it’ll call directly to your phone, which is pretty exciting as a new little tool for that.

Bill: I’d be surprised if Facebook doesn’t push video into that sometime soon. Facebook is really pushing video ads right now.

Louis: 100%.

Bill: I’ll cross my fingers, hopefully they’ll push into the hyper local.

Louis: It might even come by the time we start watching this.

Bill: Yeah, exactly.

Louis: It does change quickly, right? [Laughs]

Bill: Okay, cool. Back to the business to business stuff. You’re basically generating appointments so that you can get a prospect on the phone and close them for your coaching. Do you have an example campaign of something like that?

Louis: Yeah, let’s pull that up, too. Right here, this is the one I just started running, as you can see, just a few days old here. Getting already 5,500 video views and it started at 5 cents, it’s down to 3, so I’m going to bring that down hopefully to zero, like I did last time. This one here again is the one minute, very quick, again, it’s my little Ask Louie style of mini episodes. It’s about a minute long and this one in particular talks about attracting more tourists to your bar. It’ll auto play and it’s kind of neat because the beginning is a little cartoon of mine. I don’t know if you can play it here. You see me jump in. So it gets some attention, which is kind of neat and it might entice them to actually sit there, click on it and listen in and watch the full minute. What it’s doing is, it’s not only building a custom audience for me right here to retarget with my products and my lander, but it’s also getting people to be more enticed to click through and then watch that eight-minute video and again, from there as well, try and apply for a coaching scenario as well. It’s pretty important there.

Bill: Wow, that’s pretty cool when you think about it. The scale of driving consumer traffic with local, to make local purchases, it’s working there all the way up to kind of premium high-end purchasing services.

Louis: It works.

Bill: What kind of ticket prices do you usually charge your coaching clients?

Louis: Usually the average is about $5,000 US, and I know the nightclubs and bars can make tons of money and that’s a nice average. There are some larger ones that can go 10,000, that kind of idea. There’s some small bars that come in to play that are 50-person capacity and they may make $5,000 in 2 weeks or something like that, they’re little small mom and pop and they may not fit the high ticket, even though they need it. In that scenario, I might try and entice them to maybe get into my monthly membership idea, where I release videos like this one, How To Attract Tourists, 8 minutes there, How To Use Facebook Videos, 8 minutes there. At least they can learn without blowing their bank. But I try and target the right ones where they are definitely high ticket for me and I can concentrate one on one and make bigger money.

Bill: I love that scale, $25-5,000.

Louis: Exactly! Exactly. It is, it’s amazing that when I can finally get them on the phone and 100% of them need the help, every single bar, nightclub and restaurant out there want more traffic. Whether they’re doing okay but want to learn and want more traffic, or they’re doing terribly and they’re in a bad scenario and they really need to turn things around. 100% of them that actually get on that call want the help and it’s a matter of if they have the money to spend on me or if I can filter them over to the other membership. But once I’ve gone through this qualification process here, I mean, the closing scenario is a little bit easier for me.

Bill: Wow. The other factor you have going for you is they’ve also been introduced to you and your brand before you have ever got them on the phone. Between the Facebook ad or the retargeting ads, they’re seeing your videos, they’re getting to know a little bit about you and your credibility and that you actually know what you’re talking about. Almost kind of like a byproduct of the advertising process.

Louis: It is.

Bill: You’re seven minute and by the time they’re on the phone, I think you’ve done a lot of rapport and trust building.

Louis: Yeah, and I think that’s important in every single business niche, not just nightclub and bar, it’s people are seeing online, on Facebook, some sort of claim that this is how things work. I think the more we give, the more trust it is and I think we’ve heard that same story over and over again. So you’re right, when I’m creating the video ad itself, you get a one-minute video, you get my face on screen, it’s telling you here’s some information, things are possible. You get to my landing page video, more things are possible, and here’s an actual step by step, so there’s some more trust being built there by—look, it’s free, take it, use it, hopefully you make money off it. There’s a link over to my blog as well, so if they want to do a little bit more research or they want to Google me, they’ll find my videos on YouTube. A lot of my blog articles, things like that. So they can dig deep and they can do some research. Like you said, it’s built some rapport by the time they do get on that coaching call itself, they’re really just rambling on to me on how they need help. They always ask me, “So I know you don’t work for free, how much?” They always do, I never have to lead them into, “By the way, it’s not all for free here.” Every single one of them always asks me, “I get it, sounds like it’s going to work, how much?” Then like I said, it’s just a matter of am I aligning them with this is how much it costs and is that cool with you basically. That’s pretty much what it comes down to.

Bill: Awesome. I love the approach. Anything different about your videos themselves on the business to business style or is it really all the same principles apply on both sides?

