Video IS Your Funnel

Today, I want to reframe how you think about your marketing. I think this will be the key to the future of all of us. There are a couple of key messages: video is your funnel; it’s not that your funnel is made up of videos. The algorithm can push content based on how they interact, what they say, and your ability to collect information along the way in different videos. Another point is how relevancy is absolutely key, and how that can be calculated, and how that ties back to every single other channel, whether it’s email, search engines, or social media.

So what exactly is Quality Score?

Let’s step back almost 20 years when we ran ads on Google; you had a Quality Score. Google would show you at the keyword level, and it was on a scale of one to ten. With better relevance, say an eight versus a four, you would pay half as much for that traffic, assuming they had the same bid. 

If someone else had half your relevancy score, they’d have to bid twice as much to get that same traffic. So your relevance score times your bid was your ad rank for a lot of you guys. It still is the case for you folks who know about PPC, buying ads on search engines. It was the same thing for us when I was at Yahoo! We calculated something called the “Quality Index”. The Quality Index was something we showed at the ad level, and a lot of people asked why that’s different. It’s different because Quality Index, or Relevance Score, or Quality Score is the intersection between content and targeting. So it wasn’t at the ad level, and it wasn’t at the targeting level. It was at the intersection. 

And for search, the better your Quality Index, which is Yahoo!, or the better your Quality Score, which is Google, the less you would pay and the better your ads would perform, of course. 

If you’re paying one fifth the price because your Quality Score’s a ten, like on your branded terms, versus a two – maybe you’re buying some else’s term; maybe you’re buying the broad match term or a very general head term – you just wouldn’t be doing as well. 

How does Quality Score work today?

Now, imagine what it is that goes into the calculation of today’s Quality Score on Google and why that’s so important to us as marketers when you understand what the search engine’s thinking. The number one factor in Quality Score, you guys know, is your CTR because the high CTR is a good proxy for relevance. People are clicking on it, then it somehow must tie to them. So if you get, like, a 10% CTR, which usually means you’re in the first or second position of search, then people are like, “Oh, this might be neat”, but it’s also looking at landing page factors; it’s looking at the keywords you’re using; it’s looking at other user experience factors, right? Because the search engine’s trying to think, “how do I know that something’s relevant – not just clickbait enough to get someone to click on it – but they end up having a good experience, and how do you measure good experiences along the way? Do they buy?” 

So, if you look at Facebook and their Relevance Score… Facebook, of course, by the time you’re reading this, they’ve probably gotten rid of the Relevance Score and replaced it with three different factors. It’s the same thing. If you ask yourself, “what does ‘relevance’ mean,” it’s “does it apply to me or to whomever that user is?” And you could make the best content in the world, but if it’s not relevant to that particular user, it doesn’t matter. Or you could have the right target but the wrong content, and that’s gonna be low relevance. So you need great content against a particular user who needs to see that content. 

Benefit by building a sequence for your marketing funnel.

Here’s something that throws most marketers because they don’t know how to build sequences. They’re trying to sell cold traffic to people who they’ve never met– people who haven’t consumed content along the way in sequence. And you can have something fantastic, but it belongs three or four messages deep in a sequence.

It isn’t that the content is bad; it’s that it’s not something you would say to someone as a first step, which would also be like a pickup line. Someone who doesn’t understand sequences is gonna walk into a bar, meet a woman they’ve never talked to before, and try their best pickup line to try to get them in bed. 

But if you and I, where we’re being smarter about this, understand that high relevance along the way, multiple steps, means getting to know them the right way: getting their name, going on a first date, going on multiple dates, first kiss all the way to propose, get married, have kids, all those things… There’s something relevant to say at every step along the way. If you believe that modern marketing, for anybody, whether it’s high-end B2B or even selling simple products and services, requires building multiple touches, then how many of your touches are gonna be a first touch, and how many of your touches are gonna be second or more?

