Let's face it if you're a brand in today's day and age chances are you're not driving as much organic traffic as you once were or as you want to be...
But why is that?
The content creation game has changed throughout the years and most brands cant seem to keep up with those changes so they rely so heavily on paid ads to keep the traffic coming in.
Well this episode is gonna change the way you think. We've been watching Leo Olsson crush it for the different brands he's been working with for the past couple years. He's been responsible for increasing his companies social following organically up to the hundreds of thousands of followers.
In this episode we talk about two critical things for brands to understand in 2024:
This is a must listen to episode. If we want to win in 2024, we have to find ways to drive more organic traffic to our website. Content creation is a massive vehicle to do that. Go give it a listen.
Please connect with Trevor on social media. You can find him anywhere @thetrevorcrump
Let's face it if you're a brand in today's day and age chances are you're not driving as much organic traffic as you once were or as you want to be...
But why is that?
The content creation game has changed throughout the years and most brands cant seem to keep up with those changes so they rely so heavily on paid ads to keep the traffic coming in.
Well this episode is gonna change the way you think. We've been watching Leo Olsson crush it for the different brands he's been working with for the past couple years. He's been responsible for increasing his companies social following organically up to the hundreds of thousands of followers.
In this episode we talk about two critical things for brands to understand in 2024:
This is a must listen to episode. If we want to win in 2024, we have to find ways to drive more organic traffic to our website. Content creation is a massive vehicle to do that. Go give it a listen.
Please connect with Trevor on social media. You can find him anywhere @thetrevorcrump
Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the unstoppable marketer podcast. With me, as always, is my wonderful co-host over here, mark Goldhart. Mark, what's going on, my friend?
Speaker 2:Oh, just live in life, man. Just getting ready for the Christmas holidays, just went and swapped out my car for a different car.
Speaker 1:So oh, you did, I did. Yeah, you did it officially.
Speaker 2:I went with a four-runner.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:We had a Wagoneer. The Wagoneer was great, but you know the model that we got, I mean, I don't know the Wagoneer is great, but it wasn't super practical for what we wanted. And we're three, four or five people now, so three, three half people, two full people, Three children under the ages of eight. Yeah, that's another way to say it. There you go.
Speaker 1:That's what. That's what he means by half people, half people, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay so yeah, man, it's good we got the four-runner. Four-runner is great. Just got my roof rack installed and going to go on some Christmas adventures down in the mountains in a little place called Enterprise.
Speaker 1:So Nice Get ready for ski season.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, you know, and Christmas is all about stories, the stories you make and the stories you tell.
Speaker 1:The stories you create. I guess right, that's right.
Speaker 1:I guess that's what you mean by you say stories you make. There you go Stories you make. Well, dude, I'm really excited about today's episode, so let me give you a little before I introduce our guests today. I'm going to give you a little like of my creepy stocking background on how we got this guest here.
Speaker 1:Okay, so about like 18 months ago to two years ago, I came across this brand, this cereal company that was creating content, and they were creating content in a way that I had, like very few brands I had seen create content, like you know, we're so used to nowadays brands like not being unless you're a Gen Z brand like you, you're not used to seeing people get in front of the camera and talk and tell stories about the business that might not have anything to do with the product and just just talking about what they're doing as a company and documenting. And I thought it was super interesting and super refreshing, and so I started following this brand and recognize that it was. You know, it was actually being led by somebody who's in charge of content, and this person his name was is Leo Olson, and so I started following Leo. He had a personal brand and just kind of fell in love with the content he was creating and actually used his content and what these, what he was doing for these, the brands he was working for, as references to our own clients, to people who I was consulting with, talking to like, hey, this is a North Star of what you should be looking at from a content creation. And so we've got Leo Olson, who is now the head of content for a really fun party game company.
Speaker 1:Leo, you might want to jump in and say no, we are actually this, but, like, they create really unique fun party games and sell them online. It's called Lucky Egg, based out of the UK and in London, and so I've been. I've been like Leo's been on my radar for about 18 months. We started talking, leo, what? Maybe six, eight months ago finally kind of got schedules in line and and now here we are. So, Leo, welcome, it's good to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me on Party games. Am I right? Party?
Speaker 3:games, Party games. Board game sounds a bit too boring for for what we do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I was telling, I was telling my wife like party game? No, I said board games, and she's like so, like a monopoly, and I'm like no, no, no Party games.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're quite, we're quite anti monopoly in the Lucky Egg office. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1:So, dude, let's. I mean, I have a ton of questions that I want to jump into from a content creation perspective, but before we do that, let's just take a few minutes and tell the audience a little bit about you how you got started in this content creation game, what you've done personally and now what you're doing with Lucky Egg.
