Are you looking to maximize your content marketing strategy and leverage the power of podcasts? Look no further! Brad is joined by Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative to uncover the secrets behind successful content marketing and explain how podcasts can be powerful tools for building an audience. Tune in now to unlock all the tips and advice you need to get ahead in content marketing!
Click here for a free strategy call with Matt! - https://twobrotherscreative.com/video-podcast-services/
Connect with Brad's team at www.rentwerx.com!
This podcast is produced by Two Brothers Creative 2023.
Brad Larsen: Hey everybody. On today's episode, I've got Matt Tompkins with content in a box. We're going to be talking about all kinds of different marketing strategies. You got to listen.
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Brad Larsen: Hey, good, good conversation we're going to have here. And for the audience listening, you guys are producing our podcast and we've been using your service for for several years. You've attended my conferences and you've really gotten to know our industry. And you you see the value and the opportunity in the podcasting realm and the real estate and the property management world. And that's just one little niche. I mean, you can start talking about anything out there in the industry that needs to be just it's a it's an audio video blog that can turn into some really good stuff. And I think it's a great medium to get your name out there to become a better speaker, to put out really good information and to have fantastic content that can highlight what you do in the business world.
Matt Tompkins: Yeah, for sure. When you first started and you first said, Hey, I'm going to double down, I'm going to do a podcast. And you wanted to do it with video too, which, you know, video is become almost an elemental. It's a crucial element, I think of podcast, really of marketing for sure. Every social media channel now is a video platform. There is just no way around that fact. And you saw that kind of ahead of the curve. And I know our mutual friend Gwen Aspen, they kind of saw that too, both you coming from that property management industry and that you were some of our first clients, both of you. And so as I've always been curious, like, what was it that gave you that, that indication that, okay, this is where we should double down, this is where should we invest with podcasting and with video?
Brad Larsen: Podcasting well, started with YouTube. Youtube came out I think, in 2005, and at the time I was selling hardcore real estate in San Antonio, doing, you know, all the listings and the buyers and all that good stuff. Right around 2006, I just for some reason saw somebody do this and I bought a video camera. This is before smartphones where you have all the video built into your smartphone. It's an actual handheld video camera, not VHS. I'm not that old, but what it was is just it's all digital video camera. And I was doing walkthroughs of homes and then I started doing videos of like what we do inside of property management and was posting those onto YouTube, which kind of was the precursor to podcasting. Podcasting really started for me around 2017 and that turned into all kinds of different things into a Facebook group. It turned into more online content, it turned into more speaking opportunities, and it turned into really hone in advertising for our business to generate more leads. Now, the challenge that I see in the future this is again, my my forward thinking mind how do we hone in on the 30 second to one minute little video snips, right? The tiktokers, the the Instagram reels and the Facebook, whatever they call it on Facebook. And it's that video concept of just a short little 30 second, one minute where it's got subtitles. People don't even turn on their volume. And how do we turn that into a potential opportunity for garnering more clients to to get more content put out there? I mean, what do you see in that that conversation realm as far as going to that little tiny snippet?
Matt Tompkins: Yeah. So I mean, we tell clients, anybody we work with, you have to stop thinking of a podcast as a show or entertainment. Like this isn't Joe Rogan. I mean, yeah, you want it to be entertaining, of course, but look at it as a tool. When you start looking at it as a podcast, as a tool, there are two main categories two main values, two main assets, if you will. One is the audio podcast and those things you were talking about. You're cultivating a tribe, you're building a group. This, you're becoming an authority. You're building these genuine relationships, working with advertisers, having that ideal dream client you wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to even have a conversation with, you invite them on your podcast. On your show, they will say, Yes, it's crazy how often they say yes. Like 80, 90% of people big name people will say yes, that's on the one side. The other side is with those vertical video shorts. And I would say for branding, for brand awareness, that's how you get almost any immediate value out of your podcast. So what are these vertical video shorts and like what you mentioned, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. So they all operate similarly. And what happened was we actually Snapchat actually came out with the very first vertical video short.
