How to Use Videos in Marketing Communications in 2021 [with David Jay]

On today’s episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show, we have invited David Jay, Founder, and CEO of Warm Welcome, and a Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer. Join Andrei and David on this episode, as they will be discussing best uses for videos in marketing and business communications in 2021, giving us top insights and action-points, ready to be applied to your future communication and business strategy for the upcoming year.

 

Warm Welcome helps businesses upgrade from boring text to personal video so they can build meaningful relationships that drive real revenue. David has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million ARR. Revenues from Warm Welcome, along with his other four companies, will exceed $6 million in 2020.

 

Connect with David:

Press kit: https://kitcaster.com/david-jay/

Get 3 Free Months of all the Warm Welcome goodness with the code „MARKETIU”: https://www.warmwelcome.com/marketiu

Warm Welcome: https://www.warmwelcome.com/

David on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/freedavidjay/

Agree: https://www.agree.com/

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode Transcript:

Andrei Tiu  

Hello everybody, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is David Jay, who is the Founder and CEO behind Warm Welcome, helping businesses operate from boring text to personal video, so they can build more meaningful relationships as well as drive real revenue. David has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million dollar businesses and this year, his five companies will actually exceed $6 million in revenue. So big up for that, David! And David was also recently named the Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer. Today we will discuss how to best use video across your marketing and business communications in order to be more effective, as well as starting from your passion, how to get your startup to that $1 million mark. So, David, I am really excited to have you on the show today. How are you? How's everything going?

 

David Jay  

I'm doing great. Andrei, thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

No, thank you for being on the show, for joining us. Really exciting time. So where are you tunning in from today?

 

David Jay  

I'm coming in from Bend, Oregon.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. So still morning on your side, right?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, it's morning here. It's a beautiful morning, we've got a little bit of snow on the ground. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. Okay, so I think we're gonna start this morning on a more energy level and dive straight into the subject, because I know many of our listeners here would be keen to find your thoughts also on the content marketing and video side of things, but also into the business scale up and business growth area. Mainly, since we are living through tougher times for some of us. So just to get to know you, really. So if you could please tell us a bit more about you, how you started, and how you grew your first business or businesses?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, so it was back in 2001, I actually dropped out of college. So I've kind of a typical tech Founder story, a college dropout. And at the time, I was really excited and passionate about photography. I had the choice: I could either be considered a college dropout or I could be an artist and I chose to be known as an artist and grew my photography business, which is a great, great part of my life, learning how to run a service business, that really can't scale that much. I think it really prepared me well for starting software companies and getting into businesses that do scale. So from 2000 to 2005, I was doing the service-based business of photography. And in that, I started to build online communities. So this is before Facebook, before Twitter, this is kind of back in MySpace days and online forums. I would start those and get photographers in them. And they would all share their problems, with questions as Hey, how do I start my business? How do I take great photos? How do I deliver them all these typical problems? And through that, and through understanding that there were quite a few common problems for these people, we started to build technology to solve them. And that's how we've grown all of our businesses: create a community, listen, understand their problem, create solutions that solve the problem, and work on the business and scaling it. So that's kind of been it. I've just done that one time after another, with different problems at different points in time-based on what other solutions are out there for industry,  just taken it organically, bootstrapped everything and grown one business out of the other businesses and kept going.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. So what was the first one? What was the first thing that triggered you?

 