Speaker 3:Sure, I guess the best place to start is, like a lot of people of of my, my age, of the kind of Gen Z group, is when I was 10, I had a YouTube channel where I made terrible, terrible videos and I stuck with it for a little bit. I was really trying to be the next Marquez Brownlee. I was really into the tech YouTuber space and did end up, you know, reaching out to brands. I would send my little cold outreach emails saying, hey, I only have 500 subscribers, but I think I'd bring that unique youth perspective that you need and I get, get brands to send me, you know, the most random Bluetooth headphones and this, and that I kept up with that until I was about 14. And then I stepped away from from content and started to try and be a bit more normal, as most, most teenagers do.
Speaker 3:And then, around 2020, when COVID hit, I found myself with a lot of time and with all that time I decided to download TikTok, which I think was something that, for a long time, a lot of people were quite against doing, and I was one of those people. I felt like it was a waste of time, but I found myself sucked into swiping and spending hours watching videos and eventually I decided to to post and I think, as with a lot of things, once you take that first step in, I really decided to be frank. I was quite concerned with how I was going to look at school and I thought, if, if I do this and I don't get a load of followers, it's it's just quite sad and a waste of time. So I decided to commit quite hardcore, posted a lot and fast forward to two years later. I had about 300,000 followers on TikTok. At that time I was studying in London. I'd moved away from Jersey, which is this tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean where I grew up.
Speaker 2:The original Jersey, not the new Jersey.
Speaker 3:The original Jersey. The original Jersey. Original Jersey.
Speaker 1:It exists, I didn't even know.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, it's. I mean, if you ever have a weekend, I'd go. I wouldn't go for much longer. There's not much to do.
Speaker 3:But yeah look, I found myself a university and I think, like a lot of people my age, I felt that it was a bit of a waste of time and it was a bit of a waste of money, and so I decided to go looking for jobs. I thought it would be far easier to find a job as a college dropout than it was. It was quite hard, especially to find something that I was interested in. So after a few weeks of getting no real responses, I just got a load of rejections. I applied for everything from solar panel sales to recruitment.
Speaker 3:I did it all and I started to just go for a Tim Ferriss cold outreach approach of messaging founders on LinkedIn saying hey, my name is Leo, I recently left university, I'm trying to find a job and I'm documenting that process on my social media accounts. I would love to jump on a call with you to ask you a few questions about your, your dream candidate, so I can educate my audience and also, hopefully, give you a free platform to promote your company. And the third person that I sent a message to was the founder of Krispy Fancy, the co-founder. They took a chance on me. They gave me a massive opportunity. I went there and did, hopefully, a pretty good job for about nine months and then I subsequently moved on to Lucky Egg, which is the company I'm at now.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of the beginning to end. I feel I hopefully covered most of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's perfect, man. Quick question so you were studying at the university. Were you studying marketing and business? Is that why you felt like it was a waste of time? Or what were you studying and what made you feel like that wasn't the path for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I I've always been quite a committed person, I think so when I decided that I wanted to go to university, I wanted to go somewhere with prestige, and so I went to the London School of Economics and studied international relations, which isn't the most practical degree, but I felt quite frankly that doing a marketing degree or the more practical university degrees that exist, I just didn't see the point. But I did maybe see the appeal in trying to get that, that badge of approval from kind of the establishment of academia, I did come to the conclusion that that was, that was not for me.
Speaker 2:How did your parents take it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it they. I think by most accounts they took it really well. My mum was concerned with. I think university is a really great place where you get the privilege of making a lot of mistakes in a low stakes environment and I think a lot of people doing a lot do a lot of growing up there. So I think she was maybe a bit concerned with the fact that I was going to jump head first into the real world and never have this time to form as a person. But she was, broad strokes, pretty approving. My dad was not very happy and then when I told him that I was going to get a job and I was going to pay for everything myself, he didn't seem to mind that much.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, yeah, I'm curious about that Because in here in the United States there's definitely a like, there's definitely a shift in how people are thinking about like. You know, you guys call it university there, we call it college here, right, but like there's definitely a shift of people starting to be a little bit more open minded to the fact that maybe it's not mission critical, but had I when I was I mean, I'm 35 now had I, when I was like in my 20s, like 20, 21 or whatever you know going to college and told my dad that I was going to drop out, he would have like flipped his lid and my mom would have been so disappointed in me as well. You know, so it's it's. Is that? Is that a very similar? Is it pretty similar out there? How?
Speaker 3:people feel about you For sure, I think, look, there are definitely generational perceptions that are changing. I do also think there was maybe I definitely came to my parents with a plan of action. I think university, and I think what a lot of people say you know, take, like Gary Vaynerchuk will say, if you don't know what you want to do and your parents are going to pay for it, go to university and figure out what you want to do with your life, like that's a great use of your time. For me, I guess the reason that I wanted to leave was I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in content, I wanted to work in marketing, and so therefore, I don't think it was super hard for them to get on board with the idea that I was just going to commit my time to something else.