Matt Tompkins: They were the first ones to do it. Tiktok. They perfected it with their algorithm. They took off. They changed how the social media platforms work. It used to be you would post a video or content, and only your fans, your friends, your followers would see that TikTok took the opposite approach. They said, We're going to put this video in front of complete strangers who don't follow you, who don't see you that are best suited for that particular video. And what that means for you as a business is that this is an opportunity with every vertical video short you post as a Facebook reel, Instagram reel, TikTok and YouTube short to be placed in front of literally not exaggerating tens of thousands of new people every single week. And they are much more effective than widescreen because a only 15% of people will turn their phone if it's widescreen and when they're holding it vertical, it takes up 78% more of that screen, which means you have that person's full attention. And you're right, 80, 82 or 83% of people don't even watch a video with the sound on. So you have to have captions. You have to have animated subtitles. I will tell you this. We just put this together and that's kind of the only reason I know this.
Matt Tompkins: These case studies that we put together for our clients, we took four clients. We looked at just the first 30 days after implementing a vertical video reel like Facebook reels, Instagram reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts across all those channels, you have to post at least one per day. And that's why having a video podcast is great because you can pull a ton of these video shorts out of it, but if you're posting one per day, we saw clients that saw we had one, one clients, TikTok took off, got over. Was I think it was 6 million views in in just a 30 day period. Granted, they had a couple celebrity names in a couple of the videos to kind of help them launch. Overall, though, I mean, we're seeing like clients go from here's one for real plays. Before the strategy, they had about 2.3 thousand total plays for their channel and then they jumped to 5.8 thousand just 30 days later. We look at YouTube is really where I would steer people to go. Our own channel, we implemented this. We went from 47,000 views in total to over 90,000 in just the first 30 days. Chief carriers, they had 8000 total views for their channel. 30 days later, they had an additional 25,986. And all they did was they posted these vertical video reels every single day, once per day.
Matt Tompkins: And there's a lot of little things that, you know, we can talk about like little things you need to check off the list for YouTube and that are slightly different from the other channels. But overall, that's the basic premise of really what gives you massive branding impact and value for any business in any industry. And if you're going to post like I'll just do one real 2 or 3 times a week, you might as well not post any. You have to post them at least once per day. That's the other side of this value that we really coach businesses on using because let's say you're doing a podcast yourself, let's say you record it yourself, you do it with video, and then you use some of the different tools to help chop up and edit that for you. You can produce enough content to last you at least a couple of weeks from just one single 20 minute podcast episode. And now you can actually implement the strategy and all that that will cost you is time and effort. And that's really where the magic lies with these with podcast today, it is the most multifaceted tool that you have to meet all of your marketing needs.
Brad Larsen: Now do I do want to comment on the content and a lot of people are going to struggle with that. Like, what do I talk about? Matt Like, you know, I just I'm this person. I'm that person. I'm not, you know, Joe Rogan trying to do a, you know, an hour and a half, two hour podcast. What do I talk about? So one of the things that you've seen me do and I tell this all the time in our in my particular podcast called the Property Management Mastermind podcast is we basically do a discovery call and we contact or talk to a vendor that might be in or circling around our industry and basically ask them the five W's, who, what, where, when, why, and then what's it cost and how do I reach you? And that brings out a lot of good information because, you know, in a method it's self-serving because I want to find out about them. You remember the episode I did with Proof Serve, and I'm like, What is proof serve? It's this method to serve notices, to vacate and to serve clients with legal papers. That dovetails fits perfectly into what we do as property managers when we have to do a notice to vacate, it's a legal document, blah, blah blah blah, blah. You know, I could go on. It's just whatever. But the point of it is like, wow, I didn't know any about anything about this. And at the end of the episode I'm like, Where do I sign up? I was so excited. I didn't know anything about anything going into it, You understand? I didn't have to do four hours of homework. I didn't have to do two hours of pre-show. I just got on the microphone and said, Tell me what you do. You know, I had no idea what they were doing at the end of that call. I'm like, You either love it, hate it, or you're neutral. And that, as you mentioned, could be broken up into all kinds of little snippets. 30s a minute, whatever. You all just broke up and then published on a daily basis.