Louis: Yeah, shorter is better still, I still think that. Between the consumer side, where again, if I’m running a party, it’s probably going to be the DJ on stage or some video meme, that kind of idea. It’s going to be a little bit different on the creative end and how I talk to the person. But the generic portion of it, how I’m targeting very well, shorter is better, that kind of idea, even my one-minute video, other than that little cartoon that I had produced, which is like five seconds long and kind of grabs attention, it’s basically what you’re seeing here as well. Things will change on the fly as well and I want to be able to change that as that changes. So I don’t have a thousand dollar television production as well that goes into it. It’s still fairly native, very real, that kind of idea. To me, I think it ads a little bit of human aspect to it. I’m not pretending I’m on a boat with 30 girls, “This could be you!” That kind of concept, which we’ve seen and we’ve had, and as fun as that would be to shoot, I think there’s a lot of skepticism out there and I try to not to touch upon that. I just think I would lose more people. So I like the realness of the videos.

Bill: Cool. Now let’s talk a little bit about an actual set up of your video ads themselves. Is there anything you’ve learned as far as targeting, demographics, any tips you’ve got there that you can pass along?

Louis: Yeah, I think it’s not just to video, it’s probably for any Facebook ad or even Twitter ad that you run, to really stop and try and know your market. That’s one thing, when I first call at every single venue I work with, we sit down and we try and create a customer avatar. Who is your market? What are they like? Once you know, like again, for us in events, do they like Patron Tequila or Jose Cuervo? Do they like Ketel One Vodka or Grey Goose? These are different people. You can tell by going to the different ads that these guys run. Grey Goose ad is different than Patron Tequila. Dos Equis, the most interesting guy in the world, is completely different than Corona, but they’re both that Mexican beer, but they’re completely different. Someone who likes Dos Equis is maybe a little bit more fun because that most interesting man in the world kind of campaign resonates with them, where Corona is on the beach, you’re with your spouse or with another person, the Corona is sitting there—completely different. With any business that we’re talking about, you really have to know your customer, what they like, what they purchase, that kind of idea. Then from there, your creative comes into play and it becomes a lot easier to target as well, obviously, because you have a whole list of interests and things like that that you can target. Every video has to talk to them.

Bill: So I’ll pretend I’m the club owner. If I were a club owner and I have an event I’m promoting on Thursday night, I want to pack my bar.

Louis: First of all, I hope it’s not this Thursday, because it’s a lot of work. Give me some time! [Laughs]

Bill: So a couple Thursdays away. I want to pack the bar and so if I were sitting down and I was going to start to build my Facebook ad, what kind of—obviously my local area, and then would I dig into people that have shown interest in other clubs, do I look at different alcohol brands? What would I try to come up with for targeting.

Louis: Yeah, I mentioned earlier on that I like to do different layers of that. We may have not just one ad, let’s say Thursday is going to be a top 40 night, student party, cheap drinks type of idea. I wouldn’t just have the one ad saying, “Hey, it’s student party night, it’s dollar draft.” That’s one, but it’s not really resonating with a lot of people, so I may have several different layers. We may have a birthday party special, again, like I mentioned earlier, that does very well. “Hey, it’s your birthday this week! Come out on Thursday and you’ll get a line by pass when you bring your friends,” and that’s one ad. The targets that are going to work on all of them will be obviously the age demographic, the location, the zip code and the radius. We’re going to look at the interest, so what kind of music are we playing? Is it Rihanna? LMFAO? Is it Lil Jon? Is it DJ Tiesto? Is it country music, is it rock music? What are the interests and we’re going to plus those in as well. Then of course we’re going to segment that basic audience now over to birthday parties. If it’s student night, you’re probably not going to have bachelor parties, they’re not going to be engaged by then, hopefully, who knows. We’re going to have different layers of ads that work. We’re going to take the basic audience and then we’re going to start to segment that as well. That’s what I find works the best. Of course within those, you’re going to have different creative. If it’s going to be birthday and it’s bottle service oriented, I may have a quick video of the girl bringing up a bottle with the sparkler sticking out and that 10 seconds of action is what’s going to entice the person to stop and see that video. If it’s just the generic cheap draft thing, I might have the bartender pouring. Now with that, you may get into some disapprovals with Facebook, depending on who you’re targeting, because you’re actually pouring a beer, they may not like to see that. I’ve had no problems with some of them and other times it’s like, “We don’t want to see that,” so they disapprove the ad. In my mind, I call them bar niche, there’s a couple of compliance things we have to keep an eye on, but that can be very cool to do, too. If it’s going to be something like, again, off the top of my head, doing beer pong, you might have the table there and somebody firing a couple of pongs into the cups and it’s 20 seconds worth of video, and that works, too. Depending on each of the little promotion slices of that pie, you may have different creatives that you work with. Each one of those could be a $5 or 10 ad that does really well for your one Thursday night.

Bill: Wow. That’s really helpful in the targeting. Question I have on the video. I like to stick with us having bumpers, so I’ll do like a super quick little intro, attention grabbing, and then a call to action at the end. Then I just fill the content in between. In these examples, you’d have like whatever the person carrying the bottles here, bouncing the pong. That would be the center piece. Do you do bumpers on? Do you put like a before and after?