Speaker 3:It wasn't like I was going to go, nor that there's anything wrong with this, but I wasn't going to go to Bali and just kind of hang out for 12 months.
Speaker 2:So then you jump into this world where you now go back to your original roots of storytelling and making content and posting it. Now you're documenting this journey of hey, I'm trying to get a job, I'm trying to break into business and into this space. What were some of the lessons you learned in those early days when you were reaching out about how to catch people's attention and make yourself look like a worthy bet for these businesses?
Speaker 3:Sure, I think I guess I had a massive advantage compared to most people in the, at least for the specific job that I wanted, which at the time I don't think quite exists in the way that it does now. The role of the in-house content creator, whether that's on the paid or the organic side, wasn't as much of a thing two years ago as it is now. Now it feels like every startup wants this person and they're looking for it. Then it was like a way harder sell because people were getting annoyed at me that I couldn't run ads on Meta or that I wasn't a media buyer. I did have this portfolio through my social channels of this is a body of work that I've done.
Speaker 3:I have the ability to tell stories in this way, if you want content that focuses around story and a narrative, and my thing, I think, has always just been selling people rather than the product and going with that approach. First, if the brands were interested in that, I felt that the writing was kind of on the wall in terms of my ability to do so. Then, capturing their attention, there's the Tim Ferriss cold email template, which I just think is a great place to start of opening line. This message will take X amount of seconds to read. I think that's really beneficial, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, where people actually have a tendency to read their messages and be intrigued. I think, with an opening message that cuts the chase and shows that you respect people's time, and then saying here's my portfolio of work, here's what I think I could do for you, how can we move forward from here? I think it's just a case of respect and showing why you're worth their time, which is really obvious advice, but maybe not so obvious at the time. Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you nailed it on the head, like two years ago. Listen, I was a CMO of a big brand in 2020. I know that's three years ago, but it was really challenging for me as a CMO back then, because paid media was still in the world, where it was a lot easier to track attribution when you spent money. It was a little easier to win on paid social and Meta back in 2020. There wasn't a TikTok. Tiktok was around, but the attention that TikTok was gaining was not where it is today, meaning that TikTok came into play and actually started hurting Meta performance because people started spending more time on TikTok than they were on Instagram. You're totally right.
Speaker 1:2020, 2021, even into beginning parts of 2022, it was really challenging as business owners or CMOs or whatever to say, hey, if you don't have a secondary skill, it's hard for me to justify paying a content creator. I need you to be an email marketer or a media buyer or a social media strategist as well as creating content. I very much fell into that trap. The problem, though, is there still is a lot of people I would actually say you're right that there's a lot more brands who are more susceptible to hiring somebody and bringing somebody 100% in-house and paying them a good salary. We're definitely more susceptible to that. What kind of advice do you have for brands when it comes to hiring good talent like you? What advice do you have for them?
Speaker 3:Sure, I think you definitely touched on something that I've noticed lately in talking to founders that this notion of brand equity and building brand equity has become way more of a hot topic. I think a founder who starts a company now in his or her mid-20s they're a lot more likely to push for wanting their brand to be cool and wanting it to have this buzz, rather than going straight into and maybe this is sometimes for the worse going straight into the economics and the numbers and the paid media side of things. I think it's really good that founders now have flipped slightly in their perspective. To go more for a red bull is a classic example of what would seem to be inefficient marketing but in the long term, really plays out correctly. To find the people who do that, I think, is, interestingly, still incredibly difficult, because it often involves finding someone at the early stages of their powers. If you will, you need to find someone who is quite good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, literally, if they're really that good, why would they come and work for you and why wouldn't they do it for themselves? What's the incentive? I think there's that side of things of just pure practical. I tell you to find someone who maybe isn't as good as you want them to be and you make a work ethic higher rather than a skills higher. Classic advice In the more short-term tactics, what I would recommend is going out and finding a film student or someone who is really into video production, who cannot make a good social media video, because if you give them the time and the patience to learn the format, those technical skills I feel are way harder to teach and learning.
Speaker 3:Storytelling can be done just by exposure to good content. Giving them the work that I have done, the work that brands like. There's a toothpick brand called Pickham whose work I really admire. There's also Midday Squares, who are a functional chocolate company in Canada. Their work is really good Showing them these brands who have done storytelling really well. I feel with someone with the right technical ability, they can be shaped to do the same thing. Quite frankly, a lot of brands do it through just straight-up copying scripts and changing words that works. I personally wouldn't want to do that, but each to their own as a starting point.
Speaker 1:What do you think some I love what you said. I think those are really good practical tips, because that's what I've. The conversations I have with people are always like, yeah, we know we need to hire somebody like a Leo Olson, but how do we find them? How do we convince them to come work for us when they could be making a lot more money working for themselves? Or a lot of people like you start to consult as well, not only your personal brand, but you do that kind of stuff. I like these tips about trying to find people early and take a chance on people early. What kind of recommendations do you have for brands to get those people to stick around? Let's say the brand develops a content creator or the content creator is developed working for that brand and they recognize what kind of opportunities they have. What do brands need to do to say, hey, stay with us.