David Jay  

So the very first piece of tech that I built, was for photographers. It was a slideshow product, and it came from a wedding that I shot. I shot a wedding for a guy named John Foley, and it was in Santa Barbara where I'm from, and at their wedding reception, I used to put up a slideshow, I download all the photos onto my computer. Editing really quickly, and then take that computer and put it over by the bar at the wedding reception. And as people would come up to the bar to get their drink, they would watch this beautiful slideshow. And the more they drank, the better the pictures got. And they would refer me like crazy. And it was awesome. This is how I grew, through word of mouth. Well, after this wedding, John called me up the next day, I was already shooting for another wedding. And he said: David, that was a beautiful slideshow that you put up, is there any way that you could put that online? And nowadays we think of that as being something normal, everyone has slideshows online everywhere. But back in 2004, it was very difficult. There weren't a million slideshow makers to use. And so I found one, it was pretty janky, I put it online, I sent it to him. And within hours of me sending it to him, he forwarded it on to all of his friends. And it just said, David J, our photographer rocks, I still have the email, a little screenshot of that email today. Because of that one email, where my client said five words about me, I booked five weddings all over the world. Really high dollar weddings. And I realized that it was word of mouth put online, turns into Word of the mouse, right? So it's scalable marketing. And I learned how to tap into other people's networks. And so I looked up this guy: Who's this John Foley guy, whose wedding I shot and who's kind of taught me how to tap into other people's networks. And he was actually the CEO of E-vite. And a few years ago, he started the company Peloton. And so you see how he's done this. Peloton is a billion-dollar business. Today's Evite is huge. And what Evite did is to tap into the client’s network. You have an event, you want to send an online invitation, send that out, bring all your friends and family to our site, and we'll get paid by some advertising on that site. A strategy that we've used for almost all of our companies is: don't just focus on your customer, but create something for your customer that would be beneficial to their customers, this kind of this b2b to C started the market. And by doing that, you turn your business from just a wheel to much bigger steps. You're not having to grind to get every rotation. And that helps to scale up in a healthy way.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Very insightful. So basically, you use them as the word of mouth propagator, in a way. Helping your clients tell nice things about you to their networks, knowing that they are probably high net worth individuals that would have high net worth networks, that would afford, in this case, your professional photographer services, and then just basically scale it out like that.

 

David Jay  

Right. Yeah, so that was for photography. And with tech, it's the same thing. And most tech and software companies, SAS companies, spend so much of their money and so much of their time in sales marketing, right? And they do a lot of Facebook ads or Google ads, and they have these big sales teams, right? That insane venture capital money that usually goes into building a sales team can be really prohibitive from somebody trying to bootstrap or somebody trying to organically grow their business. I was able to take one person and get five clients from that. From those five, got five more each of those, is 25 clients. Same thing with SAS. You can get 50 clients pretty easily if you have even a bad product. But if you can leverage those 50, it will bring you, five people. Now you've got 250. Leverage those 250 and you can see how you can scale it up without having to go out and get venture capital or giveaway a huge part of your company to do it. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

So what would be some tactics for doing it? I mean, maybe not so much for the first business, which was the photography business, but more for your future ones. What would you say were some tactics that you used that were crazy successful in this organic growth? I think it's a really important and interesting thing to discuss because most of us look at the paid acquisition channels first. And I think this would be a nice growth hack in a way.

 

David Jay  

Yeah. Yeah, one of the key ones in which Warm Welcome is really built on this foundation, is video testimonials. And it's one of the easiest and funniest sorts of marketing. And the reason why it's really fun is that when you go out and you get these testimonials from people, it feels really good, right? They're reminding you of the value that you added, of the contribution that your product brought them. An example of this is, you go to your clients and ask them: Hey, would you mind if we got together and I recorded a video testimonial of you talking about what it's been like to work together, or what it's been like, for you using our product? And you can do it in person, that's great. Or do it online, do it in Zoom, do it with Warm Welcome. Send them a video and say, click the button and send me a video back. It's super easy to do. And so you make that request. And not everybody's gonna do it. But let's say 10 people do it. Well, these 10 people now, are going to sit down, and they're going to take a second and they're going to think about something nice to say about you. Maybe you can prompt them, or you can give them some ideas or whatever. But when they go and they say that, when they go and they record that video talking about your business, what they have now done is, they've done the hardest part of referring you, which is thinking about what they're going to say. And it's just like a business. The hardest part is getting started. It's the same thing with referrals. It's the same thing with building promoters are evangelists for your business, the hardest part is getting them started, this is a very easy way to get started. When they record that video and they say those words, now you've trained them how to talk about you, how to refer you. And now, when they talk to their friends, all those barriers are broken down, they already know how to do it, they've practised it. Maybe three or four times, some will record once, and record again, and record again. And now they practice three times how to refer you. And they're going to go out in their normal daily life and be much more confident in referring you as a business. So you've now activated word of mouth marketing, which is them going out and doing it on their own and you've captured a digital version of that which you can put online, sharing ads, put on your Facebook page, put on your website, which starts the scalability of that. The word of mouth marketing. So it's a growth hack, it's very simple, very easy, free to do. Again, this is one of the foundations of Warm Welcome: capturing video testimonials, because they're the most powerful form of marketing that we have. And we want to make it really easy for people to capture.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Okay, so your journey as a business leader started from photography, and then what did you do?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, so from photography, I got in the photo world right as it was transitioning from film to digital. And what happened was, there were a lot of new photographers coming in, and they were all wondering, how do I start my business? And that's when I started to build these online forums. Online forums were really just a way of scaling information. Instead of having 100 people call me every day: how do I shoot this type of photo or how do I start my business? They could just ask me the question online, I'd answer it once and 100, and then 1000, and then 10000 people could read that one answer. And that grew my network. And at that time, a mentor of mine, Tim Sanders, who wrote the book, Love Is the killer app, one of the best business books of all time, in my opinion. He said, your network is your net worth. And we all know that now as we're building networks through Facebook, or Twitter or Instagram, or I think right now, the best way to build it is direct to you, actually, off of the social networks. Because I think we're all seeing how social networks aren't exactly playing fair. Build a direct contact with your network, build that network, own it, because that's your net worth. That's what you're going to be able to leverage, those are the people you're going to be able to ask questions to and say: Hey, what problems are you experiencing in your business? And then they share those problems with you and then you'll be able to go out and create solutions for those problems.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I see, when you say directly to you, do you mean an email list? How do you see building such a community?