Matt Tompkins: And keep in mind these snippets 30s is actually long 15 to 20s for these videos. 15 seconds is the optimal length Facebook meta with Instagram. They just released their annual report talking about like their recommendations for ads and video shorts. They said 15 seconds, keep it to 15 seconds. The reason is that when it's short like that, they'll watch the entire thing and they're more likely to watch it over and over again, which gives you a high consumption rate, increases your engagement. And then Facebook, their algorithm will place it in front of more people. If people don't finish your whole video because it's even if it's 30, 40 60s, then they're not going to place it in front of new people because people aren't as engaged. Every social media platform today is based off of engagement. Like how are people? Are they commenting? Are they liking, are they sharing, are they watching this over and over again? And so you're absolutely right. Right on that that front there. And like as far as like how to come up with the content, I think you're 100% on there. You could do spotlights and features with partners that you want to work with or you just have, like you said, like it's an introductory call, you know, this is somebody I want to do business with. I just want to learn about them. And in the process, you make them feel like a star. You wow them.
Matt Tompkins: You leave an impression with them that they'll always think of you as, Oh, yeah, it's Brad Larsen. Yeah, he's the podcast host. Yeah, that was great. They're always gonna have that positive impression to really build that relationship. But another way, if we look at this, because there's there's seven total different formats for podcasts, the most popular as far as like what people are most engaged with is a solo or monologue where a person is just talking directly to the listener, right? It's just one on one. The second would be the conversational kind of round table, conversational. The guest is still a part of it. And then. After that you would have like interview and you had have hybrids where it could be, you know, like our podcast, we will do like a little a solo monologue narration in between interview clips to kind of give it a hybrid feel. But if you're worried about like, listen, I'm not Joe Rogan, like, I'm not even Brad Larsen, like I've never been on stage. I don't know how to like talk. I don't know how to do this. This is nerve wracking. This is what I tell people. It's, you know, keep it simple, stupid, right? Just keep it simple. Answer one question per episode. That's it. Don't try and do anything more than that, because you're right. I come from the world of Newstalk radio where we had to prep like it was like three hours for every one hour.
Matt Tompkins: You were on air. Yeah. Don't take that approach. You're not hosting a Newstalk show. You're not on, you know, MSNBC or Fox News. You're not doing you're not hosting a show like that. All you need to do is answer one question, because the truth is, your listener, they most of the time they walk away only remembering one thing from your show. So if you want them to take away one thing, just answer a real question. And how do you find out what that question is? Well, we use a lot of tools to find out, like what people are asking Google. But some free tools like answer the public is one. Neil Patel. This is a free website where you can just punch in a topic like, say, property management or San Antonio, where you're based out of Brad or Omaha where we're based, based out of, and it'll show you what are the questions people are asking about that. And you can just pick one and you just answer it. Don't worry about the length. You know, it could be five minutes, it could be ten minutes, it could be 15 or 20 or more. But just answer that question. Trust me, even in a 5 to 10 minute episode, you could still pull 10 to 20 of these little vertical shorts if they only need to be 15 second soundbites. Basically, you know, one thing that.
Brad Larsen: One thing that came to mind. One thing that came to mind is, you know, you've seen me do this, too. When we start talking to a particular person and we start doing, you know, five, ten, 20 minutes of pre-show, I ask them, Hey, how are you doing? You know, Good to meet you. I'm Brad. You know you're so-and-so. And tell me what you do a little bit. And then they start going on and on and on and I put the hand up. You've seen me do that all kinds of times. I put the hand up. Stop, stop, stop. Save it for the show because that's magic. I don't want you to I don't want to make you repeat yourself. So let's just, you know, let's do two minutes of pre-show to say hello to each other, and let's just start recording. And I'm telling people that because I don't want them to get wrapped around of like this prep time, like you just mentioned it with talk radio and it's a 3 to 1 ratio. It's really not that difficult. You can do some pretty good content in a serious 60 minute window like you and I jumped on at 1:00 Central Time and we'll be far done by 2:00 Central Time and have a great potential episode to come out of this with a lot of content. The other thing I wanted to ask you as a podcast producer, tell me who your ideal client is.