Speaker 3:I would probably say it's no different to how you get any other talented employee to stick around. It's your basic things of giving them skin in the game, making sure that they feel valued and compensated. But beyond that, I think what's really important is people who come from an analytical background often struggle to give creatives the rope that they need and the trust that some days they're just not going to have it. That's the nature of the game, that's how it goes, and you need to be okay with that because it's not, in my opinion, 100%. Content is about the reps, but not quite in the same way that someone who does sales has their job. There is going to be a certain level of the amount of effort you put in on the microbe.
Speaker 3:On a day to day I might put 10 hours into one video and five hours into another, and the video that I put five hours in to might do way better Over the long term. Sure, you need someone who turns up and works hard, but accepting that, I think, is really important and it's been the reason that I've had a far better experience at Lucky Egg than where I worked previously has just been this level of trust and accepting, maybe, that these people, these talented individuals, so long as they're doing their job and getting the work done Monday through Friday, they can do whatever they want outside of those hours, if they want to work on their own stuff, if they want to consult for people. That's the cost of getting them to the table, I feel.
Speaker 2:So here's a question for you, because you said it shouldn't really matter exactly the hours that this creative person is putting in, and you said you know the 10 hour video versus the five hour. I know that's not like exact science, but you're just giving an example. But I do think that there's a valuable point to be made about creatives, and that's creatives often perform the best when there's certain constraints put around what they're working on, and oftentimes it could be a time constraint or it's a resource constraint, and that's really where their creativity shows up to at its full strength. I'd love to hear from you about create, creating videos and constraints, and how do you fit that in your work to make the most out of what you have.
Speaker 3:Sure, I guess, from the business side of things, which is probably what people are most interested in, the advantage of having to sell a product a and me representing someone else's brand be, even if I'm the face of it, is the.
Speaker 3:No longer am I as concerned with the artistry of the thing I'm doing, because it's not really representative of me as a person, which is something that you have happened when you're doing any personal brand or any personal video, et cetera.
Speaker 3:So I think the fact that I come in to work on a Monday and I think, okay, we have this new product that's coming out, I want to promote it in an organic way and I don't care if the video looks sexy, I just want to make sure that it performs well, that's really freeing as a creative, because I think oftentimes we fall into this really snobby mindset of if I think it's good, everyone else is just wrong, and that's not really the approach to be successful in your lifetime. Maybe, if you want to be remembered a hundred years down the line like cool, go with that. But I think to be practical and to try and perform well in your career, you have to let go of that snobbery and that perhaps is a good constraint to have of just I don't care how cool I think the video is, it just needs to perform well. It just needs to promote the product. At the end of the day, Love that.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. One thing that I wanted to ask you was, jumping kind of back into this question around how can brands find people like you? Another thing I wanted to toss out there to let brands understand what we mean by, like Leo said, something like skin in the game. You know, when it comes to like, like, give them. So, like you said, a couple things right, it's like give them creative freedom, which is kind of what we just talked about. Give them the freedom to have a personal brand. Don't say, hey, the moment you come here, you can't keep working on this stuff, you don't have opportunities to make money there or whatever. You got to give these creative some, some, some freedom, some creative freedom outside of work as well. But then there's also skin in the game, which can mean two things, which is two things, which is money as well as potential, like pieces and shares of a company. So there's a company out there.
Speaker 1:I just pulled up this tweet that I saw back in. I think it was like back in September. Have you ever heard of a brand called Ridge Wallets? So Ridge Wallets is a nine figure business and the founder the founder tweeted this out and he said this I'm offering a million dollar contract to a content creator to come in house at Ridge. What does this mean? What's the catch and how do I apply? And he breaks down what that means. That it's like. You know, I think, mark, what was it like? A four year contract come to it, so it's like $250,000 a year. He talks about equity in the company. You know, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's like if you find the right content creator and not saying that like, if you're a small business, you might not be able to afford $250,000 a year. You know, like, but you have to think. I think you have what. What I'm hearing from you, what I'm seeing from that tweet is like you have to think a little bit bigger. And and the content creator hire is almost like the new media buyer hire. So back in 2018, it was like how do I get an in-house media buyer who can crush it for me? You know, that was the. That was like, that was the thought and the goal and um, and now it's it's changing a little bit. It's it's how do we get this con like this organic content creator, to come in here and you have to pay them um, accordingly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And even for those smaller businesses, I think, going back to Red Bull that was mentioned earlier, this, this is a good example of they don't have a face of the brand, but they've been working with you know, we can call them content creators, but athletes for a very long time, right? So they've been working with this army of athletes to promote their brand and guess what they also were doing for a long time. And I get their business models different. Energy drinks and margins are quite different than other businesses. But man, I remember their gorilla marketing back in the day they had the Red Bull girls I don't know if they were over there in the UK, leo, but on every college campus before your time.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, that's, that's definitely before his Leo, how old are you? Can we ask that? Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm, yeah way before your time then.