 

David Jay  

Definitely, I think there's gonna be a resurgence in email lists, just owning your content, instead of putting your content up and spraying it all over social media, you're going to host it on your website. So people are going to come back to your website to experience your content. They're going to get emails from you, or messages from you. You can create a mobile app quite cheaply nowadays. That's more or less a version of your website. And as you post things to your website, go right into the mobile app and get a notification. You do a post, and it notifies everybody. Well, it's getting cheaper for the everyday person to have that same capability, starting a Kajabi site, or selling your information that way. But you own the network, you control it, you know, when you make a post, those people are going to get that information. Lots of ways and Warm Welcome is one of them, obviously sending videos to people communicate so much better than just sending a text-based email. And transitioning all these things from text to video gives people a huge advantage. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. So tell us a bit more about Warm Welcome, now. And also, what's your business infrastructure at the moment? So you run five businesses at once? Obviously, all of them are super successful. What are you doing right? How is every business working with the other? How have you made the system fit into itself?

 

David Jay  

Maybe one thing that I would say I'm doing right and missed many things I'm doing wrong, is that I don't run all these businesses. That was actually one of the things that I had to learn is that I'm actually not very good at running any business. And I don't like running businesses, I hate management, I hate finance. And those are all very necessary things, especially as a business gets bigger. But I noticed as my business has got to a certain point, that I was a detriment to them. Because I'm a startup guy, I'm an innovation guy, I love new stuff. And in an established company, something that needs more finance stability structure systems process, I don't bring that, and I don't like that, I don't operate well in it. I hired a CEO who is more finance minded, and then I went and started new companies. And so that's the model that I have: start things, take them from innovation to market, and then I stay involved until the 1 million arr mark, that's probably as far as I like to go in a company. After that, you need a different set of skills that I just don't enjoy. I'd rather go start something new and go through the pain and the struggle of the startup process and let someone else deal with the pain and the struggle of growing something and scaling it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, cool. 1 million is not so little. I mean, for most of us, it's a long way to get into 1 million arr. How quickly did you get there? What were the tactics that you use to reach that point because it's a long journey? It's a lot of things that need to happen on the way. So talk us through some stories that you have and some things that you've been challenged by?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, I think that a key thing to point out is that it takes time and sometimes you get lucky and you have the wind at your back. But most of the time, that's not the case and you have to stay around in the market, wait for the wind to come, or just continue to plow through. And that's okay. We often put expectations on things and we talk about product launches. And I think it's a bad analogy because almost never does a product launch. Right? It's more like a seed, we plant a seed, and it remains underground for years, maybe it's growing, you don't even know sometimes. And then, you get to see a little bit of it, and then it grows, and grows, and grows some more. And I think that's more real than a launch, like a rocket launch. We've spent a year building this product, and we put it out in the market, and everyone loved it, and it just took off. Those stories are so rare and it's usually like: they were working on that for 5 - 10 years, and then the market hit boom, it took off. You look at Slack and these other companies. They exploded. Second, again, they were around doing nothing, serving a very tiny little group for years and years before they really launched. And that's what I would say is: patience is really important. It's one of those things that were in the early stage, so let's say 0 - 100,000, or 0 -  500,000, trying a lot of things and getting things to market quickly, helps. And the reason is: because when you take a lot of time and you build something, and you think about it, you have meetings about it, you strategize about it, you think you've done it right. And you stick to that for way too long. And you get this arrogance and pride: this is the right way and you're not flexible, you're not going to adapt once it hits the market. And the fact is, the market doesn't care about your product, they only care about their problem. And when we spend all our time in an office or in our cave, or in our garage, building a product, and not trying to understand what the customers' problem is, we get further and further away from a business. Because the business is in place to solve their problem. It's not like you just build whatever they want. You have a gift, you need to discern, and you need to figure out how that's gonna fit into a product because the market doesn't understand how the product is built. Or they'll just say> I want this, this, this, this, this, this and try to do all that you're gonna die. But listening to them and understanding their problem is something that I think most founders don't do enough of as they're building a product.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay, so what was the case with Warm Welcome, then? Is this, at the moment, the biggest business that you run? 