Matt Tompkins: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And I want to ask you after this, I have another question I want to ask you because I think you're best suited to answer as well. As far as our best, our ideal client. This isn't just limited to podcasts. I mean, we help clients with marketing services. I mean, we're a content marketing agency. That's kind of what we do, podcasting and our content in a box product line, if you will, is is really our kind of bread and butter. But we have other services and I think across the board it's it's unanimously a client who is willing to learn and invest in their own success because that's the one thing we can't really control. Like, I can't control how passionate you truly are about wanting to be successful however you define your success. You know, it could be more money, it could be achievements, it could be growing your business. But I can't control your passion and your commitment to that because I'm not going to sugarcoat it. This takes work. It takes commitment. You have to have discipline. That discipline is probably the hardest thing. I think, for any entrepreneur, because that's really the difference maker. It's like everybody can put in all the effort in the world for a few days or a week, but can you do it day in and day out, week in and week out for years to really achieve the goals you set you want to achieve? So I would say those who are willing to learn, those who are willing to invest in in themselves and their business and the process, because we will give you every tool to make you a success.
Matt Tompkins: And we have so many tools with especially with available today, to make that even a higher like it's a ridiculously higher likelihood today than it was even 2 or 3 years ago, just based on what we have available. But we can't control how committed you are to it, you know, and so we have some people come in like, well, I don't I don't know. And if it let's try it for a month and let's see. It's like you got to you got to commit to it. And you know, and if you commit to it, we're going to be committed to it. And think to encourage that commitment is my question for you, because I'm talking about some of the numbers we see with our clients. And they can just sound like stats and analytics and we talk about, you know, building and nurturing these relationships and how you can turn it into lead gen revenue for your company. But why don't you share some of your real world like practical wins that came straight from the podcast. You know, I mean, I know you mentioned the Facebook group. You've got your property management Mastermind conference that didn't come out of the podcast but kind of runs parallel to it. And the Facebook group, they all kind of support each other. But what are some big wins you've seen that you can share with people from your podcast?
Brad Larsen: Well, that's a great question and let's kind of dwell on that. So one of the things is it makes you a subject matter expert in your field because you're learning more of what's going on in your industry just by those discovery calls, just by having your radar up, looking around, just by seeing new vendors that might come in to your particular industry and you interview them and you find out what's going on and they're going to turn you on to something else. So it does make you learn more about your particular industry. And mine just happens to be property management. I'm sure if you applied this to any other industry at the same thing, a new product, a new service, a new vendor, a new support person will come along, a new statistic will come out. That's going to be a new policy that's going to come out. So it does make you pay attention. And when you talk to these guests or even do a monologue, you're going to learn something from them. So that's been one of the big pieces I think that's come out of it. Not to mention, okay, there's a opportunities to monetize it. I don't want to, you know, gloss over that. If you have a good enough show and you have a decent enough following, you could potentially get sponsors and they could pay for your show either monthly or commercial sponsorship or something along those lines. I mean, I don't here's one thing I probably have made a mistake upon is don't push it like other podcasts. Hey everybody, make sure you like my show and give me a five star review every 10s and be sure and smash that like button.
Brad Larsen: You know, don't don't do that because it just seems like as soon as you hear that they're not trying to put out good content, they're not trying to be, you know, good conversationalists, They're just really trying to build a following for whatever reason. And I've never taken that stance. And starting the Facebook group, for example, the property management mastermind Facebook group, now it's over 11,000 members in that group and it should be 25,000. We have seriously turned away half the people that apply for that group because they're just they're not into the property management world. You know, they're vendors trying to sell you something. They're ghosts. I mean, that's just fakeness. That's turned into some other good things. You know, we got an opportunity to do a conference that we started that four years ago, and we started doing the Property Management Mastermind conference. And that's been a good addition to the things that we do in the podcasting world. But all that's just been a side gig for me. At the end of the day, I own a property management company. That's my main thing and it augments what we do just by being able to talk about it. I've been a big proponent that if you're going to do this as any sort of industry to try to make it hyper local, and maybe you could hone in on that a bit more than me with stats and other things that could benefit them because mine is more of a national international type of a interview system, a podcast, if you will. But I think there's a lot of benefit to super, super hyper local niche. I want you to elaborate on that.