Speaker 2:But the Red Bull girls man, they would drive around in mini coopers and just hand out Red Bulls at events in cities. So we had some here in Salt Lake City. I think they were in kind of every major city and college campus area just going around handing out Red Bulls.
Speaker 1:Yeah, They'd be around like college campuses, ski resorts, you know like kind of these, these more extreme, and like I don't know if that had a positive ROI.
Speaker 2:I have no idea. But what I do know is that Red Bull was just seen everywhere and over time, you know, they became the de facto energy drink for for quite a while and I think they've been a little dethroned a little bit by Monster and some others. But but overall, I think that the message here is you can work with more people. It's just if your incentives are aligned, and I think the incentives are. There's monetary incentives and there's also mission based incentives. You know, I think a lot of athletes jived well with uh, with Red Bull, because of what it represented and how it was also amplifying extreme sports at that time. So I'd love to hear what you think about that, leo, of how these smaller businesses can reach out and work with uh different kinds of influencers maybe not one full time, but how can they reach out and work with people and align their incentives to to get the most out of it?
Speaker 3:Sure. So I think one thing that was interesting was talking about the Red Bull girls and questioning the ROI, and from that I guess what I want to bring up with the content creators is when you hire someone in house and let's say they're going to focus on organic, obviously the advantage is is that if they make good stuff, you can run that as paid and your CPMs are going to be way better. It's just all around a way smarter move. But assuming you were just going to get them in for organic, the only quote unquote spend you have on marketing is that person's salary and the money that you're spending on the content that creating. And contrary to paid media which I think oftentimes when you see an ad, it's very rare that you see an ad that makes you genuinely connect with the brand or even have a positive impression of the brand.
Speaker 3:But when you have a content creator who you're paying to produce content and maybe not get the same level of exposure, chances are that exposure when you're implementing this kind of storytelling, this narrative, building, this brand building, people are going to be left with this positive brand consciousness and the way in which they think about the brand is all around going to be good. You're going to be that energy drinks company, you're going to be that party games company, the one that people know which brand you mean. So I think first off is just changing that perception with a small company of, yes, you might get less attention and, yes, that attention might not translate to sales instantaneously, but the perception of your company is this entirely different ballgame. When you're playing with organic in a way that I think is just a way better long term play In terms of then being a small company and getting that person in the door. I guess it's just about offering them creative freedom, like we talked about, but genuine, practical. I have a helicopter. Hopefully you can't hear that.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's your helicopter.
Speaker 3:Genuine, like that's my helicopter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, get into content, guys, but genuine practical enthusiasm.
Speaker 3:You need a founder who's willing to be in the videos.
Speaker 3:I, I strongly believe that if you don't like being on camera, tough, like it's time to buckle up and maybe it's just you smile, maybe you just say one or two things that you get told to say.
Speaker 3:But having that interplay of this is my boss, this is my CMO, this is Gary who works opposite me, having that kind of wholesome office vibe, I think, is what people are becoming really interested in, in seeing these companies that appear and obviously there's a certain creative license and embellishment, but appear to be different to any place that anyone has ever worked. It's like the inverse of the office, like the show is kind of what you're aiming for. So, having having a founder or a team who are enthusiastic about being in the content and I think that also somewhat depends on getting someone in who has that passion but, yeah, giving them that enthusiasm and parting with the perception that you're going to get less impressions than you would on page, like maybe you do, maybe you get more, but the attention is all the more- Now, speaking of this, I want to ask a question.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should have asked at the beginning or just shouted it out, but how many views are you responsible for on TikTok?
Speaker 3:Views is tough. Views is tough. I guess I've always measured it a bit more in terms of followers because, one, it's way easier to do and two, the point of the kind of content I create and the kind of content I advocate is making videos that leave people interested in where this company is going to go and, more importantly, being invested in where the company is going to go. You want to build an engaged community of diehard fans. That's so much more important than a lot of brands who will have these opening founder story videos that reach five million people. That's great, but if you never touch or interact with that person again, I do think that's pretty pointless. Organic content, like the only way organic works is by having these repeated multiple touch points. So come, let's say Q for the Christmas season for some products, or January wellness, when people are getting into that for other products. You're going to be back of mind for when they're having that purchasing intention to actually go out and buy the products.
Speaker 2:I love that answer, but I do want to just shout out that if you go look up Leo Olson or you go look up his companies, there are tons of videos 500,000, one million, 1.5 million views I mean the engagement as well as through the roof, if you look at just views to engagement. So you're clearly great at what you do. And this is all about what you said. And I love what you said too, because I know it's not about all about just a view, because a view is an impression, essentially, right, it's a little more valuable than just an impression.