Louis: I do before and afters for B2B, as you notice with my little cartoon guy. For nightclub and bar in particular, I don’t use them, but what I do use, and I’ll show you that once again on screen share. You’ll notice how I made this meme almost look. I actually took black bars and threw up the whole thing. I kind of got the idea from not only the memes, but also from like movie trailers that are on TV. Now you’re noticing within the black bars, they actually have the website or opening this Friday, that kind of idea. So I know it works and I know the psychologically is there. When I’m business to consumer, I like to throw my ads in something like this so it’ll say, like this one right here is a funny meme because I was getting people to jump on the marketing lab. For a DJ event or a band that’s coming up, I may say, “band name” this Friday, click for tickets, whatever you want to say in the creative, as the video is going through. Or if it’s “Hey, happy birthday! Click for bottle service,” that kind of idea. Again, that’s in the nightclub and bar niche, but those kind of bars, with some text top and bottom, I think works really well as well. It’s kind of another way to do the bumpers on the two ends. It’s actually playing throughout the whole video and if you get the right thumbnail, too, they get a good looking girl. If it’s my niche or something like that, you’re going to have people stopping and looking at the video and it’s going to start auto playing as well, which is really nice.

Bill: Yeah, I think that’s an important fact, too, people realize that those video ads, they’ve all experienced them. They may not even necessarily be realizing that they’re seeing video ads on Facebook. But they’ve all probably experienced it and it is that moment as you’re scrolling through your feed, because your feed is filled with stuff, there’s a never-ending selection of things to attract your attention. The video has to do that, it has to jump out of the feed and grab the person the say, “Look at me,” otherwise, they’ll scroll right on by.

Louis: Yeah. Again, I have the opportunity to kind of get away with the audio thing because it’s very visual. So if I have a party atmosphere or something like that, people can actually see the party and good looking people in the bottle service and get away with the audio. But in my B2B, when they need to hear my voice, I need to get that attention grabber so they actually click on it so I actually get audio out of it. If I have no audio and it’s just a talking head and nothing is going on as they scroll through, it almost means nothing at that point, even if I’m getting the view. You’re getting some branding but I’m not actually connecting with the person. Whereas in the nightclub and bar kind of scenario, we can get away a little bit more because just party, hands in the air, big DJ confetti, that can sort of give the impression of the party without having the audio. The audio is probably just music anyways, so I can get away with that a little bit more on the consumer end. On the business end, and probably a lot of people who are watching this video now, you may have something that you need people to actually listen to. They want to hear your voice so you can bring them in to your funnel, bring them into your world. You need that attention grabber so they actually stop, click, and actually start to pay attention.

Bill: One of the things that I’ve noticed for me, a couple of times I’ve done one without any kind of bumpers and it’s just raw video, head and shoulder of me, I’ll do lots of like hand movements as I’m talking. Almost every time you end up with like the first frame is pointing at the play button.

Louis: Yeah, exactly.

Bill: Their mouse goes over it, they see me gesturing wildly and talking excitedly, yeah, what is he doing?

Louis: Yeah. They want to know what you’re saying, which is really cool. I mean, you can even use text there, too. Click me! Click me! Or something like that, maybe not being so cheesy, but you can have some text that entices them to want to actually learn what you’re going to say right there, you know what I mean? Again, I’m testing mine with that cartoon guy that jumps out and it actually has a little tag at the top right corner that says, “Nightclub and bar video on targeting tourists.” Hopefully when they stop and see this cartoon jump in but they actually see what is going on, they’re going to say, “Whoa, whoa, I have a nightclub and bar,” “Whoa, whoa, I want tourists,” and they stop and click and watch. There’s a ton of different ways that works and experimenting is pretty much the key there.

Bill: Awesome. I think we’ve given a lot of good insight into what’s working for you and I think, I really appreciate you spending the time with us to kind of go over that.

Louis: No problem, thank you.

Bill: You’ve been an open book and just saying, “Here’s what’s working,” so I think that’s awesome.

Louis: You bet. Yeah, thanks for having me, it’s always exciting to share the knowledge and to bounce ideas around as well.

Bill: Anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up and shut her down?

Louis: No, I mean, it’s been great being a part of this and I hope the members really get some good insight and of course, you can Google me to find some fun videos on some of the acts that I’ve interviewed and what not. I think the key to this and being in the nightclub and bar niche is really fascinating and it’s a fun business to be in, but the key is the same blueprint does work on different businesses. So while we’re talking about nightclubs and bars and bottle service, the takeaway is how can you use this for whatever business you’re in. Just like I did in the internet marketing world, I took all this stuff that you guys know and I brought it to my world. It goes the other way as well, which is kind of cool to see.

Bill: Awesome. Again, thanks so much and of course, if anybody has a bar or nightclub and they want to learn how to do their marketing—

Louis: Come and find me. Absolutely. Thanks.

Bill: All right, thanks a lot and at this point we’ll wrap up. With that we’ll end off here with the Social Video Formula and look forward to seeing you on the next video.