 

David Jay  

No. It's one of the smaller ones. It's just started. Warm welcome's pretty new. And we built a lot of it, we built the video email side about a year and a half ago, and then show the whole project. And then 2020 hit, pandemic, everyone was obsessed with video. And we went all-in on it. The time's right. The sailboat analogy, where it's like the wind is coming and that's when we built video business cards, video pages, video email signatures, video bubbles for your website, every way that you can personalize your business through video, is what Warm Welcome is being built to do. So it's not just the video emails that has all these other components to it. Warm Welcome is one of those new businesses that is very exciting. Timing is everything. And we're really fortunate to have a world that's searching out video solutions like this and wanting to personalize their business. Everyone's depersonalized, dehumanized. And to build a business that is meant to create that human connection, to communicate in a much better way than text. Look at Facebook, look at Twitter, I think it's obvious to everyone that text is probably the worst way that humans can communicate. It just turns into a war. When you have a video conversation, we can disagree on things, but actually have a civil dialogue. That just doesn't happen with text. Nowadays, everyone reads the text with this negative slant. But when I see you on video, I'm like: Oh, another human, a brother. I can chat with this guy, even if we don't agree on everything. And that's a good thing for society.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. And before we go into the video side of our discussion, because I'm really looking forward to getting into that and get your thoughts on things, as well. Just to exploit a bit more this area of sustainably growing your business and really being on the right track to this let's say the 1 million marks. Through the perspective of a start-up, what's your strategy to make sure you are going in the right direction with this, and also what's something that maybe somebody else could take away and implement it to their business, to make sure that they are on the right track with theirs?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, well, I think the market dictates what the right track is. But I also want to point out that in business, you don't have to be right in order to win. And this is something that we get obsessed with. What's the right decision, right? When you're starting a company, there are a trillion decisions you're trying to make. If you're obsessed with making the right decision with every single one, all that does is slow you down. The most important thing in the startup stage is to be decisive. And to make decisions quickly, which then gets to the market, the market gives you feedback, and then you can adjust from there. But when we get to focus on making the right decision, you spend too much time in meetings, too much time debating this and that. And it's far better to just make a call, make a decision, move forward, get feedback. You got to be humble and listen to that feedback and realized that that was the wrong decision, then switch it. You have to be flexible, you have to be constantly doing that. That's why I think most companies take years and years and years to really even get any sort of momentum. Most die along with that way because they don't listen, they don't take that feedback. They just keep building what they think is right. And it kills them. If you keep listening to the customer’s problem, and you keep iterating on your product, you keep shipping stuff trying to fit that, not only do you create a better product, but you create evangelists for your product at the same time, because they've been part of the process. So that's been really key. Get your product to market quickly. Whether it's an alpha, whether it's a prototype, alpha, beta, MVP, whatever you want to call it, just get something to market quickly. Get feedback and keep iterating on that. You'll find you create a lot of evangelists along the way. That's the key to getting traction and to getting to 100,000 - 500,000. You're not going to get to that sort of revenue without some early adopters that are really passionate about solving the same problem that you want to solve. Again, don't try to make them passionate about your product. They don't care about your product, make them passionate, and show that you're passionate about solving that same problem that is their problem.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay, super. So I'm shifting now a bit towards the video side of things, because, as you mentioned, content in general, has been going a lot in this direction lately, not even lately. It's been years now since people have started to use video more. Is just this year that has ramped up everything four or five times from our perspectives. How do you see video integrated into the business, in content marketing? We've already discussed a bit about testimonials. But let's go a bit more into it.