Speaker 2:But you want to drive action and in order to drive action, you have to create connection. And so for you I mean, the Brits have a long story and history of telling stories, right, some of the greatest storytellers in the history of the world come from England and the great UK, which you know. It took me a long while to even understand what the difference was between the UK and England and all of the countries. No idea, that's such an American thing to say, but it's true, I appreciate it. So. So, with you and storytelling, how do you get into the right mindset of saying, hey, I want to tell a story and I want to drive action and emotion through this story. I don't just want to throw something out there and get views, but it doesn't actually drive a connection.
Speaker 3:OK. So yeah, I guess, to touch on your point and just to give me some credibility if people wanted to take on the advice Lucky Egg in nine months with zero ads, bend, we did. We built an audience of 300,000 followers. That's been kind of my, my legacy at the company, and how you drive action, how you drive intention.
Speaker 3:I think there are a few things to look at. You talked about these great storytellers and I guess what's interesting is is I haven't really learned from any of them. I'm a classic YouTube kid. Casey Neistat is my idol, and what I always found really interesting about Casey's work is this idea that what is a really mundane task can be turned into this three act story and before anyone loses interest, that literally means there's a beginning, there's a middle and an end, or the way I always pitch it in terms of ticktoxes. You have the context, you have the conflict and you have the resolution, and that's how every video should look, because it means that you end the video hopefully feeling that something was achieved, and that thing that was achieved in an ideal scenario should still raise another problem that will be dealt with in a future video.
Speaker 3:So a great example of this might be a few months ago we were going to well, I wasn't going, but some of my team were going to the New York Toy Fair, which is a really big thing in the tabletop games and toys space, so the team was headed there. They had a bit of a shit show getting there. Their flight was cancelled. They were in the airport for 12 hours when they turned up at the fair, which is this really important place to meet with retail buyers, your targets, your Walmart. These are big orders that make or break the kind of business that we're in. They were very sleep deprived and to a normal company, that is just a series of shit show problems that you're going to tell your bros about and really it's something to complain about. But when you have content as a focus in the company, this was one of my best weeks of the year because the writing was there.
Speaker 3:It was super easy for me to craft this compelling story of this is my boss, luke. He's on his way to New York to try and save our company and our company and what is a pretty make or break situation because we need to get these buyers on board, oh no, as he's going there, his flight gets delayed. They're sleep deprived. Who knows if they're going to get there on time? There's all this drama.
Speaker 3:By the way, this is me, leo. These are the other people who work at the company. We're a really small company. You should really care about us. And then at the end, he gets there and you leave this question of who knows what's going to happen at the fair and whether they're going to meet with the right buyers. So that was a bit of a rant, but the point was, you set up these key things of why should you care about us as a company? Here is a problem we're currently facing, here's how we dealt with it and here's why there's still some turbulence to come in the future, which means you should really stick around, because there's lots more to see, and I guess that was like a really short attempt at how I make a video, but yeah, that's how you get people invested.
Speaker 2:No, that's phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I just want to touch on this because I think it's so interesting, because I think most laymen might look at TikTok and just think, hey, someone's going on there and just trying to make a funny video, right? Or they don't really think about what kind of frameworks are going into play for certain businesses or certain content creators and how they're driving that engagement. But what you just described is almost a typical sitcom episode. Right, it was this. Hey, this is the problem, this is what's going on. Here's the turbulence and, oh, guess what, there's a cliffhanger, because we don't really know where this ride is going. And I've never, I've never, ever thought about it that way in creating content for a brand. And that's what you did, is just invited somebody into your company, and that's what you did, is just invited somebody into your story, which is what captivates audiences, right, like they're in the story, they're invested in the people and the story. There's conflicts, there's things going on, and then there's cliffhangers to say, hey, come back next episode, because you don't know what's going to happen now.
Speaker 1:The cool thing about content creation this way is exactly what you said is like. Sometimes organic content creation doesn't have an immediate ROI, but what's amazing is what it does is it connects you to like. This type of content creation connects you to a brand in a way that paid ads just can't do it Right. So what I've recognized is every Christmas holiday, that's when we buy our games. It's like we buy games for our kids, we buy games for my parents, we buy games for us. You know we love, we love party games, and I have never been a fan of one particular brand that creates games. It's more like oh, that sounds like a fun game, right.
Speaker 1:But what's been interesting is, since I've been following Lucky Egg, you are now the Lucky Egg is now the brand that I'm going to buy for the Christmas season because of what you've done to get me into the story and how you've got me interested in the founders. You got me interested in what you're doing and so, yeah, like two, a couple of days ago I was looking at your website and I was on Amazon and I'm looking here to say, okay, these are probably the games I'm thinking I'm going to buy here. So I love what it can do. Content doesn't always have to have that direct ROI the way you want paid ads to have a direct ROI, right 100%.