Matt Tompkins: Yeah, and you're absolutely spot on with that. In fact, I'll broaden it just a second and say you need to be specific with your show. You want to be specific. So when you are hyper local, you're just being specific to a particular market. And the reason you want to be specific is because the second you try to try to be for everyone or appeal to anyone, you're going to resonate deeply with no one. You're not going to have a deep connection. They're not going to feel like, man, this show is 1 in 1,000,000. It's just for me, like, I feel like this podcast was made just for me. Like, how do they know? How do they tap into my brain, you know? And that's what you want because podcast listeners, they listen to 6 to 8 podcast or subscribe to 6 to 8 per week. So how are you going to crack into that regular rotation? Well, you need to prove like you're saying, you're not selling things, you're being authentic, you're staying true. You genuinely want to provide something of true value in every episode to your listener. And how you really resonate is do what you said. You get specific. And I encourage people like think this is a saying in real estate. It should be true everywhere. Own your own backyard. It's shocking to me. Like when we started looking at doing our own podcast and it was originally called the Omaha Podcast and it was because we were in Omaha, Nebraska, and it was kind of a it was kind of a side hustle effect where we're like, Well, if people who are searching for Omaha podcasts like they want to do a show, a podcast with Omaha, they can find us, we'll show up, which we did so for SEO, for search engine results.
Matt Tompkins: It worked. But I looked at it this way People who have questioned it and they're like, Why would you narrow it to just, Oh, hold on a second. Like Omaha, we're like market 72, something like that. There's still over a million people in the surrounding areas. All the Council Bluffs, Iowa, every little suburb and city that's connected around here, it's over a million people. So let's say I can reach 1% of that million in each episode. That would be incredible. You know what? If I could just reach 100 people in my own market and let's say I do resonate deeply with them because I'm being specific and hyper local, and let's say half of those become turn into new clients. We would hit our annual goals like that mean it would mean how many new clients do you need? Do you want to add to your business every year? And then translate that to listeners? How can you make a show just for that specific person in your local market? Let's say, Hey, I want to add two two new people coming to my shop every month, okay, 24 new recurring customers every year. So if you make this a local specific show that is targeting those specific people, it doesn't matter if you have 25, 50, 100 or 10,000 listeners or downloads every episode. You really just need to resonate really with those 24 people that turn into customers. So it goes counterintuitive to how we think because we think I want the biggest audience, I want to be for everybody.
Matt Tompkins: And even with businesses, we coach them. Who's your client? Who's your ideal client? Well, everybody, it's your your client is your ideal client is not everybody. That's impossible. Everybody on planet Earth can't be your client. Let's narrow it down. Let's get specific and start local. And I know you've done that with like the San Antonio Invest in San Antonio podcast and a lot of other podcasts are seeing that. The last thing I'll add here with this is that it is much easier to own a smaller market when it comes to things like search engine optimization or showing up in Google searches, which your podcast will help you. Do they count in those search results? It's much easier to win that local game because most local businesses aren't even aware of, let alone considering or then executing effectively any type of organic SEO strategy. So that is an opportunity for you right out of the gate. Nationally, it's going to be very, very hard. It's going to be hard to own property management nationally because there are a lot of people competing for that nationally for those those keywords, those phrases. Locally, though, it's a different story. And, you know, politicians and politics have caught on to this. Now they're doing organic local SEO for elections because there just isn't that competition. Competition. What would you see? Do you see other future opportunities for podcasting and for content marketing like this, really, that you think that you see the the industry kind of trending towards here?