 

David Jay  

Oh my gosh, in every way. We're on a 600-year shift when it comes to video. It was 600 years ago that the printing press came out. And it was at that time everyone got obsessed with the written word because it was maybe the first thing in our world that scaled. And we love things that scale, right? I can write something once and print a million books. For the last 600 years, everything has been geared towards the written word. We have so many different varieties of it, right? We have notebooks, we have books, we have text messages, we have emails, we have Google Docs, we have notepads, post-it notes, we have so many iterations of it because there are a lot of different ways to communicate with the written word. Now, we're seeing that same thing happen with video. If you want to do a live video like this, you can use Zoom or Google meeting, or 50 other solutions. When did some of these first video calling technologies come out? We're talking 20 years ago or more, maybe, and it's just now today, where they're beginning mass adoption. If you look around, you're starting to see all these different iterations of it, whether it's a little video bubble on your website, that's one way to communicate through video, or a video email, or a video business card. All those are iterations of taking the old model and transitioning to the new. We're at the early stages of this because it's a 600-year shift in the way that people communicate. It's not just a new technology that's this year, we're all going to do this. We're shifting everything. People are just not going to communicate the way that they did before. Because video is so much better. If you get a video, and you can see someone's face, you can see their smile, they're waving at you. Think of how much more you communicate through video than you do through an email. When you get a video version of that, is like: Wow, that's cool. I like this guy more, I trust this guy more, I can see his face. He's smiling at me, he's waving like. You get a lot more of the nuance, which there's a lot of power in that and a lot of trusts is built to that. So that's an exciting time to be in the video.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, okay. I might push the limits here a bit, but I just got an idea. You know how Joe Rogan always creates these scenarios and stuff. I think this is an interesting thing that we could fantasize about. Or not even, maybe that's not the word. But let's say that we have a business that currently has a website that is all text and images mostly, maybe some videos about the product or about the team, but not so much video in general. Do you see any future where a business could run, and basically expose itself and sell almost entirely through video? Have a website that communicates mostly through video, their communications are mostly through video apart from these live ones? Have you thought about a scenario like this? I'd be super curious.

 

David Jay  

Absolutely. I think the video is the driver for communication, whether it's communicating with words as humans, or even communicating with content. So an example of communicating through content would be a contractor. We have contractors and developers that use Warm Welcome. And they'll go out to the job site and what they need to communicate back to their client is the progress, a progress update. Every week, here's what we built on your job site, or here's the repairs we did at your house. Well, I think if you got a text email from a contractor that said: We repaired the broken wood on the door, and we did this and we did that, it kind of communicates it, but if they show you a video, you're like: Okay, cool. I trust that that's done. Right? Because you get to see it. If you get a text email, then you come back and say: Yeah, but you painted the door the wrong color. There's a big problem there. The picture says 1000 words while the video says a million words, right? You've got the ability to communicate so much more and so much faster than you would if you were doing the written word. And so there's a lot of implementations of video. And putting that stuff on your website is just so much more engaging and our human minds can capture so much of that. You have to read documents and documents, and documents to get the same amount of information across as a short 10-second video.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. It's also this other debate of: should we have videos that are very well-edited and polished and everything, or can we just keep it raw and real? Many marketers now agree to the fact that it's better in many cases to keep it more unedited and being real and high quality and bring value with videos in general, as in the case of any other content marketing piece. But what's your take? Do you think that in a context where more and more people have the opportunity and the tools to create high-quality videos that are fairly easy to edit, or do you think many of these will be rawer? Or do you think it would be better to have most of the things more high quality edited and sharp and polished?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, yeah, well, I would say it's not binary, I don't think it's one or the other, I'd say it's both. And, and I think it's great to have both, and I don't think it's one or the other. But the real and raw really lends itself to more content. And we're seeing that people just want more consistent new content, then one perfectly created a video that they see over and over and over and over and over again. If I'm wanting to get to know a company or a person, see if I trust them, or I align with them, I just want more content from them. Trust isn't going to be built by watching the same perfectly produced video 50 times, trust is going to be built by getting to know somebody. It's more through relationship. I think the relationship is the driver, not this perfectly produced brand image. That's why I think this type of video is allowing people to do it. It's allowing them to build a relationship as a human or even humanize their brand or personalize their brand, which is way more powerful than a very perfect, pretty brand or website.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. As we get a bit closer to the end of the episode, and this is something that we try to do with each of them, would be to try to help them get some take away points that we discuss here and actually apply them into their business so that they can see some tangible results. I think we discussed a lot of very insightful, important, and applicable things so far. What would be the first three-four things that you think could be easily taken away from the video discussion that we had and sort of applying this more personal face to your business, that people can take away and think or even implement straight away into their businesses?