Speaker 3:I think just on that and like as a sort of tying the two together, when I worked at Krispy Fancy I had a guy called Johnny who came and worked for me, who kind of worked under me, and I guess I mentored him in the ins and outs of making organic content. And what's really interesting is he now has a he has a supplements company where he sells, among other things, clear way I know that you're a big Sikh fan, right Similar vibe. And he found that after a certain point he was struggling with organic content. But when he took those same storytelling principles and started implementing that through TikTok spark, his you know, his his ad cost was so much lower than any other competitors because he's generating content that's actually interesting to people and then putting money behind it. It's kind of the perfect storm. So, yeah, you can hide these organic only creators and I would argue they're still going to give you a ton of upside on the paid side of things if you give them the opportunity, totally.
Speaker 1:Well, not only because of the content, like you said, that they can create and turn into ads, but also the one thing that I think a lot of brands forget about is the best way to retarget from a paid perspective is by video views, is in platform engagement Ever since iOS updates.
Speaker 1:It's very challenging to retarget people who came to your website, because you lose a lot of that with the privacy stuff that Apple has since put out over the last couple years, but you can retarget on anything that happens in platform. So the beauty of this organic kind of strategy that we're talking about here is you at Lucky Egg are building a retargeting audience that you do not have to pay for. Now you can start to run paid ads into that audience, and it's going to be significantly cheaper, because a lot of brands are running what's called prospecting and awareness campaigns and then they get into the retargeting campaigns and they close them over. Here You're doing this for free, so there's all this money. So that's the other piece that you didn't quite touch on there as well. So it's not only the content that you get to be able to utilize as ads, but it's the audience that you then get to market to. So that's the other killer part, leah. What's one of the biggest mistakes brands are making when it comes to creating content?
Speaker 3:It's probably going to sound somewhat harsh, but I do firmly believe that one. If you're not going to seriously try, then just don't. I think it's a waste of time. I think that the time of cheap wins is kind of over in this idea that you can just go viral on TikTok. That was really big about three years ago. I just don't think it's quite the case anymore.
Speaker 3:Beyond that, if you're a brand and you have decided that you want to pursue short form content let's say whether that's Instagram Reels, whether that's YouTube Shorts, snapchat Spotlight, et cetera I think one crucial thing is just to ignore every trend. I think it's a waste of time. I think it makes no sense at all to try and make your brand stand out by doing the same thing that every other person or brand is doing on the platform. It boggles my mind. And then, what do you do instead of that? I don't think necessarily it has to be Leo Olson tell a story. I don't think it has to be that. I just think it needs to be a unique format that you're prepared to do or think you could do for an extended period of time up to a year because it's probably going to take a while to find the right audience, and then you're going to want to test things and try things out. But yeah, I think tying yourself to trends is the wrong kind of constraint to adopt, and nothing frustrates me more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's funny because that's generally one of the number one things that brands will think of, right?
Speaker 2:I don't even think it's a brand issue, I think that's just a human problem, right? I mean, well, just going to sports, for example, I mean a sports coach always tells you to focus. Don't focus on the numbers, don't focus on your numbers. You've got to focus on these fundamentals or these extracurriculars that you're like, ok, cool, but I want 15 receptions in the next game or whatever the number is, and that's what you're trying to do. And it's like, well, that doesn't matter, right? Because if that's all you're focusing on, you're not going to put in the work on the fundamental principles that get you the numbers right.
Speaker 2:The numbers are just the byproduct of following the fundamentals, and I think every person, regardless of what you're working on, we tend to do that. We tend to focus too much on what the result is instead of focusing on hey, how do I follow these principles and these guidelines and then create it and make it my own thing? But you can't make it your own thing unless you know what the fundamentals are. And I think that's what Leo was saying earlier too, right, like he has the fundamentals down and even going all the way back to what you said about when you're hiring someone, if they have the fundamental technical skills. You can mold them into whatever they need to be for TikTok or whatever platform you're hiring them for. But it still comes back to do you have fundamentals and principles that you can mold into your own and then tell your own story with? Or are you just trying to throw your story out there and you're expecting everyone to care all the time?
Speaker 1:Leo, I got one last question, at least for my angle or for my end, as we kind of clumped to a close here. But one thing you said that I thought was I'm glad you said it is. You said founders, you've got to get over it and you need to be on camera as, look, I'm a millennial and putting a camera in front of my face, if I was 20 years old, I would have felt like somebody would have punched me. You know what I mean. If I would have walked around with a camera in my face, I really would have felt that way.
Speaker 1:And so a lot of millennials which, to be fair, just generally, that is what the majority of the businesses are are usually millennial owned. You definitely have people who are in the Gen Z space who are doing it and they crush it with content because they grew up with cameras being OK, right, where cameras. It was a big faux pas for Mark and I. What are some tips or pieces of advice you can give to people who don't want to be on camera or don't think that they need to be on camera?