Brad Larsen: Good question. I mean, you could you could argue that again, we talked about the shorts again as being part of the wave of the next big thing. You know, there's some opportunities there that we may not even realize are coming up. And I know that's very squishy to say. It's not a clear answer, but I think just doing what you're doing now, something's going to fall in your lap. And I guess that's the point I'm trying to make. There's been a lot of opportunities that have fallen in my lap just out of blue sky, just because I have put out a podcast since 2017. And you know about some of them, we've talked through them and some people nobody knows about. And it's just I don't consider it to be like a giant influencer. But if you put that content out and some people absorb it and take it in and digest it, you never know what's going to happen with that. You never know the you never know the big client that's going to come seek you out. You never know the new opportunity that falls in your lap. So you're better off to put it out there than not. Yeah. And I know that seems like a lot of effort to to never see a clear return, but you just never know what's going to happen. And I think that's it's a good thing to put out the information that's that needs to be heard and something's going to happen. That's, you know, it's all karma. It's all going to come around.
Matt Tompkins: Like, think of it this way, like because brand awareness, branding, it is hard to define because it's not quantifiable. Like I can't see how many people clicked and then purchased on my website necessarily from based on how many videos I got. And you could say, Well, my videos get a lot of views, but I don't really know. Is that translating to qualified leads and sales? It's hard to quantify it like you're saying, but I would look at it this way. When you are posting these daily videos, when you're posting this content, when you have established a genuine, authentic place in this person's life, this ideal client's life, your prospects life, and you're not selling them on anything, you're just helping them. You're giving them something of true value in every video and every podcast episode. Now imagine how easy it's going to be when you actually do ask them for the sale. You know, how are they going to say yes to you? Or somebody who just comes out of the gate selling, selling, selling. And that's what brand awareness really does. We see this and like I know our guys were kind of annoyed with me when we started doing it, but I said, Listen, I want to do two videos per day, two vertical video shorts, pull some from our podcast, we'll do some original.
Matt Tompkins: And we started doing it every day and we've been doing it for a couple of months now. In the beginning it's like, Man, man, this is a lot of content we're putting out. Like, how is this going to generate revenue? And sure enough, we had three clients, two of which have signed with us that have added at least, oh, I would say a 25% boost to our annual net revenue just in those two clients and all three of them. And the other one we're still in talks with, all three of them came purely because of the podcast, because they saw that they saw me as an authority, they wanted to talk. And then when we have these meetings with them, there's not a lot of I don't have to sell myself. They already, in their mind, have the impression and they believe that you are credible, you are an authority, and they trust you. And that is really what we're getting at with all this building trust with people so that you can have a business relationship with them. And all of this content is how you establish and build trust. You can't build trust with a pay per click Google ad campaign alone, right?
Brad Larsen: Well, to give you a quick endorsement, I would highly recommend anybody to talk to you about what kind of marketing assistance you can offer them through websites, through anything else that you're doing with podcasting or shorts or stuff like that. I highly recommend what you all are doing for the listeners. You probably want to leave your information real quick just so you can just going to have that and reach out to you.
Matt Tompkins: Yeah, absolutely. And go to the content. Box.com The content Box.com And and there's a link at the top of the home page. You can't miss it. It just says content in a box. And that's what we have packaged together for, for clients. It, it checks off every box for any small business, no matter your industry, your marketing needs. And we have within that content in a box all of our case studies that I mentioned today. So you can see real stories, TikTok, YouTube, you can see the real world impact, not after a year or two years. In the first 30 days, we limited every single case study to just the first 30 days after implementation. So content in a box. We have all the prices transparent about everything and we will actually have, if you want to book a free strategy call where we'll give you a free marketing audit, we'll review your website, look at what you're doing, help you see the opportunities and give you topic research for all those questions. You know, we talked about like, what questions do I answer? We'll give you all of that research for your market for free, which is a massive value just with scheduling a strategy call to talk with us. So the content box.com is where I'd tell people to go get started.
Brad Larsen: Awesome. Great stuff.
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