David Jay  

Depending on the stage your business is in. If you're creating your product, then I would start sending video emails to people who are your potential customer base. If you're creating a product for real estate agents, send video emails to 100 agents a week, because you're still building the product. Once you've refined the product a little more, send 100 a day. But at the beginning, send 100 a week, it's not a big deal, maybe 15 a day. It'll take you probably less than an hour to do that. And send video emails, explain the problem that you're trying to solve, and then ask for feedback on it. Align with them as experts. Say: Hey, you're the expert in this industry, I'd love to learn from you. I'm building this to try and solve problems that I think you have, would you take a look at this? A lot of them would be willing to take a look at it. And as they take a look, they invest in it a little bit more, they give feedback and that gets them aligned with what you're trying to do and they will become your early evangelists.

 

Andrei Tiu  

How should they do these videos? For example, with Warm Welcome, can they create something like this? And if so, what's the form when it gets into a video?

 

David Jay  

With Warm Welcome, you can send a video email, and then we have video playlists. So what that is, is a pre-recorded video that will automatically play after the personal video. So for example, I would click record on my phone or on the computer, say: Hey, Andrei! I'm creating this product and it's meant to solve this problem. And I just love to get your feedback on it. I'm going to show you a little preview, a little screen grab of the different things that it does, and have a look, if you want, you can go create a free account, and you can check it out there, just know that it's in beta, but I'd really value your opinion on this because I hope this is going to help a lot of other people like you. And boom, then you hit the playlist and it plays the other video. You see how you only have to take a few seconds, a personal introduction, explain the problem, and play the playlist, which will show them the product a little bit more. And then right from that video email, they can click reply and send you a video back or an audio message back, or text back, whatever they want. But it starts to build the relationship and it builds the relationship around a problem that you at least hope that they have. It's a very easy way to go out into the market and start getting feedback from your potential customers. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Okay. And maybe another thing that they can think of? 

 

David Jay  

Video testimonials. The first piece of advice was getting feedback as you're building a product. The second would be: if you're already in the market, and you're wanting to generate that word of mouth and word of mouth marketing, go to whatever customers you have. Maybe only have 10, that's fine. You can do a lot with 10 excited people. Look at the religions of the world. Those religions in the world were founded by one person who had this small group of really passionate, loyal followers. They've changed the world. So go to those 10 and say, Hey, would you take just five minutes of your time and click this button and record a video testimonial for me? And you can do this through the video emails. Send them a Warm Welcome video email, they watch it, it's a testimonial request, they can click the button right there, send you a video back. Super easy. And by doing that, you've trained them how to talk about you, you've taken the hardest part out of it, which is getting started and you've created a more scalable marketing piece at the same time, which is their video testimonial.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool stuff. Nice. And now, let's talk a bit about you, as we wrap up. What exciting stuff are you planning for the next couple of months? Now, since you have identified opportunities with Warm Welcome, probably many of them linked to the other businesses that you run. Where's your focus at the moment? What are you planning? Any announcements that you feel you could share?

 

David Jay  

With Warm Welcome, we've just added in the four widgets. We started a video e-mail but then we added in the video business card, we added in video email signatures, so that you can put those in every single email that you send. The video pages are another cool one, because that you can just embed them on your website. You were talking about a video-driven website? Well, it's great to have broadcast videos that are communicating a lot on your website. But what the Warm Welcome video allows you to do is make it engaging, where the customer can respond back through that video. And it's not just pushing messages out, it's helping pull people in. That I think is the best sort of marketing. And then, the video bubble. Adding that video bubble to your website, where the minute somebody sees your website, they see you smiling and waving at them. I think is a really, really powerful thing. And what we're going to do now is create more and more of those widgets that are just transitioning Old World types of communication to new world types of communication, which is obviously being done through a video. We have lots of creative things planned. But for the most part, people implementing just those few things, which you can do in a matter of minutes, will definitely help move the needle.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Very cool. You've convinced me about the video widget. Basically, how does it work the one that the customer can reply to you? I had a look on your website, but I just didn't try them yet. So how would it work for the people tuning in as well? Because I think that there might be some more edgy marketeers here that would be keen to see how this would work and maybe try it out. I'm one of them. So basically, you implement this widget, which would contain a video of you talking about one of the services, right?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, you could use it for a service, you could use it for a product, you could use it as a customer service tool.