Speaker 3:Cool. I think the first thing to say would probably be to leave any idea that some people are just naturally better than others. At the door, like when we're doing, let's say it's a one minute video and I'm talking for 40 seconds throughout. That will probably have been a seven minute take of me saying those lines 20 times each, and then I take my favorite take of the way I said that sentence. So, first off, I think anyone who does content will tell you that it's going to take many, many tries to find that little take that you think is good. Second off is the fact that all of our videos Lucky Egg and my personal videos I'm a writer first and foremost those videos are scripted word for word.
Speaker 3:There's no off the cuff, there's no natural improv, because I don't think I'm that naturally interesting or compelling. So I write that stuff down, I make sure it sounds good and I think that takes away this fear that you just turn on the camera and you suddenly have to be interesting. You don't. You take the time, you figure out what you're comfortable with, what you think is a good representation of you. You show it to other people, just as you would with a speech, a presentation, anything else, and then you sit down and you mess up many, many times and eventually you'll have a take that you're happy with. I don't think it's ever simple or super easy, and I think that's completely OK, and once you get past that, it's going to be far easier to do it because you have no.
Speaker 2:And then how do you advise people that get worried about the anxiety and the repercussions of a bad video or negative feedback?
Speaker 3:Well, in short form, video, no one's going to see if it's bad, so get over that. It's the simple answer.
Speaker 2:That is great.
Speaker 1:That's so good.
Speaker 2:And I mean people's attention spans are about seven seconds now too right. So if it's bad, it'll blow over by next week 100%, 100%.
Speaker 1:That's a good point. That's a good point, Mark. You have any other questions? I think this has been great.
Speaker 2:No, no, I think that was phenomenal. I had a really bad joke about English writers, but no, it's really terrible. It's only a good joke when it's only a good joke, if you like, but I missed the moment. I missed the moment to do it. I was going to say the great storytellers of England, like King James. I think the Bible's been read by a lot of people, but obviously King James didn't write the Bible, right? No, he didn't. He just made me smile. I got a smile out of.
Speaker 3:Leo, it was an unreal joke.
Speaker 2:It's a shame you weren't here, dude, we're just not as witty as the Brits are than American comedians.
Speaker 3:That feels like a strong generalization.
Speaker 2:I don't think it is, though If you, just think about.
Speaker 3:I think Andrew Schultz is quite witty, oh man, he is witty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're right, he's witty, but it's just different, right? I just think that British comedians tend to layer because there's a little more dryness to it. So they come up with these layers of intellectualizing their jokes in a way that I think that Americans don't. Americans are a little more just like in your face and have energy, which is its own skill, it's its own critique. It's not saying one's dumb and one's smart, it's just. I just think that the British way of humor like with the Monty Python sketches of the world right, there's just always so clever and interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, do you like the British version of the office more than the regular American version of the office? The first season, for sure yeah, the first season of.
Speaker 2:Well, there's only one season of the office in England, right? Or the British version? Is there two?
Speaker 3:I think there's two Far better than the first season of the American office, but okay this feels a bit like the as in, to take like basketball terms. This feels a bit like the LeBron versus anyone else debate of the sheer fact that the US office went for let's say, nine, ten seasons maybe shows that that was the real testament to being gay Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could also just say that American audiences will just stick with something for far too long, like the walking dead's been around for how long it's still going? How is it still going?
Speaker 3:That's true, that is true.
Speaker 2:It did go on for like three seasons too long. Yeah, the office dead.
Speaker 1:And the walking dead should have ended like four or five seasons ago, for sure. All right. Well, listen, Leo, let's close it out here. Tell everybody where people can find you and Lucky Egg and what you guys are doing. Sure.
Speaker 3:I mean, you can look up my personal stuff. If you want stories from my life that try and be somewhat motivational, find me on Instagram or TikTok. Just put in Leo Olsen, that's O-L-S-S-O-N. I'll come up. Check out Lucky Egg If you want games that aren't boring, that aren't like Monopoly, that don't last hours and make you hate your life. Lucky Egg official on Instagram, TikTok, everywhere. Yeah, pretty much that's it. That's me.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. This has been awesome. I can't wait to listen back to this episode. I don't know if you saw me like in parts of it I was writing things down. I always like it when, like, I have a guest and I take notes. So super amazing. Thank you so much Everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Go check out Leo. He's one of my top three to five examples of what I'm usually talking to people about the type of content to create, and so I think if you want some good inspiration, he's an amazing person. Go check out and we will see everybody next Tuesday. Thank you so much for listening to the Unstoppable Marketer podcast. Please go rate and subscribe to the podcast, whether it's good or bad. We want to hear from you because we always want to make this podcast better. If you want to get in touch with me or give me any direct feedback, please go follow me and get in touch with me. I am at the Trevor Crump on both Instagram and TikTok. Thank you, and we will see you next week.