I would argue that 80% or more of your touches are gonna be two or more. It’s not going to be a cold touch, which is your first touch. Therefore, to have high relevance, most of your targeting is going to be driven by what they last did with you, therefore retargeting. So, if you think about retargeting as what they last did with you… IF they came to my website and filled out a form, THEN I’m gonna send them this email. IF they just became a fan on Facebook or filled out a lead form, THEN this. IF they are an existing customer, THEN this is what I’m gonna say. Or IF, based on data that LinkedIn has, that their job title is this, and they’ve never been to my website and have never been a customer, THEN here’s what I say is the first touch. IF, inside a video, I ask them, “are you trying to grow your agency and you’re just getting started or do you have an existing agency and are just trying to grow it, which of these paths describes you?”

Imagine that’s the beginning of an agency training video and instead of saying, “here’s all the different situations of who you might be” and trying to cover that in a one-hour video, we cut that down to an intro that says, “Hey! Welcome to my Agency Management Course, but first, before we get started, which of these is you,” and they answer that, for example, saying, “I’m just getting my agency started” and then you say, “Great! I remember when I first got started. Here are two or three things that I remember.”

Or let’s say that they say, “I’m a public figure, I have a book out, I’ve done public speaking, I’m doing well; I just want to take it to the next level,” you’d say, “That’s so good that you have these pieces. Here’s what we’re gonna do next.” Or it could be, if they answer that they’re building a personal brand, but they don’t have a speaker reel, for example, then you can address that directly and say, “You’ve spoken before, but you need a speaker reel. Here are the items that you’re gonna need,” and you can start to coach them. It’s just like a regular conversation you have with anybody else where there’s interactivity based on what they last said. 

Imagine how much more powerful it is when you have engagement at that level because, when they’re engaging, you know that there’s a clear correlation between engagement and conversion. So, if you have high relevance along the way, you’re gonna get a lower cost of traffic along the way, and your net cost of conversion across all those touches, even though you have more touches, is going to be less. 

Video remarketing really can be amazing.

When you are building video remarketing, you might pay two cents, two cents, two cents to go three touches deep for someone who has watched a video 15+ seconds, or on Facebook, a thru-play. I believe a first touch should be a Facebook video. So they watch one of these videos all the way through or 10+ seconds, then I try to get them to the website, to get their email address. Then I want to send them to an article on another site. Then I want to get them to YouTube, etc. There are many possible ways to remarket to them.

I consider email to be remarketing. I consider any kind of sequence journeys to be remarketing. You could have a LightSpeed video that has many different journeys along the way in that one video, so it’s like Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch is a choose-your-own-adventure movie where you’re choosing for the character. “Oh, do I jump out the window or do I fight?”, “Do I eat the Fruit Loops or Frosted Flakes?” And thus all of us have a different experience going through Bandersnatch. You can’t say, “Well, the movie is fifty minutes long.” It could be an hour and a half long; it could be ten minutes long ‘cause you died when you choose the wrong thing. That’s how all video needs to be. That’s why the funnel is your video; that’s why your video is your funnel. Imagine, now, that inside one video, it could have any range, and inside a single video, you could have any range of possible journeys. Then no longer is it true that you can say, “Well, this particular video is 5 minutes, and this video is an hour long.” 

It’s whatever length that video is for the journey of the user, right? But how are you going to create these kinds of sequence videos? You can’t put that on YouTube. With YouTube, you have playlists with video 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or I guess you could use Wistia and use a Turnstile where, along the way, you’re collecting information. But imagine if you can build your entire funnel into just a single video with all the different gated logics and the IFs/THENs.

Then you could take that video and embed it on your website. You can embed it anywhere else you can do a video embed code, and you don’t need to use all these ClickFunnels anymore. You don’t need to use all these crazy landing page builders. It’s simply, I’ve got a video; I’m continuing to make it more and more complex with more logic, and I’m building engagement along the way. What used to be maybe a six or eight-week conversion process with lots and lots of touches is something you can compress down into one video that has multiple sequences built-in. I hope that it changes the way you think about things.

LightSpeed happens to be the best place to make these kinds of interactive videos, not just for training, but for any kind of funnels as well. That’s why I’m so excited about LightSpeed. Contact us if you want us to spin up a system so we can help you and make a little commission, too.