 

Andrei Tiu  

But how is the interaction going on? Somebody views the video and then how did they send you that video back?

 

David Jay  

It's super easy. All they do is click the button. It asks them, Hey, you wanna record a video? Yep, boom and it pops open their camera, and they can record a video and they send it to you. And so it's asynchronous, it's not live. They record a video, send it to you, you watch it when it's convenient for you. And you can send them a video back, and they can watch it when it's convenient for them. For example, a video about page or a video contact page, on your website. Most contact pages are formed. Which is the worst idea ever, right? When you think about it, you create this website, and you have the sales funnel, and you have all these things that move the customer along, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And then, when you've done all the hard work, you put them onto a page the tough form. That just makes them feel like a number. They might think: you did all this work to get me to a form? I'm at a doctor's office, I got fill this out? Nobody wants that, which is not good for the relationship. Why not have that final page be a video saying, Hey, I'm so thankful that we're gonna get the chance to work together. The best thing you can do in sales is to assume the sale. Got them all the way down the line, assume the sale. When they're on your contact page, assume you've already closed them. Talk to them in person from you, about what it's going to be like to work together. Not fill out a form and we'll get back to you when it's convenient for us. No, talk to them, thank them for doing all the work getting to this stage, share how excited you are to work together. And then they can click a button and they can send you a video if they want or they can just say: Hey, contact me back and we'll get working together. That's another example of using this interactive, engaging video to solve a problem that previously was done through text in a really poor way that really didn't help the relationship.

 

Andrei Tiu

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the contact page is the one that I was thinking of, as well. So I will let you know how it goes. I will schedule this for this month to try to test it. I'm really excited. 

 

David Jay  

We wanted to handle the entire customer journey. There are other companies that do video emails and that's great. There are other companies that do little video bubbles. At least one that we know of. And that's cool, too. But, if you don't take the entire customer journey and personalize it, and you're strapping all these different tools together to try and do that, it becomes disjointed and disconnected and the customer experience falls off. When you think of the flywheel or the customer journey, you want every touchpoint to be personalized, every touchpoint to be consistent, every touchpoint to be moving the relationship along towards, what everybody wants, which is a solution to that common problems. That's what we think is really important, is having those all within one tool and not using this for video emails and this for a bubble, and this or this. That creates chaos for everybody.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Very cool. Very exciting. So, David, a big pleasure having you today on the show. Really enjoyed our chat and found out new things. Got new ideas myself, and I'm sure that people are tuning in as well. Guys, let us know what captured your attention most. And David, if there's somebody here that wants to reach out and connect directly to you, which would be the best way? Is it LinkedIn? Would it via email?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I'm on LinkedIn, Warm Welcome is there. Or david@warmwelcome.com. Feel free, send me an email, I'd love to chat or send me a video, even better, I'd love to see you and get to know you. Those are all good ways to do that. We'll send over a special code for all your listeners where they can get hooked up and get a few months free of Warm Welcome, they can try out all the features, play around with it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's super kind, thank you!

 

David Jay  

And the video business card and the video email signatures, they're free for everybody all the time. So anyone can go now and grab those. And then if you want to try out all the other stuff, then we'll get you that code.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super, thanks a lot. So, guys, you'll most likely find this in the description of the episode together with David's details, as well as links to his businesses. But until next time, David, really appreciate your insight here, in both areas. I thought equally interesting to both discussions. And I'm sure that everybody tuning in got value from them. Really enjoyed the dynamics of our chat, as well. I'll let you know how we get along with the videos, as well. This is going to be a very nice test. We never did before. Let's keep connected. Maybe do this again early next year. Really excited to hear how things will go for you and the growth that you're gonna see over the next couple of months.

 

David Jay  

Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks, Andrei. I appreciate it and just really excited about what's ahead.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Same here. Thanks a lot. Have a nice one. Speak soon.